Search Results for: NPR

My So-Called Media: How the Publishing Industry Sells Out Young Women

Sipapre, AP / Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2018 | 10 minutes (2,554 words)

On November 30th, Tavi Gevinson published her last ever editor’s letter at Rookie. The 22-year-old started the site when she was just 15, and in the intervening years it had spawned a pastel-hued community of girlhood, which, if not always sparkly, was always honest. The letter spanned six pages, 5707 words. In Longreads terms, that’s 20 minutes, 20 minutes of Gevinson agonizing over the site she loved so much, the site that was so good, that was now bigger than her, that she couldn’t figure out how to save. “Rookie had been founded, in part, as a response to feeling constantly marketed to in almost all forms of media,” she wrote, “to being seen as a consumer rather than a reader or person.”

The market had won, but Gevinson was fighting to the death. It was hard to read. You could sense her torturing herself. And she was. Because in truth there was nothing Gevinson could have done, because the failure of Rookie was not about her, or even about the poor state of media as a whole. It was about what it has always been about, which is that as much power as women have online — as strong as their voices are, as good as their work is, as valuable as it is to women, especially young women — its intrinsic worth is something capitalism, dominated by men, feels no obligation to understand. This is what ultimately killed Rookie. And The Hairpin. And The Toast. And maybe even Lenny Letter too.

***

In her first ever editor’s letter, Tavi Gevinson explained that she wasn’t interested in the “average teenage girl,” or even in finding out who that was or whether Rookie appealed to her. “It seems that entire industries are based on answering these very questions,” she wrote. “Who is the typical teenage girl? What does she want? (And, a lot of the time, How can we get her allowance?)” She claimed not to have the answer but provided it anyway by not asking the question: by not inquiring, like other young women’s publications, whether her readers would like some lipstick or maybe some blush with that. Instead, Rookie existed in a state of flux, a mood board of art and writing and photography on popular culture and fashion and politics and, just, the reality of being a girl. In an interview with NPR in 2011, Gevinson noted the hypocrisy of other teen magazines’ feminist gestures: “they say something really simple about how you should love your body and be confident or whatever, but then in the actual magazine, there will still be stuff that maybe doesn’t really make you love your body.”

Writer Hazel Cills emailed Gevinson when she was 17 to ask if she could join Rookie. In her eulogy for the site, published in Jezebel, Cills described the magazine’s novel concept: “unlike Teen Vogue or Seventeen, we were overwhelmingly staffed with actual teenagers, and were free to write about our realities as if they were the stuff of serious journalism.” Lena Singer, who was in her 30s when she worked as Rookie’s managing editor, thinks the publication deserves some credit for the fact that adults are now more willing to defer to adolescents than they were when it launched. “Part of my role as an editor there was to help protect the idea — and I still believe it — that the world doesn’t need another adult’s opinion about teen spaces, online or elsewhere,” she says. “Teens say what needs to be known about that.” And when they didn’t have the answers, they chose which adults to consult with video features like “Ask a Grown Man,” where celebrities like Thom Yorke answered readers’ questions. The column would have been familiar to Sassy aficionados, particularly fans of its “Dear Boy” series which had guys like Beck offering advice. Which made sense, because Sassy was basically the OG Rookie.

Named by the 13-year-old daughter of one of the heads of its publishing company, Fairfax, Sassy arrived in 1988 and was the first American magazine that actually spoke the language of adolescence. Teen publications dated back to 1944, the year Seventeen launched, but Sassy was different. “The wink-wink, exasperated, bemused tone was completely unlike the vaguely disguised parental voice of Seventeen,” write Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer in How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine. And unlike Teen or YM, it did not make guys the goal and girls the competition — if it had a goal at all, it was to be smart (and preferably not a conservative). Sassy was launched as the U.S. iteration of the Australian magazine Dolly — they originally shared a publisher — and presented itself as the big sister telling you everything you needed to know about celebrity, fashion, and beauty but also drugs, sex, and politics. “The teen magazines here were like Good Housekeeping for teen-agers,” Dolly co-founder Sandra Yates told the New York Times in 1988, adding, “I’m going to prove that you can run a business with feminist principles and make money.”

So she hired Jane Pratt, an associate editor at Teenage magazine, who matched her polka dot skirt with work boots, who donated to a pro-choice organization. Pratt “cast” writers like Dolly did, then went further to reinforce their personalities by publishing more photos and encouraging them to write in the first person, with plenty of self-reference, culminating in a sort of reality TV show-slash-blog before either of those things existed. Sassy became ground zero for indie music coverage thanks largely to Christina Kelly, a fan of Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz who wrote the way teenagers talk. “I don’t know how to say where my voice came from,” she says. “It was just there.” Like the other writers on staff, she offered a proto-Jezebel take on pop culture, a new form of postmodern love-hate criticism.

At its peak, Sassy, which had one of the most successful women’s magazine launches ever (per Jesella and Meltzer), attracted 800,000 readers. But this was the era of the feminist backlash, where politicians were doubling down on good old American family values. The writers and editors at Sassy weren’t activists, per se, but they were the children of second wavers, they went to universities with women’s departments, they knew about the patriarchy. “Sassy was like a Trojan horse,” wrote Jesella and Meltzer, “reaching girls who weren’t necessarily looking for a feminist message.” Realizing that adolescents were more sexually active, receiving letters about the shame around it, Sassy made it a priority to provide realistic accounts of sex without the moralism. They covered homosexuality, abortion, and even abuse, and were the first teen magazine in America to advertise condoms.

In response, right-wing religious groups petitioned to boycott Sassy‘s advertisers; within several months the magazine lost nearly nearly 20 percent of its advertising. After several changes in ownership, including the removal of Sandra Yates and a squarer mandate, the oxymoronic conservative Sassy eventually folded into Teen magazine in 1997, the alternative press devoured once again by the mainstream.

But Sassy left behind a community. A form of analog social media, the magazine united writers with readers, but also readers with each other. Sassy even had its readers conceptualize an issue in 1990 — the “first-ever reader-produced issue of a consumer magazine” — the same year Andi Zeisler secured an internship at Sassy with a hand-illustrated envelope and the straightforward line, “I want to be your intern.” Six years later, she co-created her own magazine, Bitch, a cross between Sassy and Ms. It had the same sort of intimate community where, Zeisler explains, “there’s somehow a collective feeling of ownership that you don’t have with something like Bustle.”

Bustle, a digital media company for millennial women, is often cited as the counter-example to indie sites like Sassy, Bitch, and Rookie. It has more than 50 million monthly uniques (Bustle alone boasts 37 million) and is run by a man named Bryan Goldberg, who upon its 2013 launch wrote, with a straight face, “Maybe we need a destination that is powered by the young women who currently occupy the bottom floors at major publishing houses.” While Sassy had to struggle to be profitable and sustainable in an ad-based and legacy driven industry, now corporate entities like Bustle manspread sites like Rookie into non-existence. “The one thing that has stayed the same,” says Zeisler, “is the fact that alternative presentations of media by and for girls and young women is really overlooked as a cultural force.”

***

Tavi Gevinson was born the year Sassy died, but Lena Dunham arrived just in time. Recalling her predecessor, she described her feminist newsletter, Lenny Letter, which launched in 2015 as “a big sister to young radical women on the Internet.” Delivered to your inbox, Lenny, backed by Hearst, mimicked the intimacy of magazines past, the ones that existed outside Twitter and the comments section. It included an advice column and interviews (the first was with Hillary Clinton) as well as personal essays touching on various sociopolitcal issues. It was more activist than Sassy, more earnest than ironic, more 20-something than adolescent. It even had a Rookie alum, Laia Garcia, as its deputy editor. Lenny’s third issue launched it into mainstream consciousness when Jennifer Lawrence wrote an essay about pay disparity in Hollywood, which provoked an industry-wide conversation. Then three years after launch and without warning, on October 19, a final letter by Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner claimed “there’s no one reason for our closure” and shut down.

Lenny’s demise came nine months after that of another site that had a loyal female-driven community: The Hairpin. Founded in 2010 by Edith Zimmerman under The Awl umbrella, the site that had also published writing by Lenny editor-at-large Doreen St. Félix claimed “a natural end” — the same words The Awl used for its closure. NPR’s Glen Weldon suggested more specific reasons for their termination: the decline in ad revenue online, the sites’ unwillingness to compromise, their independence. “The Awl and The Hairpin were breeding grounds for new writers — like The National Lampoon in the ‘70s, Spy Magazine in the ‘80s, Sassy in the ‘90s and McSweeney’s in the aughts,” he explained, adding, “Invariably they would find, waiting for them, a comparatively small, but loyal, sympathetic and (mostly) supportive readership.”

Two years before this, a similar site, The Toast, founded by former Hairpinners Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Ortberg, also closed. The publication was created in 2013 to be an intersectional space for women to write basically whatever they fancied. They even invited Rookie to contribute. The Toast published multiple features a day, stating, “we think there’s value in posting things that we’ve invested time and energy on, even if it comes at the expense of ‘You won’t believe this story about the thing you saw on Twitter and have already believed’ link roundups.” In a lengthy message posted in May 2016, Ortberg broke down the financial circumstances that left them weighing their options. “Most of them would have necessitated turning The Toast into something we didn’t like, or continuing to work ourselves into the ground forever,” Ortberg wrote, adding, “The only regret I have is that Bustle will outlive us and I will never be able to icily reject a million-dollar check from Bryan Goldberg, but that’s pretty much it.”

It says everything about the American media industry that Bustle, a site with an owner who mansplained women’s sites to women, a site which acquired the social justice-oriented publication Mic only after it had laid off almost its entire staff, has outlived the ones that are actually powered by women. If you look closely, you will see that the majority of women’s sites that continue to exist — from SheKnows to Refinery29 — have men in charge. Even HelloGiggles, which was created by three women, is owned by the male-run Meredith Corporation. That means that, fundamentally, these publications are in the hands of a gender that does not historically believe in the inherent value of women’s media. Women, including young women, are valuable as consumers, but if their interests cannot be monetized, they are worthless. Yet the same year The Toast closed, Lauren Duca wrote a Sassy-style essay, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” in Teen Vogue which dominated the news and garnered 1.4 million unique visitors. “Teen girls are so much smarter than anyone gives them credit for,” Phillip Picardi, Teen Vogue’s digital editorial director, reminded us. “We’ve seen an immense resonance of political coverage with our audience.” Seventeen and ELLE have also capitalized on wokeness, their spon-con sharing real estate with social justice reporting, blurring the boundaries between protesting and shopping. “The inner workings of those places are not about feminism,” says Zeisler. “They’re about selling feminism and empowerment as a brand and that’s very different from what you would find at Rookie or at The Toast or The Hairpin.”

It seems fitting that a new print teen magazine launched last year called Teen Boss. On the fact that it had no ads, Jia Tolentino side-eyed in The New Yorker, “unless, of course, it’s all advertising — sponsored content promoting “Shark Tank” and JoJo Siwa (both appear in each of the first three issues) and also the monetizable self.”

***

Teen girls are the “giant piggybank of capitalism,” says Zeisler, and it’s an apt metaphor. Their value is their purchasing power and they are sacrificed, smashed to pieces, to get to it. When Ariana Grande obliterates every sales record known to man, man still asks why she is on the cover of BuzzFeed. Man never seems to ask, however, why sports — literal games — are on the cover of anything. This is the world in which Rookie and Lenny Letter and The Hairpin and The Toast attempt to survive, in which all that is left when they don’t are floating communities of women, because the industry refuses to make room. As Gevinson wrote, “that next iteration of what Rookie stands for — the Rookie spirit, if you will — is already living on in you.” As Dunham wrote, “Lenny IS you: every politician, every journalist, every activist, every illustrator, every athlete who shared her words here.” As The Hairpin wrote, “We hope when you look back on what we did here together it makes you proud and not a little delighted.” As Cliffe and Ortberg wrote, “The Toast was never just a chance for people to tune in to The Mallory and Nicole Show, it was also a true community and it will be missed.”

These publications did not die by their own hand. Zeisler notes that to this day, she sees people tweeting about missing The Toast. These sites died because their inherent value did not translate into monetary value in a capitalist system run by men who only know how to monetize women by selling them out. As bright and as hungry as young women are today, they are entering a world designed to shut them down. And the future looks bleak. “If media as an industry doesn’t figure out how to value [independent sites for young women] in a way that really reflects and respects the work that goes into them,” says Zeisler, “we’re just going to have a million fucking Bustles.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Neanderthal

Illustration by Lily Padula

Jen Gilman Porat | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,447 words)

A couple of years ago, I purchased a pair of 23andMe kits for myself and my husband, Tomer. I intended to scientifically prove that Tomer’s most irritating behaviors were genetic destiny and therefore unchangeable. I’d grown tired of nagging him — oftentimes, I’d hear my own voice rattling inside my brain in the same way a popular song might get stuck in my head. I needed an out, something to push me toward unconditional acceptance of my husband. My constant complaining yielded zero behavior modification from on his part; on the other hand, it was changing me into a nasty micromanager. I briefly considered marital therapy, but that’s an expensive undertaking, costing much more than the $398.00 one-time fee for both DNA kits. Plus, couples’ therapy could take a long time, requiring detours through our shared history. In much appealing contrast, 23andMe, promised to launch us straight back to our prehistoric roots, to an earlier point in causality, one that might provide Tomer with something akin to a formal pardon note, thereby permitting me to stop fighting against him, once and for all. I imagined we could help others by way of example too, for what long-married woman has not suffered her husband’s most banal tendencies — the socks and underwear on the floor, the snoring? Not me, actually, because my husband puts his used clothes in the hamper, and I’m the snorer. Really, I’m probably blessed as far as masculine disgustingness goes. But my husband is flawed in one repulsive way: his barbaric table manners.

I have no doubt this is a genetic situation, for even back when we were first dating, I’d shuddered upon seeing my father-in-law poke through the serving bowls of a family-style meal with his bare hairy hands. My husband’s father has also been caught eating ice cream directly from the carton (the thought of which I now appreciate for its built-in binge deterrent). Moreover, my father-in-law eats like a caveman-conqueror, reaching across dinner plates to pluck a taste of this or that from his mortified tablemates. A family dinner looks like a scene straight out of Game of Thrones, minus any crowns. And so, when my husband first began to exhibit similar behaviors, I had to wonder: Had I suffered some rare form of blindness previously? Did some barrier of unconscious denial gently shield my eyes each day, year after year, but only at mealtimes? It was as if a blindfold suddenly fell from my face, or as if Tomer had finally removed a mask from his own. My gentleman turned into a beast, seemingly overnight.

I watched with horror, one Sunday evening, as my husband served himself a plate of meat and vegetables with his hands. His fingers ripped skirt steak in lieu of cutting it with a knife. He abandoned his fork altogether, and I lost my appetite.

Had Tomer suffered some obscure symptom of the mid-life crisis? Or was this a regressed state? During a phone conversation with a close friend, I described my father-in-law’s vile eating manners and wondered if his pre-existing condition had grown contagious. She suggested Tomer’s change of behavior might indicate an epigenetic effect; she’d read somewhere that some aspects of our genetic code lie in wait and get activated along the way. Apparently, some inherited traits remained invisible for years, hiding patiently in our cells until: Surprise! Just when you hit middle age and are totally comfortable in your own skin (despite the new fine lines around your eyes and those brown circles that are hopefully age spots and not melanoma), some new biological fact of your genetic code makes itself manifest, waking you up from your mid-age slumber.

Another interesting detail I could not ignore: Around the same time Tomer stopped liking forks, he’d adopted the Paleo diet, (versions of which are known as the caveman diet). He’d cut all processed foods from his intake, eating nothing but meat, nuts, vegetables, and fruit. Prior to going Paleo, he’d suffered from a severe case of irritable bowel syndrome and relied on bread products, thinking that challah and croissants were the softer, gentler foods. I suspected a gluten allergy and told him to lay off all the Pepperidge Farm cookies. I probably even told him to “eat like a caveman,” but I only meant for him to eat a more natural and gluten-free diet, in order to heal him, which in fact, it did.

“My stomach is no longer a quivering idiot,” Tomer said, and he said it more than once, to countless friends and family members, until he’d worked up a complete narrative on how he’d triumphed over his very own stomach. And each time he told this story, he lifted his shirt, pounding his fists upon his midsection. His proud smile began to appear, well, wild and hungry, as if he’d tamed his digestive system but in doing so, had activated a primitive gene and sacrificed his own civility.

Shortly thereafter, I came across an article pertaining to Neanderthal DNA. According to modern science, the Neanderthals and our prehistoric ancestors mated, leaving many of us with a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA. I did more Googling and learned that 23andMe can tell you how much Neanderthal DNA you carry. Although they do mean different things, in my mind’s eye, the words “Neanderthal” and “Caveman” summoned identical images: that of savage meat-eating maniacs ripping raw meat from bone with fat fingers and jagged teeth.

And this was it — the thing that sold me on 23andMe: the chance to determine one’s degree of Neanderthal-ness. Without any consideration of all the possible consequences of submitting one’s DNA to a global database, I ordered two kits, grinning and convinced that my husband’s result would show a statistically significant and above average number of Neanderthal variants in his genome. Since Father’s Day was only a month away, I decided I’d giftwrap the kits upon arrival too. I’d kill two birds with one stone.
Read more…

Who Do You Have for Science This Year, I Have Mr. YouTube Again

Robert Papion of Lake Charles, Louisiana, works on a math problem at T.M. Landry. Papion travels 150 miles round-trip each day to attend school. (Marlisa Harding/American Press via AP)

T.M. Landry made headlines for getting so many black students into elite colleges. Now it’s making headlines again because of the fraudulent methods it employed to do that. Erica L. Green and Katie Benner have the story at the New York Times, painting a picture of a school that not only falsified application materials, but sent students out into the world completed unprepared thanks to laughably ineffective pedagogy.

The school is based loosely on a Montessori model that emphasizes mastery, so classes are optional, the Landrys said. Younger students described their education as learning from computer programs and YouTube videos. Instructors and textbooks are on hand, but the students teach one another. Math and English lessons are taught by the Landrys, who devote most of their attention to older students preparing for the ACT.

Adam Broussard, a Landry parent, noticed last fall that his 8-year-old, who had attended the school since he was 3, was writing “chicken scratch.” Mr. Broussard had been happy with the school — his older son had been admitted to Brown after two years at Landry — but he confronted Mr. Landry about his younger son’s progress. Mr. Landry responded that he did not teach sentence structure and just wanted students to love to write.

An independent assessment at Sylvan Learning Center revealed that Mr. Broussard’s younger son was performing two grade levels behind.

“I gave him my son for six years, almost every day, 12 months of the year,” Mr. Broussard said of Mr. Landry. “The longer these kids stayed there, the further behind they were.”

Read the story

Shelved: Jimmy Scott’s Falling In Love Is Wonderful

Frans Schellekens/Redferns /Getty

By 1962, Ray Charles had fully crossed over. It started with his 1959 Top 10 hit “What’d I Say,” continued with the Grammy-winning “Georgia On My Mind” and “Hit the Road, Jack,” and culminated in two smash country music albums, yielding the number one single “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Proficient at bebop, fluent in country, and having practically invented soul, it seemed there was no style of popular music Ray Charles couldn’t master. Beyond his prodigious songwriting and piano playing abilities, Charles was most famously a vocal interpreter. With his newfound wealth, he founded Tangerine Records in 1962. The first thing he did was produce and release a record by one of his favorite singers, Jimmy Scott.

Jimmy Scott had been recording since the late 1940s and made several notable if unprofitable albums with Savoy Records in the 1950s. His work was almost universally loved by the most influential vocalists of the era, a group that included Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, and Billie Holiday. Ray Charles implicitly understood the singer’s potential and believed he had the key to Scott’s elusive success.

Read more…

The Rising Tide of Wrongful Convictions

Hiob/Getty.

Lara Bazelon | an excerpt adapted from Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction | Beacon Press | 24 minutes (6,738 words)

The National Registry of Exonerations is a small, nonprofit research project founded in 2012. What the project lacks in manpower it makes up in zeal, documenting every known exoneration dating back to 1989, the first year that DNA exonerations were recorded in the United States. Staff members collect detailed information about each case from court documents and news reports, provide a comprehensive narrative about the case, and break down the data into numerous categories, including gender, race, geography, crime of conviction, factors that contributed to the wrongful conviction, and whether the case involved DNA. The registry’s website provides detailed graphs that set out the cause or causes of the wrongful convictions and chart their frequency over time.

On March 7, 2017, the registry released a report summarizing the data it had documented since its founding: 1,994 exonerations. (The number is now above 2,100.) Seventy-eight percent of the exonerations did not involve DNA evidence. This finding surprises many people, as it seems at odds with the way that crime is prosecuted on popular television shows and in movies, where the perpetrator inevitably leaves behind a tiny but undeniable bit of himself. Skin follicles are collected from under the victim’s fingernails, blood or semen is retrieved from a stain, a trace of saliva is lifted from a soda can or cigarette butt. In fictionalized accounts, diligent detectives and technicians rapidly collect and analyze this trace DNA evidence. More often than not, when the episode concludes, the bad guy has been conclusively identified, apprehended, and locked away.

The reality is much messier and more complicated. Even when DNA exists, backlogs and bureaucracy mean that it can take months, if not years, to test. Crime labs also come to erroneous conclusions, often because the technicians are incompetent, overwhelmed, or even corrupt. In 2010, at a San Francisco crime laboratory, a technician stole some of the cocaine she was supposed to be testing, resulting in a scandal that led to the dismissal of seventeen hundred pending criminal cases. Five years later, in the same laboratory, two other bad apples — a technician and her immediate supervisor — were discovered to have committed misconduct so serious it required the San Francisco district attorney’s office to review fourteen hundred criminal cases. Both employees had failed DNA proficiency testing examinations administered by a national crime lab accrediting agency a year earlier, but had kept their jobs. At least one found conclusive DNA matches where none existed. Read more…

Alexa de Paris

Warner Brothers, Getty / Corbis / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Miles Marshall Lewis | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,622 words)

When I first heard the song “Alexa de Paris” by Prince and the Revolution in the spring of 1986, I was only a year younger than Alexa, and I had no idea who she was. No one ever said. Alexa Fioroni was a painter who taught and traveled the world, but most notably, she danced. Born in Oklahoma City, she moved to the South of France with her mother after her parents’ divorce in the 1970s. She took ballet lessons there from a South American expatriate at 9 years old. By 14, she had enrolled in an intensive study program at the Opéra National de Paris, the only American pirouetting around, later advancing to the Conservatoire de Paris dance school. She remained elusive to me until I began researching this essay. As I listened to the orchestral strings and guitar solos of the song’s gorgeous symphonic rock back then, Paris was just as much a mystery to me as Alexa Fioroni.

Because what was Paris to a 15-year-old black boy from the Bronx? Beyond a vague familiarity with the Eiffel Tower, I had zero points of reference. None of the personalities well known to me much later meant anything to me then: Frantz Fanon, Serge Gainsbourg, Jean-Luc Godard, Aimé Césaire, François Truffaut, Brigitte Bardot. The advanced placement English classes at my public high school didn’t teach négritude. They eventually got around to existentialism — Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus — but not until senior year. James Baldwin lived in France, but I hadn’t read James Baldwin. Black Boy had blown me away back in sixth grade. For years, Richard Wright might’ve been the only black writer I was aware of (aside from Alex Haley), but nobody told me he’d lived in Paris. My parents didn’t have passports; my grandparents didn’t have passports.

That wasn’t always the case. Faded vacation photographs from Paris lay buried somewhere in a photo box at the bottom of a closet in our three-bedroom apartment, pictures of the trip my mom took with a girlfriend as a high school graduation gift in 1969. By 1970 she’d be a married mother, a yawning chasm stretched between the 18-year-old Evander High School student she’d been and the 19-year-old South Bronx homemaker she’d so quickly become.

* * *

My first impressions of Paris, my first time bothering to consider the city as a real place with real people walking around it came from Under the Cherry Moon, the romantic comedy Prince filmed on the French Riviera in late 1985. The movie wasn’t set in Paris. I didn’t understand that at the time. A soundtrack album, Parade, preceded the film by four months, and I pored over the packaging in my bedroom for all the clues I could find about this follow-up to Purple Rain. The packaging of the album — yes, a vinyl disc meant for turntables, enclosed in a cardboard sleeve finely designed with cover art — contained black-and-white photos of Prince and the Revolution collaged with strips of pages from a French novel. But I didn’t know French then — I skirted through Italian classes with a string of D’s. The page ribbons could have come from a porn magazine, a cookbook, or some instruction manual.


 

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

Sign up


The Parade album-liner photomontage fixes the Venus de Milo amid guitarist Wendy Melvoin, bassist Brown Mark, and keyboardist Matt Fink as if Aphrodite had joined the Revolution. Prince placed the melancholy piano piece “Venus de Milo” at the end of Parade’s side one. A statue of the Greek goddess is actually on permanent display at the Louvre museum in Paris. French by association I suppose. Parade also featured “Do U Lie?,” a whimsical bit of café jazz complete with accordion and introduced by a French girl explaining, “Les enfants qui mentent ne vont pas au paradis.” Children who lie don’t go to heaven. Prince flattered the object of his affection on the chorus to one of my favorites, “Girls & Boys,” with “vous êtes très belle” and talk of kissing on the steps of Versailles. (Where was that? I wondered.) Plus, the majestically beautiful instrumental “Alexa de Paris” was the flip-side bonus to Parade’s “Mountains” single. Orchestral arrangements conducted by the late Clare Fischer gave Parade more of a European feel than any of Prince’s seven previous albums — the French horns, the trumpets and trombones, the violins and violas.

Because what was Paris to a 15-year-old black boy from the Bronx? Beyond a vague familiarity with the Eiffel Tower, I had zero points of reference.

* * *

Piano practice swallowed a lot of my hours in the 1980s. An older Jewish woman a few buildings away offered lessons. My mother and father forced me out of my comforting cocoon of comic books and TV addiction to learn the piano for 12 months. I was 9. They promised I could drop the private class after a year if I wasn’t interested anymore. I wasn’t. But by the time Parade arrived I’d discovered sheet music to songs I felt like learning and came back to the piano. I’d spend just enough practice time after school to learn Janet Jackson and Doug E. Fresh and Prince songs by heart. Mostly Prince songs. My grandmother’s upright piano could never be pitch-perfectly tuned, but furniture movers hauled it from her South Bronx apartment straight to my bedroom anyway for those childhood lessons. I learned “The Beautiful Ones” on that out-of-tune Kemble. “Paisley Park,” “Pop Life” and “God (Love Theme from Purple Rain)” too. By the time I mastered the chords of “Under the Cherry Moon,” its namesake finally showed up in movie theaters.

Prince’s tragicomedy bombed, but that didn’t matter. In my mind I was following in his footsteps: learning his songs; writing terrible lyrics; taking the Truman High recording studio class taught by the choir director (a white rap producer who managed Doug E. Fresh); having sex; acting pretentious. I fantasized about moving on to guitar, or songwriting, or whatever else necessary to grow up to be just like Prince. I was 15, I had time. But with Under the Cherry Moon, Prince now knew something I definitely didn’t. He knew France. I had to get there.

* * *

I made it into college by the skin of my teeth. I returned home from Atlanta after freshman year for my first summer break and met a beautiful girl on the uptown 6 train. This was when I still marked my life and times by whichever Prince album occupied the record stores, and so it was the Year of Batman, 1989. (It was also the year of the first De La Soul album, 3 Feet High and Rising, and the year of Do the Right Thing, but with my 18-year-old obsessions, that hot summer could only have been the Year of Batman.) We peeked at one another when the other wasn’t looking, over and over, as the train stopped and started on its way to the terminus at Pelham Bay Park. We never spoke. We waved a week later at Times Square station, surprised to see each other again in another borough. I still couldn’t speak. I wasn’t much good at courageous flirtation. I’d heard Prince suffered from shyness and I could relate. When I finally saw her again — apricot skin, smiling eyes, round face draped by thin extension braids — I found my courage. Simone was a rising senior at the performing arts high school downtown, the one from Fame. Her youth didn’t make me any braver.

Simone danced in the video to Young MC’s “Bust a Move” that summer. I’d play the cassette single on a loop in my boombox back down at school and think of her. She sang, she danced, she acted. Simone idolized triple threats like Debbie Allen and Vanessa Williams, full of artistic plans and schemes. We spent the summer of Batman at the Sound Factory nightclub downtown dancing to “French Kiss.” She modeled clothes for me at Emilio Cavallini on Madison Avenue, where she worked. Right away I had romanticized my idea of her — some ingénue artiste — out of all proportion, killing any possibility of an authentic relationship. Friend zone, meet unrequited love. A pretty girl from the Bronx with dreams, so different from the handful of girlfriends in my brief history with love, Simone suffered my awkward advances through graduation and her first few years at Sarah Lawrence College.

There was no one more appropriate to introduce me to Paris than Simone, studying abroad in 1994 at the École Normale de Musique conservatory. “Do the Boodiewop” somehow failed to catapult her girl group Ariél onto the radio in ’92, but the trio’s full album remained a work in progress. The pipe-dream illusions of my own imaginary music career ended in college. I hadn’t rehearsed any Prince songs into memory since “Scandalous” back in the Year of Batman; I’d left my atrocious song-lyric poetry aside. When Simone invited me to stay at her studio in the 13th arrondissement, I was a first-year law student in New York City and an aspiring music journalist trying to build on a Vibe magazine internship from the previous summer. I was also still aspiring to sleep with Simone four years after first peeping at her on the 6 train.

I prepped myself for Paris with some rental videotapes from Tower Video: oldies like April in Paris, Funny Face, and An American in Paris. I don’t remember anything about them now; none made an impact. Terence Trent D’Arby mentioned 18th-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac in his album notes as a personal hero, so I left for France reading The Chouans — another work of art that entered in one ear and out the other. I touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in platform shoes and Gap bell-bottoms because (thanks Lenny Kravitz) how else could one arrive in Paris for the first time?

This was when I still marked my life and times by whichever Prince album occupied the record stores.

Rubbernecking from the backseat of Simone’s Martiniquan girlfriend’s red Fiat, I soaked in all the beige buildings with their decorative architecture, the crowded cafés, twentysomethings like me dressed in black and dragging cigarettes. But saying overmuch about the sights and smells of the city rings false to me. The truth is, I’d flown more than 2,000 miles across the Atlantic to get laid. France wasn’t my first time abroad. Two years prior I visited my college girlfriend studying in Madrid and already experienced my first fish-out-of-water feelings with Spanish culture. Nine months back, I’d flown to London alone for a week as a graduation gift. Still, in many ways, I was 23 going on 19, with an immature, naïve sense of entitlement telling me international travel was some kind of given. France eventually turned out to be a liberating place for me years later, for reasons that would’ve been unfamiliar that first time around. But as an eight-day vacation, visiting a crush I hoped to seduce in the most romantic city in the world, my Parisian experience went only as deep as I could receive it at the time.

Imagine Hippopotamus as the Olive Garden of Paris, an appropriate enough place for hungry young adults on a budget. My palate at the time wasn’t too far advanced beyond Chef Boyardee anyway. Out on the town with Simone, night number one, I ordered a saumon fumé expecting something like the Southern salmon croquettes I grew up on. I can’t remember what fish I expected canard to be. I’d never eaten smoked salmon or duck before. Hundreds of francs wasted. I thought we’d hail the French equivalent of a Manhattan yellow taxi, but Parisian cabs only lay in wait on certain street corners, so we walked back to her apartment sightseeing and people-watching. At her studio she introduced me to the music of an Icelander named Björk. I’d waited all night for the dessert of Simone’s lips, and before falling asleep together, she served them up. They tasted like a French kiss on the steps of Versailles.

Simone made me laugh constantly; our time together always a sitcom. She was the most talented woman I’d ever dated at that point, and cute enough to get cast in a Kwamé video. What magnetized me the most was her artist’s life, her hustle, her self-actualization. She was my first artistic love, a reflection of what I started daring to see in myself. The next morning she had an appointment at a recording studio, singing on the demo of some French musicians. I stayed behind, folding open the wrought-iron shutters in her window frame to stare out onto the Asian Quarter. James Baldwin (I’d gone from never reading him at all to reading everything he’d ever written) once said, “Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.” Many black American men my age never expected to live past 25. Both my hubris and my upbringing told me otherwise. Hands folded behind me, I stood in the sunlight of Simone’s window wearing my crown.

In the future, I’d become a lot more intimately familiar with the city, but in retrospect, Simone took me around to almost everything worth seeing in a week. A Louvre exhibit explored how ancient Egypt influenced Western art. We paid respects at the graves of artists who really didn’t mean all that much to me (Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust) and those who did (Richard Wright, Jim Morrison), walking the winding paths of Père Lachaise cemetery. We shot each other on camera climbing the iron stairway of the Eiffel Tower. The Notre Dame was closed for restoration, but the gothic Sacré-Cœur church gave us a solemn candlelit moment at the highest point in Paris one rainy night. And I braved the Métro by myself for the first time in search of Nutella crêpes, the Moulin Rouge, and New Morning, the site of my favorite Prince bootleg tape. I peered through the nightclub window with the strains of his June 15, 1987 aftershow ringing through my ears.

* * *

Like those Magic Eye posters so popular at precisely that moment in the ’90s, I could always pick out the 3D Prince significance from any 2D locale if I stared long enough. Night number seven, we saw a wack noir movie, Romeo Is Bleeding, on the Champs-Élysées and passed the Nova-Park Élysées luxury hotel on our way to the theater. I knew from Prince biographies that he stayed there in June 1985, holed up in a penthouse suite playing with new synthesizers while his management tried cajoling him into enjoying his first real trip to Paris. I once wrote something about all Prince’s lyrical references to Paris or France and topped out at almost 20. (By contrast, I can’t remember Michael Jackson, that stranger in Moscow, ever mentioning Paris.) Made-up utopias like Paisley Park and Uptown were central to Prince’s work, places where freedom reigns and anything goes — most of all dance, music, sex, and romance. Western history has forever promoted the French capital as a land of liberation, tolerance, equality, sex, and romance. This might account for his Paris obsession in songs like “Sign o’ the Times,” “Condition of the Heart,” “Cindy C,” “Sexy M.F.,” and others. What’s so funny, so typically workaholic Prince is that once he actually got to vacation in Paris, young and rich and famous enough to enjoy anything the city had to offer, he chose to stay in his hotel room playing keyboards.

By mid-August he was back — explaining to his girlfriend Susannah Melvoin why she wouldn’t be costarring in Under the Cherry Moon and proposing marriage in a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon. The beautiful ones celebrated for days at places I couldn’t afford with law school loan reimbursement checks: dinners at Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, partying at Le Palace. Soon he was off to Côte d’Azur to film a movie. He was 27.

I once wrote something about all Prince’s lyrical references to Paris or France and topped out at almost 20.

There was no Prince on the night I gambled on going beyond kisses. We’d eaten earlier in the Marais district, at an LGBTQ-popular restaurant called Foufounes (French for Pussies). I’d almost given up on the would-be love affair. At home we split a bottle of wine and aired everything out. Off and on for over four years — through Broadway plays, Alvin Ailey dance shows, movies, dinners — I’d been chasing Simone whenever I was back from college. Even after I committed to someone else: the college sweetheart I’d already been with since the year we first met. Simone always put her dreams above settling down with anybody and I always refused to accept what she was saying.

“I just felt too much pressure to live up to your idea of who I am,” she confessed. Years passed before I saw the truth she kept trying to tell me in different ways. She also just wasn’t that into me, there was that too. Ego and my emotional learning curve made all of that hard to accept. But. On the night there was no Prince, there was Miles Davis and his 18-minute blues, “Star People.” I warmed a bottle of body oil on her electric stove and lay slick, massaging fingers all over her shoulders, back, arms, backside. Then she let me go further. Not completely further, but further. Saturday morning, we woke up spooning and laughed easily.

Years later in an erotica anthology entitled Wanderlust, I published a short story, “Irrésistible,” buffing up the ballad of Simone and Miles with a spritz of sentimental Krylon spray paint. I’d renamed her Solange way before Beyoncé became a thing, a name Simone loved, the name of her Martiniquan girlfriend’s mom. “Irrésistible,” like our affair, ended like this:

In my final moments in Paris at Charles de Gaulle, Solange and I stood at the gate holding hands silently. When my final call was announced, we both smiled. She kissed me twice on the cheeks before I boarded the plane. I turned back to look at her a final time—recalling Charlene’s tears when I left Spain months ago—but Solange had turned to walk away. I turned again and stepped onto the plane.

* * *

Color her peach and black: A pretty mademoiselle in a skintight dress shimmies in a crowd of nearly 20,000 screaming Parisians. The sister dances, excited as all hell, next to her flamboyant teenage cousin Luc. And Prince is onstage — spinning, doing splits, leaping off pianos through “Housequake,” “When Doves Cry,” and “The Cross.” “Hot Thing,” “Purple Rain,” and “1999.” Her very first concert is the Bercy stadium Sign o’ the Times Tour stop, and she’s having the time of her life. Some months down the line she’ll ask a friend to design a dress for her 18th birthday inspired by protégé Jill Jones in the “Mia Bocca” video. Her brown eyes, heavy-lidded like some French-Caribbean femme fatale, hardly blink during the hour and a half drummer Sheila E. bangs her skins and dancer Cat Glover jacks her body across stage and our hero takes guitar solo after guitar solo.

I wish I’d known Christine then; we’d never see Prince together live in concert. Two thousand miles away in the Bronx that day, I might’ve been registering for summer school to make up a math class. In the Year of Sign o’ the Times, I had no idea the woman I’d marry one day was shaking her fanny and screaming for my idol over in Europe while I was fighting my way out of high school with both fists.

“Yesterday I tried to write a novel,” Prince once sang (in 1982, on “Moonbeam Levels”), “but I didn’t know where to begin / So I laid down in the grass tryin’ to feel the world turn.” My stab in the same direction came in 1995, trying to write a novel of my own, at 24, while living in south London studying abroad. Don Draper’s French mom-in-law on Mad Men once dropped a quip about her daughter I’ve never forgotten: “This is what happens when you have the artistic temperament, but you’re not an artist.” I spent most of those months in my Tooting Bec flat proving to myself that my talent outweighed my artistic temperament; my novel was the result. Naturally I can’t bear to read it now, but I finished it, and the completion pulled me out the other side of something.

Law school, in retrospect, and even at the time, was a plan B. I skipped the bar exam by the end, graduating instead into the wave of cultural critics documenting the continuing movement of hip-hop into popular mainstream culture. Eventually there were books I was prouder of: a memoir told in essays about my upbringing in the Bronx; an examination of funk pioneer Sly Stone’s 1960s-hangover album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. After Simone, I dated a few writers and editors, a wine sommelier, a yoga teacher. When “Irrésistible” got published, I left Simone a copy with the doorman of her Chelsea apartment building; I hadn’t seen her in two years. And by then I’d moved to France.

How else did I grow up after those first days in Paris? Like many of my favorite stories, this isn’t really about me, it’s about Prince. I’ll say this though. The year Prince divorced his second and final wife, Manuela Testolini, the Year of 3121 had I still been keeping track of such things, I married Christine — the mother of our Paris-born 1-year-old son — at the city hall of suburban Arcueil, France, in the spring of 2006. Christine: the Martiniquan girlfriend of Simone who’d picked me up in her red Fiat the fateful day of my first visit to her country. Our origin story as a couple belongs to another essay, from a less impressionable, far less wide-eyed time in my life. And our wedding song was Bebel Gilberto’s dreamy bossa nova, “Samba da Bênção” — not “Alexa de Paris.”

* * *

Miles Marshall Lewis is the Harlem-based author of Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar (St. Martin’s Press), due next year. His essays, criticism and celebrity profiles have appeared in GQ, The New York Times, NPR and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Looking Inside My Heart

Illustration by Brittany Molineux

Jen Hyde | Longreads | November 2018 | 22 minutes (6,055 words)

 

The women sit on stools behind four glass partitions in rows of 50, their eyes pressed into the cold eyepieces of their microscopes, sewing bovine pericardium tissue to surgical steel with loops of polyester thread. I’m entranced by the rhythm of these women at work, the fluorescent lights that hang over their heads, and the blue hairnets that match their uniform scrubs. I tell myself, They are real, their labor is real. I feel like I’m looking into a glass vitrine and I must stop myself from mistaking this room for a dream. Each stitch is so small I cannot see their handiwork with my bare eye when later I hold a sample in my hand. This is where they make bioprosthetic heart valves, the very device sewn into my own heart.

The facility, Edwards Lifesciences, in Irvine, California, is 20 miles from my childhood home. I was born with a heart murmur at Anaheim Memorial Medical Center on a late July afternoon in 1985. Shortly after, I was sent by ambulance to Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, where I was diagnosed with Tetralogy of Fallot, a rare condition involving four heart defects. After two weeks in the NICU, the pediatric cardiology team recommended an open-heart surgery to correct leaky pulmonary and tricuspid valves and to close one of the two holes at the bottom of my heart. The murmur and the other hole, they told my parents, would likely always remain.

When I was 25 and visiting my parents for Christmas, I was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. The cardiologist told me that the left side of my heart had dilated and that I needed to seek further medical help. I was a graduate student living in New York City, six months shy of heart failure.

This is where they make bioprosthetic heart valves, the very device sewn into my own heart.

In a corner office that overlooked Brooklyn and the East River, a heart surgeon recommended an open-heart operation to repair my pulmonary heart valve using a bioprosthetic bovine valve. Typically, the bovine valve is used in older patients, my surgeon explained. Made of the pericardium tissue of a cow, the valve will calcify over time. Unlike the mechanical valve, the bovine valve doesn’t require medication. Your quality of life will only get better. A few months after our meeting, I underwent my second open-heart operation, then went about my life in New York in what felt like the same body I’d had before the surgery. My bovine heart valve was invisible to me. I paid $3,000 for the surgery with money I’d earned babysitting and as an office assistant at an architectural studio, and with significant help from my parents. My dad’s insurance, thankfully, covered the rest.

***

The Edwards Lifesciences Irvine campus sits off Red Hill Avenue, largely indistinguishable from the dozens of other office parks on both sides of the street for miles in either direction. The interior of the Edwards campus is sun-filled and temperate. Sarah Huoh, the director for global communications, meets me at the front entrance. Her blonde curls and blue eyes surprise me. Her demeanor is bubbly and warm. As she leads me through the campus, we pass employees in business casual and employees in scrubs. Framed artwork made by employees and patients alike line the walls of the offices. A reminder of where the valves go when they leave the manufacturing room, Sarah tells me.

I was a graduate student living in New York City, six months shy of heart failure.

To get to the production building, Sarah takes me through the center of the campus, through a courtyard where the sound of cars along Red Hill Avenue is hardly audible — a hush among the rustle of the flora and the birds flying from plant to plant. The courtyard is trimmed with succulents and birds of paradise.


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

Sign up


Inside, Sarah tells me that here the valves are sterilized and serialized. Only after they pass many safety inspections are they transported, under federal regulations, to hospitals throughout the United States and internationally. Most of the assemblers are women, Sarah explains. Many of them have prior experience as seamstresses, but that experience isn’t a requirement to work here. I try not to observe them through the glass, but I stare. I stare at the symmetry of their rows of workstations, their identical white lab coats, the rhythm of their elbows moving up and down with each stitch they make as they peer into their microscopes. I’m fascinated by how deeply their handiwork is sewn into my own life. My mother sewed in Indonesia, I tell Sarah. She emigrated here in the early ’80s.

Many of our assemblers are immigrants, Sarah tells me. This can be a great job for someone who doesn’t always work in English, and many of our employees tend to stay with us for a long time. Some have been here for twenty years. They like to cook for one another, and they really take care of each other.

I’m fascinated by how deeply their handiwork is sewn into my own life.

I sense how proud she is of who Edwards employs, and the pride bubbles within me too, because everything about the medical device inside me is reflective of the kind of American I am — a biracial daughter of an immigrant mother and second-generation-American father. We are a single-income, thoroughly middle class family. My first surgery was paid for with help from state grants for children’s health. We lived in a ’60s “starter” tract home in a subdivision off Imperial Highway in La Habra. My home was multicultural and multilingual largely because my bedridden Indonesian grandmother and her Latinx and Indonesian caretakers also lived with us. I built my own identity on binaries: In high school I was the only half Chinese Indonesian student. I wasn’t Asian enough to hang with the other Asian American girls. My best friends were white, and I coveted everything about their home lives and their ability to mix and match fashionable weekend outfits from Target, Nordstrom, and Delia’s. Even though we shared everything from AP English notes to six packs of Smirnoff Ice, I never felt entirely at ease in the world we inhabited as young women. Only now, moments before Sarah will introduce me to the women who sewed my valve, do I feel at ease in Irvine. I hadn’t expected my valve and this place to hold such hybridity within it.

Sarah points to a few assemblers at one end of the facility. In this area technicians clean the pericardium tissue, she explains. After it’s washed, they’ll spread the tissue on a flat surface and take something that looks like a cookie cutter and cut out the leaflets. The leaflets are then sewn onto a structure made of steel that comes from a factory in Switzerland with polyester thread that comes from France.

Only now, moments before Sarah will introduce me to the women who sewed my valve, do I feel at ease in Irvine.

Because I’ve never seen my own bioprosthetic heart valve, I couldn’t imagine its global origins or the human hands that had put it together until I peered into this room.

I watch each woman move like the blood in my body, pulsing through with desire, shame, regret, and longing. Every inch of their bodies are covered in medical garments. Sarah instructs me to put on a pair of latex gloves, then places a sample of my own valve in my hand. I hold it to my eye to study the stitches, but I have trouble seeing a single one. I can’t feel the textures of the valve with my gloved hands; it looks machine made.

Even as I hold it now and observe the women at work on the other side of the glass, it seems like a work of fiction that the valve inside my body had been assembled by them. And yet, as I hold the valve for the first time, despite my disbelief in the very existence of this room, I feel a deep gratitude for these women and their labor. That the object now inside me had been made here, had brought me here to Irvine made me wonder what else I couldn’t see about my own life.

Sarah guides me through a door at the far end of the room. Here, four women from the assembly line have come to meet me. In the changing room they store their bouffant caps, masks, and gloves and emerge in jeans. They look just like my own mother; Asian and Latina women in their early 40s to late 60s. I wonder, had my mom been formally educated, would she have sought out assembly work here?

I watch each woman move like the blood in my body, pulsing through with desire, shame, regret, and longing.

Sarah turns to one of the women: Angie, I think this is your first time meeting a patient.

It is! Angie says, I cannot believe it! She could be in her early 40s. There’s a reddish tint to her hair and a bit of green in her eyes. They are hazel, like mine, and I wonder if she’s also made this silent observation about how alike we appear to be. I lean in for a hug, but Angie does not lean in as far. When we pull away, I nod to the others. It is rare for sewers to meet their patients, Sarah explains. It’s rare for patients to reach out to us.

I’m holding a gift, a bunch of Fino lemons from a tree in my parents’ yard. This morning, my mom helped me nest them in a basket; I added a jar of local Inland Empire honey and herbal tea. My mom gathered a handful of lavender from the backyard to give the basket some color.

Sarah tells me that you like to cook for one another, I say.

The room smells like latex and iodoform. We stand in a semicircle, surrounded by the valve prototypes. The women’s faces are backlit by the lights hanging above their assembly room workstations. I explain the contents of the basket slowly so as to draw out this moment for all of us to process together, unsure of whether my gratitude for their work was accompanied by relief, bewilderment, or both. Where will this conversation go? I wonder.

Angie asks me, Are you from here? I know the hard edges of her consonants. For my mom, a th is a t. When a hearth is a heart or heard.

Originally, I say. And you?

We are from Vietnam, Angie explains, pointing to Mary and Pham. I’m from Mexico, another woman chimes in. She’s petite and doe-eyed, in her mid-40s, I think, and I see both exhaustion and peace in her eyes. I’m Fabi, she says, extending her hand to me.

Pham and Fabi are the managers of your team, Sarah explains. Pham offers her hand to shake mine. I’m so glad you are healthy, she tells me. I shake Pham’s hand and apologize to everyone for my dry, chapped fingers. I tell the women that they are the reason I’m so healthy, and that I’m just beside myself and don’t know what else to say because I don’t. There is no place to sit. I’d love for us to sink our bodies into a curved surface. I sense that none of us wants our exchange to be so formal, but in the moment, with limited resources, I blurt, My mom is from Indonesia, and she sews, too!

Angie says, Oh so you are Asian, too!

Yep, I say. I wonder if she feels bewilderment or relief or annoyance by the connection I’m bringing forth, because it makes the most obvious thing about her appear to be our only commonality.

I hand the basket to Mary, the oldest woman in the group. I do this out of respect for her age, and also because she’s smiling. I sense she may not have comprehended the entirety of my story about the origins of these lemons, that — like with my own mother — the tactility of the gift may say more than what I’ve said in words. Mary smiles and her eyes brighten. The other women peer into the basket. I look again at Angie. Fabi brushes her hand over the lemons. Her fingers move gently across the rinds. Your hands are so delicate, I tell her. Fabi smiles and stretches her hand out in front of us as though she’s admiring a fresh manicure.

I wonder if she feels bewilderment or relief or annoyance by the connection I’m bringing forth, because it makes the most obvious thing about her appear to be our only commonality.

Delicate hands are necessary for all of the small stitches that go into the valves, Sarah adds. Everyone laughs, and Mary stretches her hand out. We all have a look. They’re so youthful! I tell Mary. She blushes.

We dip our heads into the basket to take in the scent of the lemons and lavender, and I make an effort to maintain focus on these women, our semicircle, their hands. I had come with the intention of understanding the nature of the valve inside me more fully, but that fullness has taken on a different form. I knew my heart valve was a foreign object, and I had imagined it was made by foreign hands. But these women were not foreign to me. They look like my mom. They perform life-saving labor, and I wonder about the possibility of our shared experiences of living here in Orange County.

Our meeting is exceptional, Sarah tells me, because they have just finished their workday. Have I prolonged their labor now by obliging them to stay and speak with me? I hope we can meet again, I say as we say goodbye.

I knew my heart valve was a foreign object, and I had imagined it was made by foreign hands. But these women were not foreign to me.

***

My mother emigrated to California in the early ’80s. A Chinese Indonesian woman from Sumatra, she is the adopted daughter of an affluent Peranakan family. Her mother had a hair salon on Jalan Sutomo Road in Medan, a city in central Sumatra, and her family also owned and operated a sewing school just above the salon.

My mother’s two older sisters were educated as a medical doctor and pharmacist, but my mom was never sent to school. Instead, her adoptive mother trained her as a hairstylist and an embroidery teacher. She began working in the salon at 10 years old. When her sisters moved to Jakarta, my mother worked in the salon until her mother closed it and moved them to Jakarta, too. There, she received an invitation from her cousins to come visit the United States. My mom tells me that her sisters paid for her plane ticket to the States and that as she packed her bags for a six-month trip to California, she sensed she wouldn’t return to Indonesia. Her sisters took care of her financially until a year later when she married my dad. Two years after that, I was born.

Until I moved to New York, my parents and I lived in La Habra, a city on the border of Los Angeles and Orange County, whose motto is “A Caring Community.” Our neighbors were Bolivian, Japanese, Chinese, and white. My parents purchased our home in 1990, but they never updated the orange and yellow Moroccan-inspired ’70s linoleum in the kitchen or the orange and avocado carpets in our bedrooms. Apart from a large bamboo-and-glass dining table that my dad surprised my mom with for their anniversary one year, much of the furniture in our house was second-hand — cast-offs from other family members when they updated their homes. Whenever a new-to-us piece of furniture came inside, the item that it replaced was given a new spot in the house: An entertainment stand became a table in the entryway; a display cabinet in the family room became a storage unit for wrapping paper in my closet.

The prized feature of our home was the 27 rose bushes that lined our front and back yards. My mom had grown more than half of them herself with clippings she collected from our neighbors and the gardeners at Our Lady of Guadalupe, where I attended grade school. My mother learned Spanish from the women who cared for my grandmother and practiced it at every opportunity: buying fruits and meats at the Northgate Supermarket, with the owner of King’s Taqueria where we stopped for carne asada tacos, with our Bolivian neighbors.

I learned other languages by watching my mom use the vocabulary she knew to initiate conversations and to use the conversation to acquire new words, new relationships to words, and to the people who helped her find them. I peppered the language in my head with the little Bahasa phrases that enter the English I use when my mom and I speak to each other. It is my first language and her third. Adoo — can you believe it? I’ll begin.

Relationships, I was taught, are more important than the environments that surround them. If I went over to a friend’s for dinner, my mom would send me with cuttings from her garden that she placed in water bottles wrapped in colorful tissue paper — nosegays from one mother to another. As I gave the nosegay to my friend’s mom, I questioned the utility of the reassigned furniture in my house. I wondered why our dishwasher was only ever used as storage for the plastic water bottles she collected to gift her roses and if I would ever meet another person whose house resembled mine.

***

In the Edwards parking lot, I pull my phone out to queue up directions back to my parents’ house. I have seven missed calls from my mom and a text message: I’m going to Super King to get spinach and bananas. Can you pick me up?

Super King is an international discount grocery store one dial-a-ride phone call away from my parents’ new house. When my dad is at work, my mom calls this chauffeur service for senior citizens to bring her to the market for a 50-cent fee. The size of a soccer field, Super King stocks foods from a variety of cultures, and my mom goes at least once a week to practice her Spanish and to stock up on Chinese eggplant, lacinato kale, sliced jackfruit, marinated chicken thighs, handmade flour tortillas, and anything else in season and on sale.

Inside, the air bites the back of my neck. I hadn’t dressed for the arctic temperature of warehouse food preservation. I start my search in the produce section, but I cannot find her sphere of black hair or her shopping cart, full of this week’s specials. I begin a lap around the store and find her asking the butcher to slice the beef thinner. Are you almost done? I ask. I’ve been driving for an hour.

Thirty minutes later, she’s assembling a jigsaw puzzle: each of her fifteen plastic bags belongs to a specific spot in the trunk. Double-bagged steak can cradle a carton of eggs, but an Italian eggplant? Never. An Italian eggplant, like a watermelon, is a corner piece so that its weight will only roll onto the edge of the trunk, which sits lower than the farther edges that abut the backseat of my Chevy Prizm. We are only going a few miles, I say. Assisting her would be futile. We measure time differently.

In the Super King parking lot, I’m pained by the love that governs her labor and assembly and adheres to a family food budget, and I say, Adoo, nothing is going to get ruined in the trunk! She’s protective of her little collection of perfect ingredients. She’ll use them to create the dishes she tells me are my favorite: pandan spicy eggplant, wine beef, and sautéed kale. But I’ve never craved those dishes. The need for them was another feeling entirely.

I’d only spent 10 minutes with Angie, Mary, Fabi, and Pham, and already I long to know them more deeply. I also know I must long with caution, that wanting time is different than creating it. I watch my mom shift her bag of onions for the third time and think, If I could just throw all of this in the trunk, drive home, and — open sesame — the potatoes and cantaloupe didn’t knock into your mint and rosemary, would I create a future of efficient grocery shopping or destroy it?

***

When I was 2 years old, two holes in my heart were repaired in my open-heart operation. In these surgeries doctors treat your bones as elastic bands, bending your ribs and sternum to reach the arteries they will mend. You are awake before and after your surgery, but it is difficult to remember exactly what happened; you are put on a bypass machine that pumps your heart for you, pushing oxygen to your brain in quantities that can cause permanent forgetting.

Sometimes I want to use a word but only see a deep enclosure when I close my eyes, and I wait there until the word reveals my past world.

The first time I envisioned the playroom in the hospital, I saw a large bear dressed as a clown, white bookshelves, and a wheelbarrow. I focused on the the bear for a few minutes, trying to see his face, but instead I saw my mom holding out a spoonful of steamed spinach that she scooped from the Tupperware she still uses today.

***

In the assembly room at Edwards, Sarah told me that the the pericardium heart sac — the tissue used in my heart valve — can be traced back to the group of cows it belonged to. The closest I’ve come to knowing mine is learning that my valve is made of tissue from two cows: one from California and another from Minnesota.

Pericardium is a membrane that keeps the heart safe — as the ancient physician and philosopher Galen called it, perikardion, around the heart. The membrane encloses the muscle and roots of the heart’s four valves, both in the human and the cow. Our own pericardium protects us from the shock of a sudden movement, such as tripping or falling. A viral infection or a heart attack could damage it. So can external violences.

The bovine tissue was considered material waste before the biotech industry found a use for it in the human body. Now each day, some workers in the slaughterhouse slip a cow’s heart out of its sac and spread it on a table. Here, they separate the membrane from fatty tissue and prepare it for cold ship to Irvine. When it arrives, the assemblers who are not sewing receive and wash it until the tissue is neither bovine or human but pieces patterned on the table for the next step in assembly.

In order to sell a medical supply, a farm must adhere to medical safety regulations: The cow must be carefully fed and exercised. A farmer must know its origins. A cow in natural conditions can live upwards of 15 years. For a valve, it is slaughtered at or before 24 months.

In a 2014 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Bard College, Yale University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science estimated that cattle use 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer, and 11 times more water than other livestock. Their collective secretions produce more methane than gas or oil production. Before the development of bovine valves, pericardium tissue was another waste in the process of harvesting beef. Now it is another form of income.

I try to make contact with the suppliers of my bovine tissue, but Sarah tells me they often prefer to keep quiet. I don’t persist. Instead, I watch a video that Sarah sends me. It is an Australian news segment on the use of tissue from cow hearts to treat heart conditions, in which an Australian cardiologist praises the technology inside me, saying, It was as if the sky had cleared.

Later in the video two slaughterhouse workers pull a cow’s heart out of its sac like a hospital birth. One holds the muscle’s weight, the other lifts it toward the ceiling like a chalice. They work expertly in a metal room sectioned off from the cow carcasses that hang in rows. Cool pink skin stretched over an animal’s rib cage, a sternum excavated, the organs beneath it mostly gone to waste.

***

My mom doesn’t know her biological parents. She’s never mentioned a curiosity about her origins, only that she was told that her biological mother died giving birth to her and her father grew sick shortly after. He brought her to her adoptive mother, asking that she raise my mom and teach her a trade. She knows she was born in 1949, in Medan, and that as a child she chose September 20th as her birthday. She chose the name Katherine for herself in the mid-’60s when the Indonesian government forbid Chinese Indonesians to keep their given names. Only her sisters and my cousins still call her Kim-Tju. I didn’t know why she could not easily ask questions about her birth parents like I did — Don’t you want to know? I pressed. Giving birth is a painful experience, she once told me, but raising a child causes a lifetime of pain.

Once, my mom told me that when she was 12 and had learned to sew dresses, she left the salon one afternoon to buy fabric for a new outfit she had designed herself. But when she came home, the Javanese nanny that lived with her family advised her to hide what she’d bought. It would enrage her mother. Her mother scolded her for not asking permission. She never described the color, the weight, or the print, as though giving it language would bring on the pain of being a child, or of being adopted. I cannot equate the pain of her childhood to anything I felt in mine. I cannot imagine spoon-feeding a woman who once told you that you had the face of a horse, but I watched my mom do this for my grandmother after she became paralyzed from a stroke in the winter of 1991 and came to live with us.

Unintentionally, my mom passed some of her pain onto me when she prohibited me from shaving my legs or wearing makeup until one day in my junior year of high school when I emerged from the shower with blood running down my shin, having shaved off two inches of my own skin with a rusty disposable Schick razor that I had been using in secret. After that, she helped me explore my personal style. If I wanted to replicate the studded dog collar I saw at Hot Topic, she would show me how to lightly dab the hot glue onto the black faux-leather ribbon I’d bought. For my junior prom, we rode two busses to the Brea Mall to look for a dress. She picked through the price tags on the sale racks and expressed her concerns about finding a supportive 36DD bra to go with the strapless, sweetheart dresses I was drawn to. We ended up walking through the mall’s parking lot to a TJ Maxx in the shopping center across the street where we found not only a prom dress but several pairs of wide-leg cargo jean shorts that I deemed “cool” and she deemed “reasonably priced.” When it was time to head back to the bus stop, I insisted that we walk around the mall rather than through it. It’s quicker to go through Nordstrom, she said.

No, I insisted, it’s faster if we go around it. She wrapped her arms around the large TJ Maxx bag. I’m sweating from this plastic. These clothes are heavy you know, she insisted.

Well then let me carry them, I said, reaching out to take the bag.

No! she barked, turning the bag away from me as though my discount clothing was a swaddled newborn she was guarding from an unfit mother. It’s too heavy for you.

We both knew I’d made us take the long route back to the bus stop. We both knew she insisted on carrying my new clothes because she was afraid that in the heat and with my heart condition something bad might happen.

How do you think this looks? I asked, insisting I was fine and that anyone who happened to see us walking together would think I didn’t care that my five-foot, 90-pound mother was balancing a shopping bag the size of her own body, while I, her able-bodied teenager, towered above her, ambling about completely unencumbered. Who cares what people think, she said. Anything bad could happen to your heart, and then what? You want that?

We both knew she insisted on carrying my new clothes because she was afraid that in the heat and with my heart condition something bad might happen.

I didn’t believe her side of our argument, but then I did not survive the mass killings of ethnic Chinese in the mid-’60s in Indonesia. Her own father was taken for a day and her mother paid for his safe return to their family. Her neighbor was also taken by the Indonesian military for questioning. He also came home, she told me, and the blood from the finger they cut off dripped on the road as he walked to the house.

I still can’t comprehend these stories, but since I visited Edwards and began learning about the different people who’d handled the materials in my heart valve, I return to them again and again. I would love to meet the person who slaughtered my cow and the person who prepared that pericardium tissue, but it seems impossible. I could be sad, or I could see their anonymity as a way to understand how my mom feels about her adoption, and her mother. She is content knowing the family who raised her and kept her alive.

***

Three months after my first visit to Edwards, Sarah invites me to attend their first Patient’s Day. I bring my mom with me because I want to show her where my heart valve was made. We are two of 50 guests — other patients and their caregivers, Edwards employees, and nonprofit partners. The day focuses on ways we can help new patients through advocacy work. I volunteer to assist the American Heart Association with a new support network. I become a Heart Valve Ambassador, a voice from the recovery room and beyond — a survivor — who can assure someone about to undergo open-heart surgery that they are not alone. I sign up because I want to tell these new patients, Right now, another person is making a device that may save your life. I want my mom to meet these women, but because the event is so large our meeting is a brief blur. In front of the vitrines that look into the manufacturing room, among a few other patients also meeting their sewers, Edwards employees and reporters, my mom and I shake hands with Mary, Fabi, and a woman I had not met before, Marta. We only have time to say thank you and hi again. Later, The Orange County Register will run a photo of the two of us waving to my sewers. When I look at the picture, the glass window between us feels thick.

Months later, I’m still thinking about my sewers. I wonder what brought them to the United States, what their families are like, if they really were seamstresses in their previous lives.

I call Sarah to ask if my mom and I can bring food to the women who assembled my heart valve and am surprised and delighted that she loves the idea. I call my mom and ask her if she would like to have lunch at Edwards with the women who made my valve. I would love to, she says happily. It’s really special, you know, to really know who made your heart valve, to see where they work, to meet them.

Can you make lempar ayam, and gado gado and selat pohpia? I ask her.

Adoo! she says. It’s too much work. You can just buy them and say we made them.

But if you make them and I watch, I’ll know how to make them, too, I explain, because I want the lunch to be an opportunity to learn skills she has not passed onto me. To her, domestic labor is right up there with carrying my shopping bags. I only know the tradition of making lempar ayam is an inheritance of the culture I was born into, unlike my heart defect. I want to know how to make this shredded chicken and coconut rice roll because what I know of my maternal lineage ends with my mother, and I believe that her culture, like tradition, can be adopted, like taste, to which one can adapt. Adoo, if that’s what you want, she sighs.

Sarah suggests we come to Edwards in late July after she’s checked the women’s vacation requests to be sure everyone would be on campus. She sends me pictures of a few conference rooms we might have lunch in. I send her the menu and the color scheme for the table setting that I have in mind. In our email exchanges this lunch becomes an event of the season.

***

The night before, I watch my mom shred cabbage and boil melody potatoes to make gado gado. I watch her grind another shallot and thumb of ginger in a mortar with a smooth, palm-size pestle. She pours the peanuts in once she’s made a liquid paste.

I want to know how to make this shredded chicken and coconut rice roll because what I know of my maternal lineage ends with my mother, and I believe that her culture, like tradition, can be adopted, like taste, to which one can adapt.

Around 1 a.m. her pot of water comes to a boil and she reveals another secret: If you can’t get to Chinatown, you can use spaghetti noodles. She flash-fries them with pork and celery using chopsticks to make a menagerie in her serving dish.

I print and bind her recipes into pamphlets to give to everyone tomorrow. When my mom finishes cooking, I open the pantry to find large containers to transport her noodles, lempar, gado gado, and selat pohpia, a Dutch Indonesian canapé of vegetables inside a deep-fried, cup-shaped cracker. Stacks of McDonalds cups and Cool Whip and Knudson cottage cheese tubs fall all over the floor. Why do you keep these when we can afford Gladware, I scream. I’m in her kitchen, not a catalog. I know the reasons, and that I can’t ask her to tell me why every time I open a cabinet.

To save and give everything to your children. To not have ownership over a thing. To discover coupons. To be a registered alien. To be told go back to your country. To ride public transportation. To lose the doll’s clothes you sewed in a flood in your hometown. To never have seen your birth certificate. To know someone else in your family has. To have worked in your family business. To be afraid to interview. To know how you arrived and to be thankful you did not die in your life’s process. I know this like I know we’ve been up for too long, it’s past my bedtime, and I’m upset because I can’t undo my choice to remain awake.

My mom nestles her dishes into a cardboard box while I roll two yards of kelly-green felt across our living room floor and cut out a leaflike pattern to shape a table runner. Tomorrow, we’ll lay the food on top of this runner and serve it on designer paper plates.

Mom, I say, as I twist my left thumb around the pair of right-handed scissors I’m using, tomorrow, it will be helpful if you can make everyone feel comfortable.

Yeah, OK, she says, shifting the dishes around the sheets of folded paper towels she’s tucking into the corners of the box so they fit perfectly. I know, she assures me.

Sarah meets us in the parking lot. She guides us to a sunlit conference room where three square coffee tables have been pushed together around an L-shaped sofa to create a dining room. I unpack my runner and begin setting the table while my mom arranges the layers of gado gado on a glass plate. The women arrive in scrubs, and I’m glad I’d thought to bring kimonos — welcome gifts — to help them feel as pretty as the table we’d set for them. Angie hands me a large double-stem white orchid plant and I place it on the empty side table between the two couches. Pham tells us she can’t stay, so my mom quickly makes a plate of food for her while I help her choose a kimono.

The kimonos, the kelly-green table runner, the gold chargers, the food, the flowers — there’s much to take in, to admire, to start conversation. There’s another woman I did not meet on my first visit to Edwards last year. She introduces herself as Rita, a supervisor on my heart valve team. I’m struck by her radiant olive complexion and how close in age we appear to be. As we settle in on the sofa, I overhear Angie telling my mom that she memorizes her friends’ phone numbers. If you write them in your phone, and you lose your phone, you can’t find anybody, she says.

I’ve heard this before. Do not tell family secrets to anybody, my mom demands. I hate her complacent, immigrant wisdom, but I listen to Angie to see her reasoning.

Angie is an Amerasian. A Vietnamese, biracial American. She tells us that she came to California with her husband and son who drive freight trucks across America.

Fabi asks everyone, If you could go back to one minute in your twenties, what would it be?

My life was very terrible, Angie begins. I am an orphan. I’m so lucky America brings me here. When I come here, I try to work. I try to learn. She tells us that when she first arrived she rode in a taxi. On the freeway it got a flat tire. It sounded like a bomb, she shares. She’s laughing as she thinks back to her reaction. I don’t speak English, she explains. I screamed: I don’t want to die! The taxi driver said calm down. My language he doesn’t understand. He said calm down and I’m so scared.

Rita takes us to an earlier time in her life. At fourteen years old we came to America from Baghdad. We left Iraq in 1993 so I saw the Gulf War, survived the whole thing. When we came here we lived two minutes from Disneyland, and on my first night here I heard the fireworks and and thought we were being attacked again. I ran to my room, underneath my bed, and thought oh my god the Americans came back!

As she shares her story, the music from the Disneyland Electrical Parade plays in my head, and I recall the crowd gathering for the show and how easy it is, when you are young, to feel lost on Main Street when it is dark, and how those fireworks, when you are small and alone are loud, bright, and last an eternity.

Until this day, the fireworks go on every night and everything comes back, Rita continues. You know, Disneyland is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, but I really hate Disneyland.

Mary shares that she is a boat person. In 1980 she left Vietnam with her husband and four children. On a small boat with 139 people. She stopped in Indonesia for a month, then set out for Florida. She and her husband each held two babies on our lap. When I arrived, I couldn’t stand, she says. She came to Edwards in 2001. Everyday I go to work and then I cook and take care of the children, she continues. I want to go to school, but I don’t have time. Two of her children are at UC Irvine and one is at Pomona.

As we continue chatting, Mary grows quiet. I learned English from my children, she says to my mom.

Me too, my mom tells her. Thank you for saving her life, she adds.

We are eating off of compostable Wasara plates designed in Tokyo, placed atop gold craft-paper chargers. Here we are strangers sitting close to one another, drawing ourselves closer. Past their handiwork inside me, and our laughter around us, is a heart’s life expanded that could — at any moment — begin to deteriorate.

When I first came here, Angie tells us, I hate this job. I felt, I can’t do it. Sewing is hard. She tells us that she watched a video about an Edwards patient. Produced by Edwards, such a video would contain a patient’s journey through heart valve disease and would include a personal message of gratitude to employees from patients and sometimes their family members. When I looked at the video, Angie tells us, I looked at the patient and I felt like I must do this job.

Fabi tells me, When I first started to do the visual audit of the valves, to verify that the stitch is in the right place, that the tissue is in good condition, I felt dizzy. I said please God, give me patience — but the inspector who taught me to do the visual audit said Fabi, just take your time.

Nobody, I think, is born with the patience to sew pericardium tissue to a metal frame. I look over at Mary. She is telling my mom, We’re almost the same age. I’m about to be 70! I sew the very small valves now, the ones the size of your little finger. I sew them very slowly.

Rita says, I know that there is a lot of violence going on around the world, that people are hurting and killing each other. We’re in a crisis right now. It might not hit home directly, but it’s important to live your life daily and let the rest just go with the flow.

I think of them holding my heart valve under a microscope, turning it around and around to look for mistakes, for reasons to start over.

For years I have slowly been letting go of the belief that there is a being who makes people hate based on skin color and belief. That violence is unstoppable, or that to resist violence is to be enlightened. That there is a ranking system to kindness.

Toward the end of our lunch, Angie and Fabi begin sharing pictures of their daughters. Fabi’s daughter has just dyed her hair fire-engine red. Her bangs sweep across her left eye. She smiles, confident, in control of her own presence. She loves to play with colors, Fabi tells us, seemingly unenthused.

I think of them holding my heart valve under a microscope, turning it around and around to look for mistakes, for reasons to start over.

I’ve worn my hair down today, so I lift it up and spin around — to my mom’s surprise — to show them my newly shaved undercut. My mom’s not a fan of this either, I tell them. The room swells with more laughter. I look over at my mom and see that she’s placed her hand on Mary’s back. They appear to be moving between the group conversation and their own intimate one, and my heart swells as I look at them, then at the food on the table, at Fabi, Rita, and Angie. Here is the facet of Orange County that I’d hoped to finally see. Here, around this table, among my mom’s foods, I watched my mom care for Mary with the same attention I felt she smothers me with. There was a motherliness to her actions, but I also saw her shaping community with these women, and that I was building myself into this community, too.

Later that afternoon, in the car, my mom tells me she’d barely eaten anything. I hadn’t either. We were too busy listening to everyone’s stories. I have some steak at home, she says. The thought of it and the thought of the lunch we’d just enjoyed are enough to sustain us for the drive home. The two of us are at ease as we slow into rush hour traffic and everyone on the freeway comes to a brief standstill.

***

Jen Hyde is the author of Hua Shi Hua,华诗画 [Drawings & Poems from China], Ahsahta 2017. She is currently at work on Murmur, a 2016 finalist for the Creative Capital Grant in Literature.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten By the Public

Bettmann / Getty

David Montero | an excerpt adapted from Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network | Viking | November 2018 | 16 minutes (4,298 words)

In 1975, Peter Clark was a young attorney in the Enforcement Division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Founded three years earlier, the Enforcement Division was tasked with investigating possible violations of federal securities laws. One morning, Clark was in his office when the division’s director, Stanley Sporkin, appeared, greatly vexed. Sporkin, tall and corpulent with deep-set eyes, was waving a newspaper, Clark recalled. “How the ‘bleep’ could a publicly held company have a slush fund?” Sporkin asked.

Two years had passed since the Watergate scandal broke, and less than a year since President Nixon had resigned, but the reverberations of the scandal were still rocking Washington. Its revelation that multinational corporations, including some of the most prestigious brands in the United States, had been making illegal contributions to political parties not only at home but in foreign countries around the world would later be described by Ray Garrett, the chairman of the SEC, as “the second half of Watergate, and by far the larger half.” Read more…

Theater of Forgiveness

Illustration by Buff Ross

Hafizah Geter | Longreads | November 2018 | 32 minutes (8,050 words)

 

On Wednesday, October 24th, 2018, a white man who tried and failed to unleash his violent mission on a black church, fatally killed the next black people of convenience, Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Jeffersontown, Kentucky Kroger. Today, I am thinking of the families and loved ones of Stallard and Jones, who the media reports, along with their grief, their anger, their lack of true recourse, have taken on the heavy work of forgiveness.

***

June 17, 2015, two hours outside my hometown, a sandy blonde-haired Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That night, Roof, surely looking like an injured wolf, someone already on fire, sat with an intimate group of churchgoers, and I have no doubt, was prayed for. If history repeats itself, then surely so does religion: the 12 churchgoers like Jesus’s 12 apostles in a 21st century fable. Roof the Judas at this last supper. As we know, Roof would wait a full hour until heads were bowed in prayer and God had filled every corner of the room before reaching into his fanny pack.

By June 19, 2015, two narrow days beyond the shooting, there would already be reports of absolution. “I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof at his bond-hearing. “I forgive you,” said Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the nine dead, her son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, not yet buried.

Intimately, I have been held by this wing of southern Black religiosity. My father is of Black southern Baptists who, originating in Georgia and Alabama, found themselves one day in Dayton, Ohio. Growing up, I was as curious about my Black American family’s white God as I was about my Nigerian mother’s African Allah. Much of my childhood was spent either at the foot of my mother’s prayer rug or beneath the nook of my paternal grandmother’s arm — grandma’s fingers pinching my thighs to keep me still, awake, and quiet in the church pews. At the church I attended with my Black American family, they were always praying to be gracious enough to receive forgiveness or humble enough to give it. A turn-the-other-cheek kind of church, it was full with products of the Great Migration and they were always trying to forgive white people.

As a child, though I could never quite name the offenses of white people, I could sense the wounds they had left all over the Black people who surrounded me. The wounds were in the lilt of Black women’s voices, in the stiffened swagger of our men; it was there in the sometimes ragged ways my boy cousins would be disciplined. And I knew this work of forgiving had somehow left bruises on my aunts so deep it made their skin shine. In church, we prayed and forgave white people like our prayers were the only thing between them, heaven, and damnation.

It’s left me wondering: Does forgiveness take advantage of my people?

Read more…

The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester

Illustration by Lily Padula

Sara Fredman | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,913 words)

 

In the second season of Stranger Things a tentacled smoke monster forces its way into poor Will Byers’ mouth, taking up residence inside his body. When his mother draws him a warm bath, he refuses. “He likes it cold,” Will intones creepily. The demon inside is invisible to others but exerts its will on Will, who is himself but also something else. As I watch the story unfold, the human being growing inside my body moves frenetically, as if it is popping and locking to a beat I cannot hear. This flurry of activity makes my stomach look like a potato sack with several distressed squirrels stuck inside; this is likely due to the cookie-dough ice cream I have recently eaten. I, too, have something inside of me; it also likes it cold.

“Pregnancy has every element of an alien invasion,” I read on the NPR website. “The human placenta is one of the most invasive placentas.”

We often turn to the extraterrestrial when we describe the phenomenon of growing a new person inside of an existing one. Early ultrasound images recall the classic imagining of alien form: a giant head attached to a smaller, translucent body set against a black abyss. It’s not just the optics. As pop icon and formerly-pregnant person JLo once remarked, “Pregnancy and giving birth are weird, strange. The growing life inside you — it’s like an invasion of the body snatchers.” I assume this creepy description reflects the way in which the growing fetus influences, commandeers even, so many of the bodily processes of its host. Google “alien” and “pregnancy,” and the least-frightening video that comes up will confirm: “Clearly, the fetus has no qualms about doing whatever it needs to do to get things for itself.”

Read more…