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‘My Tongue Swallowing the Taste of Home Soil’: On Filipino Food, Family, and Identity

WASHINGTON DC - September 5TH: Sisig from Purple Patch shot on September 5th, 2017 in Washington DC. (Photo by Goran Kosanovic for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

At The Margins — the online magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) — writer, filmmaker, and photographer Jill Damatac explores identity, colonalism, and memory through the lens of family and Filipino food. In “Dirty Kitchen,” Damatac shares two recipes — tinola, a ginger chicken soup; and sisig, a diced-up pork dish seasoned with calamansi juice, onions, and chili peppers — and weaves cooking instructions throughout sharp, sensory prose.

On the taste of tinola, and memories of her childhood:

When I was little, before I departed the sunny, Pacific chaos of our world for the chilly, Atlantic silence of the new world, we often had tinola for Sunday lunch at Lolo and Lola’s house, where I would spend weekends. In the early mornings, Lolo and I would stroll the barrio streets to buy fresh pandesal from the local bakery, me skipping along in mumbled song with the roosters, him punching the air with calisthenic fists, just as he had done with the American GIs during the war. In Pennsylvania, where he had followed us a year after we left, he would walk me to and from school, the two of us passing a bag of sticky, sour sampalok between us, spitting out the smooth, shiny seeds into our palms. He always wore his pristinely white Reeboks and sometimes his ten-gallon cowboy hat. I still remember my shame on the days he would arrive in that hat.

It was during those early years in the land of the free and the home of the brave that I first felt shame, which is a hunger for pride, and loneliness, which is a hunger for belonging. Tinola’s plain, clear-brothed, ginger-laced embrace helped to sate these hungers, my tongue swallowing the taste of home soil.

Sauté the garlic, ginger, and onion in oil in a large pot, stirring until soft. 

On sisig, but also colonialism, home, and identity:

“You want to know why my sisig is special?” Tito asked me recently over a sizzling plate. We were sharing a meal next to the volcano, Taal. I had just returned to the islands after twenty-two years of undocumented American exile.

“Because I make it with pork belly. Usually it’s made with the cheap parts of the pig, ha. Why should we eat only cheap parts? And love. I cook it with love.”

Sisig is no longer made with just the discarded cuts, but its poisonous effects remain. The Americans are gone, but their imperious scars linger. No longer trapped by our colonizers, we trap ourselves. We transform to survive, but we still bear the boiled, charred, gristled remnants of our past. I will continue to exist in a hungry space between longing and belonging, for my body, exported from its country of birth, deported from its country of growth, now has only sense and memory to call home.

Serve immediately, using two large spoons to stir in the eggs to cook. Enjoy with garlic fried rice. 

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

The El Paso and Juarez customs and immigration entry and exits at the border.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Melissa del Bosque, Marta Martinez, Kiese Laymon, Jill Damatac, and Nehmat Kaur.

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1. The El Paso Experiment

Melissa del Bosque | The Intercept | November 1, 2020 | 27 minutes (6,900 words)

“A public defender’s lonely fight against family separation.”

2. The Social Media Managers Are Not Okay

Marta Martinez | OneZero | November 9, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,931 words)

“They’re on the front lines of a relentless and overwhelming news cycle that is pushing them to the edge.”

3. Why I Paid Tenfold to Buy Back the Rights for Two of My Books

Kiese Laymon | LitHub | November 10, 2020 | 6 minutes (1,728 words)

Kiese Laymon on revision, radical friendship, and community.

4. Dirty Kitchen

Jill Damatac | The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop) | November 11, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,865 words)

“Far from our barrios, mountains, and islands, we cook, so that we may practice swallowing our undesirable truths, acidic and blood-heavy.”

5. The Dogs of Gurgaon

Nehmat Kaur | Fifty Two | November 11, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,400 words)

“Gurgaon’s relationship with its canine residents is both a symptom, and a result, of how this town, sometimes called India’s ‘Millennium City,’ incubates new ambitions, heinous old inequities, and ecological ruin.”

There She Goes: How to ‘Feminize’ a Face

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When most people think of the medicine of gender reassignment, hormone therapy and genital surgery likely come to mind. In a thoughtfully written feature in The Guardian, journalist Jenny Kleeman describes a new frontier: facial feminization surgery, or FFS. Kleeman introduces readers to trans women who, unsatisfied with — or traumatized by — the way they are perceived physically, visit surgeons who shave jawlines, plump cheeks, lift brow lines, and perform other procedures that can make faces read as more feminine. “I’m not trying to make myself beautiful,” says Sophia Drake, the main subject of the story. “I see testosterone as a poison in my body, a poison that I had to deal with for 20 years. I want to put my face to the way it would have been if testosterone had never been [there].” Her surgeon, Dr. Keith Altman, operated on Drake in October 2019:

There was no more easy chatter between the doctors when Altman returned to the theater to operate on Drake’s brow and forehead. This was the most difficult part of the surgery. It would remove the parts of Drake’s face she thought were most male, the features she hated so much. Altman brushed sterile aqueous iodine over her face and hair, rendering her first rusty red and then yellow. He made an incision into her hairline with a swift, steady hand.

He drew back her skin in either direction from her hairline until it gathered in folds on one side at the tip of her nose, and draped back across her crown on the other. With a tiny steel mallet and a chisel, Altman set to work carefully chipping away her brow bone, before filing it with a tiny drill bit. Then he stopped, and everyone in theatre craned in to see the difference.

When he was satisfied with the result, Altman changed his gloves and turned his attention to her forehead. The MRI on the lightbox showed Drake had a large sinus cavity with a thin wall; the challenge was to saw the bone down without perforating the sinus, and the best way to do this was to remove part of her forehead entirely. Altman drew a 5cm by 3cm rectangle on to her skull with marker pen. He sliced into it with another fine tool, then prized out the section of bone. He held it in his hand as he filed it back, turning a flat plane into a gentle curve. When he put it back in place, he pulled the skin over it, tilting his head to the side to check his work. Finally, the piece of forehead was fixed back in the skull with two 4mm titanium plates, which his trainee, Maini, secured using a tiny screwdriver. Drake’s skin was smoothed back for a last time. “Good,” Altman nodded.

As Kleeman details, FFS raises challenging questions about privilege and beauty standards. The surgery is expensive and not covered by the National Health Service in most of the United Kingdom. According to Juno Roche, author of Trans Power, FFS contributes “a kind of two-tier system where, on the whole, the most successful trans people are beautiful people that pass. People who are proud to be trans, and those people who can’t afford the surgery, fall into a separate category. That’s most people. And we have to create safety for everyone.” Then again, Roche adds, “Trans people deserve an easy life. This is a tough gig.”

For Drake, the results of FFS were life-changing. Kleeman interviewed her two months into post-surgery:

The change was almost imperceptible to me, at first. But I could soon detect a new poise: her face seemed narrower, and strangely her shoulders did, too. Her dimples were more prominent, her eyes looked brighter and more expressive. There was a faint, pale pink sliver of a scar along her hairline, mostly covered by the dark roots of her fringe.

“It was just enough, without being too much,” she told me. “The hairline frames my face better. I find that my eyes aren’t sunken, they’re further out. I feel that I’ve got a lot more expression in my eyebrows now. Other people spot this”—she cupped her hands around her jaw—”more than I do. But when I go back and look at old pictures, I see a massive difference.”

The biggest change was in Drake’s demeanor. She no longer sat with her arms across her chest or played with her jewelry. She was open, at ease, comfortable.

“It’s made me so much happier. Calmer. I can sit and relax in ways I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to,” she said. “I don’t walk around any more worrying that people are looking at me.”

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The Dogs of Gurgaon

Longreads Pick

“Gurgaon’s relationship with its canine residents is both a symptom, and a result, of how this town, sometimes called India’s ‘Millennium City,’ incubates new ambitions, heinous old inequities, and ecological ruin.”

Source: Fifty Two
Published: Nov 11, 2020
Length: 17 minutes (4,400 words)

‘Social Media Managers Are First Responders’

INDIA - 2019/08/30: In this photo illustration online social media logos are seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Constantly navigating a 2020 news cycle that eats itself and a Twitter stream that endlessly flows, “social media managers are first responders,” writes Marta Martinez. The people tasked with handling social media at a company are expected to stay abreast of what’s happening in the world, react swiftly, and act as an official voice for a brand. Yet individuals in these roles are not always provided the support and resources to do their jobs well, and the time and effort involved in this type of work, including strategy, content creation, and community management, is often dismissed as trivial. Hey, can you whip up a few tweets? Can you promote this on our accounts? Let’s launch more channels! Let’s build a community! 

Under “normal” circumstances, social media management is hard work that requires a varied skillset. In 2020, it’s a stressful and hazardous job, says Matthew Kobach, who worked as the New York Stock Exchange’s social media manager, and one that should be paid accordingly.

At OneZero, Martinez reports on the experiences of social media managers and strategists during the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, at organizations like DCist, the University of Michigan, and Mount Sinai Health System.

Brown has not been able to meet most of her co-workers in person yet and, as a social media manager and a young Black woman, she often wonders whether she is being taken seriously as an equal professional within the newsroom. Social media managers are in high demand. But these jobs are often performed by young people who are underpaid. The national average salary of a social media manager is about $57,000, considerably less than what marketing managers make — over $135,000.

Social media managers are making important — and very public — decisions all the time. They need to respond to news and conversations quickly to be effective. The public voice and image of companies, media outlets, public figures, and institutions are in their hands at a very delicate time. Yet their job is still often seen as something anyone could do, or left to those who are just getting started in their careers.

“It’s like putting an intern to be your press secretary,” says Alan Rosenblatt, a social media consultant for political campaigns who teaches digital and social media strategy at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

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Sejal Shah: “All my life, I have been biking with brakes on.”

Longreads Pick

“‘This Is One Way To Dance’ is a timely collection about identity—where it comes from, what it means (and doesn’t), and what happens when we lose it.”

Published: Nov 9, 2020
Length: 12 minutes (3,118 words)

‘You Just Have to Have a Strong Mind’: Shantonia Jackson on Working in a Nursing Home During the Pandemic

Photo by Matthias Zomer / Pexels

This summer, Gabriel Winant, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, interviewed Shantonia Jackson, a certified nursing assistant (CNA) who works at City View Multicare Center in Cicero, Illinois. CNAs like Jackson provide general care (making sure patients eat and shower) and are often the only people that offer support and companionship when residents need someone to talk to.

City View experienced a major COVID-19 outbreak: 253 residents out of 315 contracted the virus, and many of them died. Jackson’s colleague, a 64-year-old woman named Camelia Kirkwood who was supposed to retire in June, was among those who contracted COVID-19 and died. Before coronavirus, the two oversaw 35 residents apiece. Now on her own, Jackson provides care for 70 men in an all-men’s unit.

Winant and Jackson’s conversation in Dissent reveals what it’s like to work in a nursing home, and the challenges and exploitative conditions hardworking healthcare workers like Jackson face, especially during the pandemic.

She describes how she felt after her colleague, Camelia, died from the virus, and the lack of support from the nursing home’s management:

It just devastated me when she passed away. I really, really took that very hard. But I had to come back and explain it to the residents, because they wanted to know where she was. They were hearing that she was sick or she died, but one by one I would talk to them and let them know she was in a better place. And you have to do that with psych and behavioral patients, because they can kill you. They could take the fire extinguisher off the wall and just bash it up the side my head, you know what I’m saying? So I develop a rapport with them.

Management never came upstairs on the floor with me to see what I was dealing with. They would come upstairs and yell at me, “Well, you need to give a shower.” I already gave thirty showers out of seventy people. I can’t make sure seventy take a shower. Because I’ve got to still pass trays. I’ve got to still make beds. It’s hard.

Even with the kitchen. Even with laundry. Who wants to have bugs? It’s supposed to be clean, but the nursing home industry is so cheap. We sometimes don’t have a housekeeper on our floor. It’s like, really? Call somebody in. But you don’t want to, because you don’t want to pay them. That’s crazy.

It’s common for nursing home workers like Jackson to juggle more than one job, often at other care facilities or in people’s homes, which is one of the ways the virus spreads.

I took a leave, because I felt like I didn’t want to take the virus from City View, with 253 infections, to Berkeley, which didn’t have one case. So I took it upon myself. And the nursing home industry is so fickle, and selfish, and disrespectful, because they were actually angry at me for leaving. I thought my director of nursing would be appreciative, because what if I came over here and I transmitted to all these elderly people? They all would have died. And they have the nerve to be mad at me, and calling me, saying, “You’re not going to come back?” No! I’m dealing with 253 cases over here. I want to be careful for the grandmas and the grandpas.

Later in the interview, Winant asks: “If you could make nursing homes change in any way, what would be your vision?” Jackson describes:

My vision would be to make sure that every CNA had at most only five residents. I would make sure it would be properly staffed. And that way we can comb their hair, brush their teeth, lotion their body, change them every two hours, make sure they get their needs, so we can do what we were put there to do, when their family members couldn’t do it. The residents would get proper food. You should see some of the food that they feed them. I wouldn’t feed that to my kid. Why would you feed them this? In America, we don’t care about the elderly; they’re about to die anyway, we don’t care. We should have respect, because they have wisdom.

When Winant asks how Jackson manages to care for all her patients, she responds, “I’ve got a strong mind. You just have to have a strong mind. It’s all I can do.”

Read the interview

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Along with the Top 5 Longreads of the week, we’re proud to bring you “Shades of Grey” by Ashley Stimpson.

In 2018, Floridians voted overwhelmingly to end greyhound racing, a sport they were told was archaic and inhumane. What if they were wrong? Ashley’s deeply reported feature starts with the story of Vesper, her retired racing greyhound, and explores the arguments for and against the controversial sport. This is her first piece for us here at Longreads. Be sure to check out more of her work.

It’s been nearly a decade since the numbers were tattooed in her ears, but they remain remarkably legible. In the right one, dots of green ink spell out 129B: Vesper was born in the twelfth month of the decade’s ninth year and was the second in her litter. The National Greyhound Association (NGA) gave that litter a unique registration number (52507), which was stamped into her moss-soft left ear. If I type these figures into the online database for retired racing greyhounds, I can learn about her life before she was ours, before she was even Vesper.

Smokin’ Josy was born to a breeder in Texas, trained in West Virginia, and raced in Florida. Over three years, she ran 70 races. She won four of them. In Naples on May 12, 2012, she “resisted late challenge inside,” to clinch victory, according to her stat sheet. In Daytona Beach on April 17, 2013, she “stumbled, fell early.” Five days later, after a fourth-place showing, she was retired.

Read Shades of Grey

***

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Nicholas Thompson, Gabriel Winant, Rachel Lord Elizondo, and Pamela Petro.

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1. Why Trump Can’t Afford to Lose

Jane Mayer | The New Yorker | November 1, 2020 | 24 minutes (6,220 words)

“The President has survived one impeachment, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if Joe Biden wins.”

2. A Nameless Hiker and the Case the Internet Can’t Crack

Nicholas Thompson | Wired | November 2, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,323 words)

A friendly and charming hiker was known on the trail as “Mostly Harmless.” After his body was discovered in a tent in Florida, no one could figure out who he was.

3. “What’s Actually Going on in Our Nursing Homes”: An Interview with Shantonia Jackson

Gabriel Winant | Dissent | October 05, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,222 words)

Gabriel Winant, a professor at the University of Chicago interviews Shantonia Jackson, a certified nursing assistant (CNA) who works at City View Multicare Center, a nursing home that experienced a major COVID-19 outbreak.

4. The Wounds That Do Not Heal

Rachel Lord Elizondo | The Bitter Southerner | November 2, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,443 words)

“Rachel Lord Elizondo shares something terrible in common with celebrated poet, professor, and author Natasha Trethewey — both of their mothers were murdered in Georgia by their former partners. Elizondo talks with Trethewey about her new book Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir — and the journey toward healing, education, and advocacy to end partner violence in Georgia and in every home.”

5. Shedding Light

Pamela Petro | Guernica Magazine | November 2, 2020 | 10 minutes (2,748 words)

“Darkness obscures and sunlight reveals, but dusk—that liminal moment in between—murmurs suggestions.”

A Trilogy of Visa Rejections

Longreads Pick
Published: Oct 8, 2020
Length: 19 minutes (4,783 words)

Roxie Laybourne: the World’s First Forensic Ornithologist

Starlings (Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

If you love birds, you’ll enjoy “Bird Man” by Eva Holland. It’s a deeply researched essay on extreme birding and the innate human need to classify the world around us.

Using her deep knowledge of bird anatomy, she solved crimes of passion and busted poachers. She helped reduce bird-strike-induced aviation accidents and disasters. At Audobon, Chris Sweeney introduces us to birder-extraordinaire Roxie Laybourne, the world’s first forensic ornithologist, who died in 2003 at age 92.

As part of a nine-month investigation, officials sent the bird remains to the Smithsonian Institution, where they made their way to the desk of Roxie Laybourne. Laybourne had been at the Smithsonian for 15 years and during that time had prepared thousands of bird specimens from around the world for research purposes. Over all that time and all those birds, she had started homing in on the subtle differences in the structure of feathers. It wasn’t hard for her to confirm that the birds hit in Boston were European Starlings.

The FAA’s final accident report, issued in July 1962, concluded that Flight 375 had struck a large flock—perhaps as many as 20,000 starlings—as it lifted off. This, in turn, caused three of the four engines to malfunction in a way that was impossible for the pilot to recover.

For most people, the accident report closed the books on Flight 375. For Laybourne, it marked the start of a remarkable scientific journey that was at times as thrilling as it was bizarre. She’d go on to establish the field of forensic ornithology, and the methods she developed for feather identification would be used to prosecute murderers, bust poachers, and inform conservation efforts. Most importantly, her work would entirely reshape our understanding of the threat birds and airplanes pose to one another—a threat that continues to hang over every airplane in the sky today.

Read the story