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Uncertain Ground

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Grace Loh Prasad | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,021 words)

In early October, I noticed my Taiwanese and Chinese American friends posting photos of large family gatherings and moon cakes. Others posted photos of visiting the graves of family members. I felt a wave of panic and guilt. Had I missed Tomb Sweeping Day, when I should have been honoring my deceased parents? On the other hand, I remembered and looked forward to Dia de los Muertos, a holiday I hadn’t grown up with but learned about over more than 20 years of living in California. How could I feel such a strong affinity for a Mexican cultural tradition, while being so ignorant of the holidays observed by the Taiwanese and Chinese diaspora?

A quick Wikipedia search revealed that I had gotten my holidays mixed up. Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the full moon at harvest time, with families reuniting for a traditional feast and moon cakes. Tomb Sweeping Day (Qing Ming) is one of several holidays to remember your ancestors, but it’s observed in spring. I could not remember which was which because my family did not really celebrate these holidays. Although I was born in Taiwan, I spent my early childhood in New Jersey, and then from fourth grade through high school graduation, we lived in Hong Kong.

We were a curious cultural hybrid: a family of Taiwanese origin living as American expatriates in a British territory where we resembled the local Chinese population, but did not speak the same language and had little in common with them. I attended an American school full of American and international students. One of the advantages of attending Hong Kong International School was that we got American, British and Chinese holidays off: Thanksgiving, the Queen’s Birthday and Lunar New Year.

I’m sure we learned about Mid-Autumn Festival and Qing Ming, but they weren’t as memorable as Lunar New Year, the biggest holiday of the year when everyone got a week off from school or work. Children and younger relatives received lai see (hong bao), red envelopes filled with spending money, and employees received their annual bonuses. I remember going with my parents to join the enormous crowds down in Causeway Bay, pushing for a spot close to the harbor to get the best view of the spectacular fireworks. Stores and restaurants tried to outdo each other with elaborate “Kung Hei Fat Choy” decorations and special menus and promotions. Everywhere you went, people were in a festive good mood.

Since we did not have any relatives in Hong Kong, there were no family obligations during Lunar New Year. It was only the four of us — my mom, dad, brother Ted and me — so at most we would go out for a fancy restaurant meal. We did not go from house to house with bottles of Johnny Walker or baskets of tangerines. We did not make hundreds of homemade dumplings or go to the bank to request a wad of crisp new bills to stuff into red envelopes for my younger cousins, nieces and nephews. My parents might have hung up modest decorations outside our apartment door, but I think it was just for show, so we would not appear strange to our neighbors.

Once I asked my parents why we didn’t do more to celebrate the Taiwanese and Chinese holidays. “Well,” my dad said, “it’s because we are Christian. From when we were little, we only celebrated Christmas and Easter. Your grandpa was very strict. We were forbidden from observing any of the non-Christian, Taiwanese traditions because that was considered superstitious.”

I was relieved that my ignorance was not my fault. But I still felt a void.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Kurt Hutton / Picture Post / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Angella d’Avignon, Katie Englehart, Caitlin Dewey, Eric Benson, Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom. 

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The Makeover Scene Gets a Makeover

Natalie Seery / Netflix, Allyson Riggs / Hulu, Richard Shotwell / Invision / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,283 words)

There’s a thing my psychiatrist likes to say in response to anyone who hints at the idea that they might one day be cured of whatever it is that makes them who they are: Weave your parachute every day; don’t wait until you need to jump out of the plane. It’s a paraphrased quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn, widely recognized as the father of mindfulness in the clinical sphere (this involves the secular meditation you get in a hospital as opposed to a yoga studio, though it is originally adapted from Buddhism). The program he developed in the ’70s, mindfulness-based stress reduction, is used for everything from pain and depression to what I have, which is severe anxiety. It’s kind of hard to explain what the program looks like practically, but basically, it’s rooted in meditation that cultivates awareness of your thoughts and your body, which ultimately allows you to choose your actions more deliberately. To an extent. Mindfulness doesn’t exactly alter how you think — a lot of shitty thoughts are just kind of automatic — and it doesn’t modify your fundamental personality. But it gives you a modicum of choice.

I’ve been doing this for five years and I will have to keep doing it until I’m dead. I’m not jazzed about it either. The point — and the point of that parachute quote — is that this is an ongoing, lifelong thing. It does not take three hours, it does not take a week. Those units of time may sound arbitrary but they refer to three recent examples of self-actualization presented as a switch, as something you can virtually just decide. Most notably, Shrill, the Hulu series adapted from Lindy West’s Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, in which Aidy Bryant plays a fat pushover who in six 30-minute episodes learns to stand up for herself. But also After Life, Ricky Gervais’s Netflix series — also made up of six 30-minute episodes — in which a grieving widower with no filter learns how to be happy again. And Queer Eye, the reboot that just returned to Netflix for a third season, which follows eight people learning how to love themselves … inside of a week. Read more…

Irvine Welsh on Brexit, Existential Panic, and His Latest ‘Trainspotting’ Sequel

Workers on an assembly line inside the Ford Motor Company factory at Highland Park, Michigan, constructing steering systems, circa 1913. (Hulton Archive/Getty)

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (3,284 words)

 

For many American readers, knowledge of Irvine Welsh came via his 1993 novel Trainspotting. The novel established Welsh as a daring prose stylist with a flair for the transgressive, while the subsequent film adaptation supercharged the careers of many involved, including director Danny Boyle and lead Ewan McGregor. Over the years, Welsh has revisited this world in several other works, including the novels Porno, Skagboys, and The Blade Artist. In each, he’s surveyed how time has changed his characters — and gradually expanded the scope of these books from Edinburgh to something more international.

In his latest novel Dead Men’s Trousers, Welsh has brought this fictional universe to its conclusion. Several of his long-running characters have become fathers of grown children; one of them will not survive to the end of the book. But that’s not the only bittersweet element to be found here: Welsh has set the novel on the eve of the Brexit vote, creating a growing sense of tension in the background even as his characters — including sociopath-turned-artist Frank Begbie and expatriate DJ manager Mark Renton — become embroiled in a cycle of old grievances. At stake is an interwoven pair of questions: to what extent can people change, and to what extent are people willing to allow others to change?

The temporal setting of the novel also allows for some other memorable setpieces, including a number of scenes set around Welsh’s beloved Hibernian F.C. winning the Scottish Cup in 2016. And Welsh, ever the stylist, has also come up with a resonant way of conveying several characters’ experience with the psychedelic DMT: prose pauses and suddenly, the mode shifts into a graphic novel for part of a page. While Welsh has revisited his characters repeatedly over time, each of these books has a distinct feel to it; this one is no exception. Read more…

‘Play Another Slow Jam, This Time Make It Sweet’

Kerry Coppin / Chicago History Museum / Getty

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | March 2019 |7 minutes (1,794 words)

In a photo dated September 1983, my father stands alone, 30ish, and relaxed, with arms akimbo and a slight belly bulge on a porch outside Superior Baths in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In another image with the same timestamp, my mother reclines on a pink-framed bed and paints her nails. I’d call her posture dainty, how she holds her head at an angle, crosses one bare leg over the other. It is obviously shot by her lover. Before finding this memento of their getaway as an adult, in my mother’s apartment after my father died, I had only my own existence as proof they’d ever been romantic with each other.

I also had incomplete, fragmented memories that felt sharp, scattered about my mind like bits of glass. They are records of fact, but also, possibly, my imagination: a blue light of something lost yet unnamed and refracted back to me. In one, I stand near the front door of our first home as my parents, far away, on the other side of the room, embrace with hips and arms touching. I peek at them above the piece of newspaper I have found to hide my face. The heat of their embrace embarrasses me; their smiles seem private and new. In the other, they slow dance on our fluffy green shag carpet, but I cannot recall what music they dance to.

When I think of my father back then, the Luther Vandross album, Never Too Much comes to mind. Luther wears a leather jacket on the cover, opened to reveal a crisp white shirt and a grin that reaches his watery eyes and creases his forehead. It was his solo debut, after years composing, producing, arranging, and singing backup for, among many, David Bowie, Chic, and Roberta Flack. Luther’s weight fluctuated during those years. He battled hypertension and diabetes and tried to manage it by managing his waistline. Through his first decade of  solo success, when records like, “Any Love,” and “So Amazing,” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” burned through car stereos on my street, his weight was the subject of loving jokes from his fans. Big Luther’s voice was better, sexier, more supple than little Luther’s, people would say.


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My father’s weight went up and down during those years, too. When we were closest, he was merely portly, but he smoked and drank cans of Pepsi in rapid succession. This worried me, so with my mother’s help, I made a case for him to quit cigarettes. “Maybe you could eat more oranges instead,” I told him. Time passed and he became so obese it wore down his femurs, and he had difficulty walking a long block without losing his breath.

My Uncle Frank was a glamorous gay man who lived in California and worked as a hairdresser and stylist to many people in show business. Before he died in the mid-80’s, he told us Luther was gay, too. It was a rumor we held as truth and made space for without using language we would today, like “coming out” or “in the closet.” We assumed Luther knew longing. We knew his performances were made of great skill, but recognized in them something so tender and familiar, we speculated the personal stories that must have lived underneath.

* * *

When I fell in love in my 20s, “Never Too Much,” the single, made me dance an ecstatic two step whenever a DJ played a set of R&B from my parents’ time. My college boyfriend J. was the pride of black upwardly mobile DC — the local paper profiled him when he won a hefty scholarship to university. J. was more like me than many of the friends I made — I, too, was paying for college with lots of prayers and an academic scholarship. We spent entirely too much time together; for a while, I liked living without boundaries. “Never Too Much,” an uptempo song of romantic abandon, was us. Marcus Miller’s bass is warm and ebullient, but mostly, it’s Luther’s phrasing that propels it. He sings every line into the next like it’s all one sentence, a single breathless enjambment. I remember joy in the moments we danced, but I now believe the source of my joy was the full experience of sensation dancing and falling in love gave me permission to have.

Luther’s cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “A House is Not a Home,” is the most enduring single from his debut. Kanye built a number one hit out of it in 2003, and it remains a staple on The Quiet Storm with Lenny Green, a syndicated show that runs out of New York’s WBLS on weekdays from 7pm to midnight. The most recent night I listened, they played New Birth’s “Wildflower,” released in 1973, then Guy’s “Goodbye, Love,” from 1988, which led into the Jackson 5’s 1970 Motown single, “I’ll Be There.” Then came Xscape’s recording of “Who Can I Run To,” an R&B #1 in 1995, and Ella Mai’s “Trip,” released just last August.

Before finding this memento of their getaway as an adult, in my mother’s apartment after my father died, I had only my own existence as proof they’d ever been romantic with each other.

Green has been on WBLS since 1997, but Melvin Lindsey and Cathy Hughes at DC’s WHUR, the Howard University affiliated station, created the Quiet Storm format in 1976. Hughes was managing the station and needed a replacement DJ. Lindsey, then an intern and Howard student, filled in, bringing records his family owned. The segment proved immediately popular, and when he graduated, Lindsey came on full time. It was a striver’s music, created specifically to reach the growing Black middle class of DC and its suburbs. Hughes had taken the name for the format from Smokey Robinson’s 1975 album, A Quiet Storm, which opens with soft, howling wind, flutes, congas and a cooing vocal, suggesting, Pitchfork wrote, “a deeper metaphysical connection between two intimate lovers.” It was definitely for people like my parents, who’d become adults in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights legislation that changed the kind of work they had access to, but didn’t go far enough to protect them from the vulnerability a society stratified by race guarantees. My father climbed up the ranks with the state of Arkansas, while my mother worked at a city-funded hospital. Both knew what it felt like to dutifully train the new, younger white man who would eventually become the boss. They were people who deserved to relax after a long day.

Between my early childhood and my first adult romance, something about the soft, lovelorn cuts gave me comfort, too. At some point, I found a tape my sister made of Keith Sweat and Jacci McGhee’s “Make It Last Forever” — just that sole track, playing on repeat on both sides. Sweat’s lead vocal is sweet, vulnerable — it’s the first piece of music I remember giving me a physical reaction, a warm feeling, a fluttering. Now, probably because it was my older sister who brought it to me, who’d made the tape in the throes of her own early college romance, it sounds like what I imagine adolescence to sound like: rough at its edges, yielding and tentative deep inside.

* * *

Late in 1994, Madonna’s album Bedtime Stories came out. It had smooth, moody pop-R&B songs like “Take a Bow” and “Secret,” and songwriters Babyface, Dallas Austin, and R. Kelly were at the helm. The next year, the Whitney Houston-led film adaptation of Terry McMillan’s novel Waiting to Exhale released, and Babyface wrote most of the soundtrack. It was a commercial success, and with slow grooves from Whitney, Toni Braxton, Faith, Chante Moore, and SWV, an homage to the slow jam. In some ways, so was the film. In its first few seconds, we hear the low, dulcet voice of an actor playing a Quiet Storm DJ. We hear him again at the film’s ending, framing events in the lead characters’ lives over the course of a single year. I was 14 when the film came out and didn’t share the heroines’ middle-aged love panic, but they were glamorous and aspirational, and the story’s main romance seemed to be the one between the characters, the friendships among the women. In turn, the strain of black pop on the album, one of many pivotal 90s film soundtracks that made an imprint and endure, created a mood, an ambiance that was soothing, a place from which to have conversations and communion with my own friends. In letters we circulated between classes, in bleary eyed late-night phone conversations about our fears, we lived with each other, we lived with the music.

The term “slow jam” became widely popular when a song performed by Midnight Star and written by a young Babyface came out in 1983. Midnight Star was a slick funk band heavy into synths, and “Slow Jam,” a cut from the album No Parking on the Dance Floor, was a duet. The male narrator “asks” a partner for “her hand” and for the party’s deejay to play another slow jam / this time make it sweet. Brenda Lipscomb, the woman narrator, consents. It’s a forthright demand for intimacy, for private time, in a public setting.

It was definitely for people like my parents, who’d become adults in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights legislation that changed the kind of work they had access to, but did not go far enough to protect them from the vulnerability a society stratified by race guarantees.

Obviously, “slow jams,” the sentiment and request inherent in them, both precede and extend beyond Midnight Star. My mother remembers swoony slow dances to Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “blue light” basement parties in Chicago during her adolescence in the 50s and 60s. She said the psychedelic lighting in tight spaces made the parties feel sexy. Smokey Robinson was one in a constellation of artists who made sensualist soul music in the 70s. The best singers know all about tone modulation, but Minnie Riperton, Syreeta, and Deniece Williams mastered a style of vocalizing that often settled into a soft hum or murmur. You can hear them in the colors and emotional frequencies Janet Jackson, Aaliyah, and Solange tap into in their recordings.

These soft, tender soundscapes are, for me, tightly woven with images of black intimacy. Of two black people tuning into themselves and each other. When my mother paints the picture with her memories, when Kerry James Marshall paints a dance in a lived-in room — they are images that demand humanity in a way we may not realize is a demand. They insist on the body, on its flesh and blood. They gather and soothe the nervous system. They allow for a tender masculinity. They are obsessed with survival, generations, and continuity.

We slow dance, or attempt any kind of social dance, less these days. I think that’s why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dance videos made us stir. The comfort and delight she took in her body were, for some, profane, the antitheses of how a leader should comport herself. And yet, I do not need to return to any era that came before this one. There is no idealized black past: women and queer people have suffered too much for too long at the hands of those we love. This isn’t even about romantic love; it is about the impulse. This is a reminder that our desires for sweetness and connection are and have always been a salve. The urge means we are not dead inside.

 

Coming Home, One Word at a Time

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Sharanya Deepak | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,366 words)

“Big bird, red eyes …” my teacher said, hinting me toward the new word I was learning. “Big, big bird … think about Central Delhi …” he added, excited for me to untangle his clues, for this big bird to fly into my brain. I was in my third Urdu class, ripening my vocabulary in a language I had always known but never formally studied.

Gidh!” I finally screamed, the Urdu word for vulture, leaning onto my notebook. I thought about the times I would lay under trees in central Delhi and watch the birds perch on branches. Gidh, a vulture my friends and I once fed jam sandwiches, determined to get close. Gidh, the bird I once saw feed on an elderly man’s remains in Old Delhi. The simple word for a bird so ubiquitous in folklore, flushed in memories of warm Delhi winters, of stories told to me as a child, of faces of friends I had long forgotten, of the bird both revered and condemned in the city that raised me. But like the Urdu word for it, the vulture was long since gone from my life.

I grew up in a flurry of languages: in the beautiful, unfurling Tamil of my mother’s rage, in the curt English of my grandfather’s routine, in the effervescent Hindi of my father’s quickly changing moods. The concept of one native tongue had no meaning. Languages switched quickly in our house: New ones entered with meals presented by neighbors, unknown nurturing words appeared in the homes of friends. Our everyday lives were a wonderful linguistic mess, but Urdu — the language that floated in the backdrop of everything in Delhi, in songs, in corners of the old city, in anecdotes told by poetic uncles, in the history of the city’s kings — was the one that got away.

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‘Women Can Be Required To Wear Something That’s Painful.’

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Victoria Namkung | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,283 words)

 

From Cinderella’s glass slippers to Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks, Summer Brennan deftly analyzes one of the world’s most provocative and sexualized fashion accessories in High Heel, part of the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury. Told in 150 vignettes that alternately entertain and educate, disturb and depress, the book ruminates on the ways in which society fetishizes, celebrates, and demonizes the high heel as well as the people, primarily women, who wear them.

She writes: “We’re still sorting out the relationship between glass ceilings and glass heels. For now, the idea of doing something ‘in high heels’ is a near-universally understood shorthand meaning both that the person doing it is female, and that in doing it, she faces additional, gendered challenges.” Whether you see high heels as empowering or a submission to patriarchal gender roles (or land somewhere in between), you’ll likely never look at a pair the same way again after reading High Heel.

Brennan, an award-winning investigative journalist and author of The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America, has written for New York Magazine, The Paris Review, Scientific American, Pacific Standard, Buzzfeed, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. A longtime communications consultant at the United Nations, she’s worked on issues and projects ranging from the environment and nuclear weapons to gender equality and human rights. Read more…

Of Safe Words and the Sacred

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (2,913 words)

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our lives and our will over to the care of God as we understood him.

In the throes of passion, it’s not unusual to cry out for the Heavenly Father. Bodily pleasure, the agonizing ecstasy of orgasm, can feel like prayer — a communication with the divine, a gift from somewhere beyond this realm. Sex is one of the most primally human experiences, but when it’s good, it can feel otherworldly.

In AA’s Big Book, they say that having a spiritual experience in recovery will rocket you into “the fourth dimension of existence.”

I thought I’d already been to that dimension: consensually tied up and flogged in a hotel room, the red splotches spreading across my ass and thighs — precursors to the bruising that would splatter my backside like a Jackson Pollock painting in the days to come. I thought I’d found heaven in the place between the agony of the whip and the ecstacy of His fingers finding my wetness. He called me demeaning names and degraded me in all the right ways; I was happy to do anything He asked.

I did not believe in God, but I believed in surrendering my body and my will to this man. Surely, He would save me.
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Someone Called Mother

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Marcia Aldrich | Jill Talbot | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (3,201 words)

Interested in more by Jill Talbot and Marcia Aldrich? Read their collaborative essay, Trouble.

She was old when she had me, or so I thought. She had given birth to two daughters in her twenties during her first marriage. Then her husband died unexpectedly and the period of being a single mother began. Her hair began to turn gray and a red rash ran down the middle of her face, a rash of grief. Eventually she met my father, married, and the rash disappeared. Some years later I arrived when she was 40. Twelve years separated me from my sisters.

Now, when women wait longer to have children, aided by infertility treatments and surrogacy options, my mother wouldn’t seem old at all. She wouldn’t be an outlier. But when I was growing up, my mother looked so much older than all the other mothers. Sometimes I thought she was rushing toward aging, embracing it rather than pushing it away, as if it was the destination she was looking for. She wore her gray hair in a teased bouffant that was hard and outdated, concocted weekly at a hair salon with Julie. I wondered if she deliberately chose the style to ward off touching — touching by my father, touching by me. I don’t remember her ever touching me affectionately, as strange as that may sound. Or touching my father. She looked off-putting, someone who held herself as stiffly as the hard-shelled purse she carried on her arm. If a bee buzzed about her head, it might get caught in the hair-sprayed formation she called her hair. Other mothers were softer looking, and more welcoming. She never wore jeans and sneakers, never allowed her hair to blow onto her face — she never looked disheveled. She looked polished as if she was heading off to a professional meeting that she would be overseeing and yet she held no job.

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Raising Really Good Hell for People Who Cannot

Longreads Pick

The only thing better than an interview with writer, scholar, and Twitter luminary Tressie McMillan Cottom is an interview with McMillan Cottom where the interviewer is Roxane Gay.

Published: Mar 20, 2019
Length: 11 minutes (2,810 words)