Search Results for: interview

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble: A Reading List About Witches

The Witches Sabbath, by Frans Francken II, 1607.

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories (and some of her friends’ favorites, too). 

What is a witch, anyway? Is it an old woman with green skin stirring a pot of something weird and stinky in an animated fairy tale? Is it a man who lives in the wilderness in isolation and emerges only to perform specific rituals to bring the rains? Is it a hippie chick in Berkeley in flowing fabrics appropriating cultural totems and symbols in order to get a desperate wealthy tech couple fertile and baby-ready? Based on my research, the answers seem to be “sure,” “yes,” and “I mean, I guess so.”

Read more…

‘I Really Hope a Lot of Men Read It’: Sohaila Abdulali on How We Talk About Rape

Garu Student Union of Bangladesh demanding the arrest of a rapist accused of raping an indigenous girl, April 14, 2014. Photo: Zakir Hossain Chowdhury/NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images.

Laura Barcella | Longreads | November 2018 | 12 minutes (3,191 words)

 

In a 2015 documentary called “India’s Daughter,” one of Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rapists, Mukesh Singh, gave a disturbing jail-cell interview in which he placed the blame for his crime squarely on his dead victim. “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” he said.

Singh’s quote is despicable, but it neatly summarizes many of the internalized myths that women all over the world walk around with each day: that women have a say in whether we end up brutalized. That we can twist our own fate by making simple choices like staying home at night, or not wearing skirts, or abstaining from drinking. It helps rapists rationalize their actions, and it makes women feel like we retain a semblance of control over what happens to us. Of course, it’s not true.

What do you think about when you think about rape? If you’re someone who has also been a victim, you might think about power, the nebulous lines of control. You might think about the outfit you wore and the plan you’d made for innocent fun with a guy you met twice before. You might think about drinking wine on the patio, of consent given and later revoked. You might think about ripped underwear; the dirt beneath the nails of his callused, unfeeling fingers; and the massive blue bruises you got in places you don’t remember being bruised before or since. You might think about the shame and humiliation of the morning after, of not knowing who to tell or what hotline to call or what to preserve in a garbage bag as “evidence.” You might think about what your friends will say; whether they’ll support your story or find a way to warp it into your fault (“I’ve seen how you act with men when you’re drunk,” “but what did you expect, inviting him over so late?”). You might think about the walk-in clinic you visited afterward and the painful tests you endured there (yes, there was blood). You might think about filing a police report, or you might remember taking to your bed for a week and trying to avoid thinking about anything at all.

In her powerful but accessibly written new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali explores how cultures around the world handle rape. She approaches this intimate, sinister type of violence with a decidedly global viewpoint, delving into how both individuals and governments treat their victims, as well as how they navigate the nuances of sexual consent. Sure, it’s different in America. But is it better? Read more…

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.


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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

Living to Create: Talking Music and Writing With Drummer Emily Rose Epstein

Katie Stratton/Getty Images

People who know Emily Rose Epstein know her as the propulsive drummer in Ty Segall’s band. From 2009 to 2015, Epstein toured and recorded with the guitar wizard and his crew of talented friends. She and Segall met at the University of San Francisco. They were both media studies majors. During Epstein’s first few years drumming with Segall, she continued pursuing her interests in journalism and editing. She interned at Thrasher magazine, San Francisco Weekly, Razorcake, Jello Baifra’s record label Alternative Tentacles, and she DJ’d and booked guests at the legendary student radio station, KUSF. Like her work history, her musical influences range widely, from Subhumans to Bob Wills to The Byrds. Naturally, her musical interests come through in her writing.

She wrote her graduating thesis on Patti Smith’s gender identity. She wrote an earlier paper about Led Zeppelin and the occult, and for SF Weekly, she wrote about her local Bay Area music scene. Rock musicians don’t get enough credit for their intellect or literary interests. I mean, Queen’s guitarist Brian May is a damn astrophysicist! Epstein shatters rock stereotypes. She proves that just because you thrash a Gretsch doesn’t mean you can’t curl up with books and string together beautiful sentences. You can, to be cliché¸ do things yourself. That’s what punk is: not dressing a certain way, but dictating the terms of your existence. Epstein took a break from touring in 2015 to work in LA, where she grew up, and plays in the country band, Blue Rose Rounder. She was kind enough to speak with me about her other life as a writer and reader.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: You started playing drums in a punk band at age 13 with a bunch of older guys from UCLA, and you were so young lots of venues made you sit outside before the gig. When did you get interested in writing and journalism?

Emily Rose Epstein: It was instilled in me from a young age that I would be a writer. My grandparents were both writers, and my uncle. My grandfather, Robert Epstein, was the Executive Arts Editor and a writer for the LA Times and the Herald Examiner, and he nurtured my creativity from a young age. We wrote poetry together all the time. He would share his work and make sure I was always making something new myself. He was a really inspiring person to be around ─ my first muse! I think more than anything I always thought I would be a poet, but journalism became something I could do more rigorously in an academic environment and potentially as a career. I always felt that it was more fun to make art than to cover it though, so that’s what dislodged the idea of being a career writer.

I was very into zines, punk journalism, and archives when I was younger, but I don’t think I became personally interested in journalism until I went to college. I never took it seriously until then. At that point I got deep into it ─ audio, print ─ just because it seemed like the right move for someone who was into the arts and writing.

AG: So it wasn’t the shrinking of newspapers or writers’ shaky financial prospects that dislodged the idea of a writing career? That is a tough decision for many writers and editors, though: do you take the risky road of making your own stuff, or do you pursue a hopefully more stable career editing, producing, or publicizing others’ work.

ERE: Yeah, thankfully I wasn’t faced with that. Music kind of took over my life and I lacked the time and drive to do anything but creative writing while I was playing music professionally, or whatever you want to call it, ha ha. It’s hard to say what path I would have taken had I not been whisked away by Ty.


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AG: Just to clarify, your grandfather shared his arts journalism with you, or his poetry? Or both?

ERE: Both! But mostly the poetry. Writing, brainstorming, working was central to his existence, and I think he knew I was really excited by that stuff, so we wrote every day and read every day. Writing was like magic, and he could always summon the spirits in both of us that were moved to make things. I was young when he passed, so I don’t think I was fully aware of, or able to grasp, what he was working on professionally.

AG: So poetry and prose? Have you continued writing poetry, or does it inform your other writing?

ERE: Oh of course, yeah. I’ve always written poetry, always will. I think I write less now than ever before, but now I’m writing differently. It’s interesting being in a country band: you almost have to learn a new way to write, and I’ve really been enjoying the simplicity of that. It’s satisfying to get back to the basics, to learn how to say something with fewer words, to get down to basic emotions that everyone can relate to but to figure out a way to do that in the most meaningful way.

The biggest gift the teachers gave me was telling me to get out into the city, the world.

AG: Muses are so essential to refining our interests and building confidence, so it sounds like you were fortunate to have a few in the family. Did your family history lead you to pursuing your media studies degree at USF? And did your time at USF help you refine your professional and artistic pursuits?

ERE: Perhaps, yes. Many members of my family work in the arts or are artists in some capacity, or writers, or work in the media, so I suppose it was always something I was around and in tune with. But honestly I didn’t know what I needed from school while I was there. (It’s true that “Youth is wasted on the young!”) I just knew that I needed to commit to getting a degree, and I wanted to major in something that could help me figure out what my path would be. USF’s Media Department was interesting. It certainly connected me with some fascinating people and lifelong friends, but the biggest gift the teachers gave me was telling me to get out into the city, the world, to look for real opportunities to work and create and consume media, so that’s what I did. I devoted myself to independent print, music, and film in the Bay Area in every way that I could, as a creator, consumer, lover, fighter.

AG: That is a gift, and you made incredible use of your time. Between ThrasherRazorcake, KUSF, and Alternative Tentacles, is it safe to say you were considering editing or journalism as a career?

ERE: Oh yeah, I never had any grand ideas that any of the music I would make would be popular or could support me, so I always assumed that I would work for an independent publisher or publication and do creative writing and music on the side.

AG: What was it about independent publishers that attracted you? You didn’t consider working for New York book publishers like FSG or interning at The New Yorker?

ERE: I considered working at several larger publications. I had an option to be a part of a program in London for writers that would have positioned me to intern for Rolling Stone London, but I decided to do a tour with Ty instead. I don’t know, I guess I never got far enough in my “career” as a writer or editor to know how that would have panned out, but I am a huge fan of small publishing houses where you can really sink your teeth into what you’re doing, where you can be a part of every process of publishing if you want to. I love the informality and the intimacy of that kind of environment. I’ve never been more inspired, really, as when I was working for RE/Search Publishing a few days a week, editing, transcribing, brainstorming, conducting interviews, working on layouts for books, fact-checking. I would come home and my young brain would never turn off: I had Schwaller de Lubicz and Timothy Leary and Philip Lamantia and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Andre Breton and Lydia Lunch and Leonora Carrington and Throbbing Gristle dancing through my thoughts all day and night, peppering every aspect of my life with rich new ideas. I assumed you’re not going to get that full-on immersive experience at a large publishing house, but I guess I don’t really know!

AG: Was your interest in both playing music and writing ever a problem or source of confusion for you, or did these different pursuits fit together in your mind?

ERE: It fit together at the time when I was writing for publications like SF Weekly. I was able to showcase bands in my columns that weren’t otherwise getting attention in the Bay Area, like the Baths (later the Royal Baths), Sic Alps, CCR Headcleaner, Rank/Xerox. That was exciting to me. But I do wish I had figured out ways to fit them together in my brain and body sooner; it took me a long time to feel confident with the songwriting process and letting my words collide with melodies. I think until quite recently I was self-conscious about sharing personal writing. I could write about other people’s music all day, but I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to fuse those two passions into one form, without collaborators steering me along the path or validating my work.

AG: So does that mean you’re currently writing your own music and also doing more personal writing? I was curious whether you were drawn to first-person narratives or memoir as well as journalism. As for being self-conscious about sharing, what changed for you?

ERE: Yes, I am writing a ton of music these days and have been for the past few years. That’s the bulk of the writing I do now. I still feel quite uncomfortable with the nakedness of writing memoirs or first-person narratives for anyone but myself. My songs are pretty bare, but I feel comfortable doing that because the writing is caressed by melody and rhythm. I’m an open book in a lot of ways, certainly emotionally, but I am pretty private too, so I think it would be a difficult transition to write and share in that way.

As far as being self conscious about sharing, I overcame that after getting out of a really difficult period in my life. I think for a year or two I really struggled when I left Ty’s band with understanding who I was, what I needed from life. I knew I needed to get out on my own in so many ways, but I didn’t know how, didn’t know what the goal was, didn’t know what I was capable of. I had a lot of difficult things happen in my personal life during that time, and I think when you learn really tough life lessons that force you to sort of wake up in a way you’ve never had to before, you also begin to realize how short life is, how universal pain is, how incredible people are around you. As those changes were happening within me. I really learned to love and forgive myself in a way I never had been able to before, and with that, I kind of also learned to learn to not give a fuck. There was just something in me that got lighter in the face of the heaviness. So now when I sing and write, I sing and write with a confidence I never was able to have before. I just really don’t care if people don’t like what I’m doing, and I’m even more grateful than ever when people connect with what I’m doing in a positive way, because I’m really living to create again, and I do hope that my music connects with people and is comforting in the ways that country music can be and has been for me.

I would come home and my young brain would never turn off.

AG: One of the interesting things about your writing is that you were an active part of the musical world you covered for SF Weekly. Playing music then, you were surrounded by so many incredible bands and personalities. Did profiling buddies like Sic Alps or John Dwyer present any challenges or tensions?

ERE: There’s always a strangeness to writing about your friends’ bands; you are biased in so many ways. It’s also difficult to get your friends to remember that they need to communicate with you as though you don’t know all the facts when you’re interviewing them. That stuff can be tricky. I think I spent more time editing my CCR Headcleaner interview than anything else I’ve written, just because there was so much in there that no average reader would be able to understand. Other than that, I never really experienced any challenges. All of the writing I was doing for the Weekly or my interviews for KUSF were so informal and basically fluff pieces, so the bands were just happy to be featured, and I was happy to be able to give them the attention I felt they deserved. I suppose if I had been doing longform journalism at the time, it would have been more difficult to be totally truthful or give the reader everything they think they want.

AG: On tours, did you bring along books and hit bookstores in different towns, or was that kind of literary life too difficult on the road?

ERE: I read incessantly on the road. I would go through tons of books on tour. I would finish my books and then finish Mikal’s books and then have to pick something up on the road sometimes! I loved hitting up bookstores and thrifting for books around America and the world, though. I really miss having that much time to devote to reading. It was great being on the road too, planning out what to read depending on where you were going. There was a tour where we spent a lot of time in France, so I made sure to bring Celine. Huysmans, Vonnegut, Brautigan, and Didion were always favorites of ours for traipsing through America.

AG: When you quit touring with Ty, was that an indefinite hiatus, or do you intend to drum with Ty again?

ERE: I never say never, but there’s no sign of that happening anytime in the near future. I’m not really playing drums these days, and Ty and I are on different creative wavelengths. I love him and think he’s doing great things always. He’s one of those people who has endless creative energy and I really admire that, but I know I needed to get out on my own and explore the things I wanted to do, and his creative needs are forever changing, too, so he and I are both thriving creatively but separately at this time!

The Queer Generation Gap

Express Syndication / Invision / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)

Should I be married to a woman? If today were yesterday, if all this sexual fluidity were in the discourse when I was coming of age in the ‘90s, would I have been with a woman instead of a man? It is a question that “The Bisexual” creator Desiree Akhavan also poses in the second episode of her Hulu series, co-produced with Channel 4 because no U.S. network wanted it. Akhavan directed, co-wrote, and stars in the show in which her character, Leila, splits with her girlfriend of 10 years, Sadie (Maxine Peake), and starts having sex with men for the first time. So, Leila asks, if the opposite had happened to her — as it did to me — and a guy had swept her off her feet instead of a woman, would things have turned out differently? “Maybe I would’ve gone the path of least resistance,” Leila says. Maybe I did.

This is a conundrum that marks a previous generation — one that had to “fight for it,” as Akhavan’s heroine puts it, and is all the more self-conscious for being juxtaposed with the next one, the one populated by the fluid youth of social media idolizing the likes of pansexual Janelle Monáe, polyamorous Ezra Miller, undecided Lucas Hedges. Call it a queer generation gap (what’s one more label?). “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with the Internet,” 32-year-old Akhavan explains to a younger self-described “queer woman” in her show. “I just get the sense that it’s changing your relationship to gender and to sexuality in a really good way, but in a way I can’t relate to.”

***

This Playboy bunny is chest out, lips open, legs wide. This Playboy bunny is every other Playboy bunny except for the flat hairy chest because this Playboy bunny is Ezra Miller. The star of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald calls himself “queer” but it’s hard to take him seriously. What was it Susan Sontag said: it’s not camp if it’s trying to be camp? And for the past few months, while promoting the Potterverse prequel no one asked for, this 26-year-old fashionisto has been trying his damndest, styling himself as a sort of latter day Ziggy Stardust — the monastic Moncler puffer cape, the glittering Givenchy feathers — minus the depth. Six months ago, Miller looked like every other guy on the red carpet and now, per his own request, models bunny ears, fishnets, and heels as a gender-fluid rabbit for a randy Playboy interview. Okay, I guess, but it reads disingenuous to someone who grew up surrounded by closets to see them plundered so flagrantly for publicity. Described as “attracted to men and women,” Miller is nevertheless quoted mostly on the subject of guys, the ones he jerked off and fell in love with. He claims his lack of romantic success has lead him to be a polycule: a “polyamorous molecule” involving multiple “queer beings who understand me as a queer being.”

The article hit two weeks after i-D published a feature in which heartthrob Harry Styles interviewed heartthrob Timothée Chalamet with — despite their supposed reframing of masculinity — the upshot, as always, being female genuflection. “I want to say you can be whatever you want to be,” Chalamet explains, styled as a sensitive greaser for the cover. “There isn’t a specific notion, or jean size, or muscle shirt, or affectation, or eyebrow raise, or dissolution, or drug use that you have to take part in to be masculine.” Styles, on brand, pushes it further. “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine,” the 24-year-old musician says, “and I’m very comfortable with that.” (Of course you are comfortable, white guy…did I say that out loud?) As part of the boy band One Direction, Styles was marketed as a female fantasy and became a kind of latter-day Mick Jagger, the playboy who gets all the girls. His subsequent refusal to label himself, the rumors about his close relationship with band mate Louis Tomlinson, and the elevation of his song “Medicine” to “bisexual anthem”– “The boys and the girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it” — all build on a solid foundation of cis white male heterosexuality.

Timothée Chalamet’s sexuality, meanwhile, flows freely between fiction and fact. While the 22-year-old actor is “straight-identifying,” he acquires a queer veneer by virtue of his signature role as Call Me by Your Name’s Elio, a bisexual teen (or, at least, a boy who has had sex with both women and men). Yet off screen, as Timothée, he embodies a robust heterosexuality. On social media, the thirst for him skews overwhelmingly female, while reports about his romantic partners — Madonna’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter — not only paint him straight but enviably so. Lucas Hedges, another straight-identified actor who plays gay in the conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, somewhat disrupts this narrative, returning fluidity to the ambiguous space it came from. The 21-year-old admitted in an interview with Vulture that he found it difficult to pin himself down, having been “infatuated with” close male friends but more often women. “I recognize myself as existing on that spectrum,” he says. “Not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual.” That he felt “ashamed” for not being binary despite having a sixth-grade health teacher who introduced him to the range of sexuality suggests how married our culture is to it.

As a woman familiar with the shame associated with female sexuality, it’s difficult to ignore the difference in tenor of the response to famous young white males like Miller, Styles, and Chalamet and famous black women like Janelle Monáe and Tessa Thompson not only discussing it, but making even more radical statements. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in May, Monáe said straight up (so to speak): “Being a queer black woman in America — someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” The same age as Desiree Akhavan, 32, Monáe identified as bisexual until she read about pansexuality. She initially came out through her music; her album, Dirty Computer, contains a song called “Q.U.E.E.N.” which was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.,” while the music video accompanying “Pynk” has actress Tessa Thompson emerging from Monáe’s Georgia O’Keeffe-esque pants. While neither one of them has discussed their relationship in detail, Thompson, who in Porter magazine’s July issue revealed she is attracted to men and women, said, “If people want to speculate about what we are, that’s okay.”

The mainstream press and what appeared to be a number of non-queer social media acolytes credited Chalamet and Styles with redefining their gender and trouncing toxic masculinity. “[H]arry styles, ezra miller, and timothee chalamet are going to save the world,” tweeted one woman, while The Guardian dubbed Miller the “hero we need right now.” Monáe, meanwhile, was predominantly championed by queer fans (“can we please talk about how our absolute monarch Janelle Monáe has been telegraphing her truth to the queers thru her art and fashion for YEARS and now this Rolling Stone interview is a delicious cherry on top + a ‘told u so’ to all the h*teros”) and eclipsed by questions about what pansexual actually means. While white male fluidity was held up as heroic, female fluidity, particularly black female fluidity, was somehow unremarkable. Why? Part of the answer was recently, eloquently, provided by “Younger” star Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender-fluid, bisexual, and polyamorous. “I get to share my story,” he told The Daily Beast. “That’s a privilege that I have because of what I look like, the color of my skin, what I have between my legs, my straight passing-ness, everything.”

***

When I was growing up sex was not fun, it was fraught. Sex was AIDS, disease, death. The Supreme Court of Canada protected sexual orientation under the Charter when I was 15 but I went to school in Alberta, Canada’s version of Texas — my gym teacher was the face of Alberta beef. In my high school, no one was gay even if they were. All gender was binary. Sex was a penis in a vagina. Popular culture was as straight, and even Prince and David Bowie seemed to use their glam sparkle to sleep with more women rather than fewer. Bisexual women on film were murderers (Basic Instinct) or sluts (Chasing Amy) and in the end were united by their desire for “some serious deep dicking.” I saw no bisexual women on television (I didn’t watch “Buffy”) and LGBTQ characters were limited (“My So-Called Life”). Alanis Morissette was considered pop music’s feminist icon, but even she was singing about Dave Coulier. And the female celebrities who seemed to swing both ways — Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Bijou Phillips — were the kind who were already acting out, their sexuality a hallmark of their lack of control.

“I think unrealistic depictions of sex and relationships are harmful,” Akhavan told The New York Times. “I was raised on them and the first time I had sex, I had learned everything from film and television and I was like ‘Oh, this isn’t at all like I saw on the screen.’” Bisexuality has historically been passed over on screen for a more accessible binary depiction of relationships. In her 2013 book The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, Maria San Filippo describes what has become known as “bisexual erasure” in pop culture: “Outside of the erotically transgressive realms of art cinema and pornography, screen as well as ‘real life’ bisexuality is effaced not only by what I’ve named compulsory monosexuality but also by compulsory monogamy,” she writes, adding, “the assumption remains that the gender of one’s current object choice indicates one’s sexuality.” So even high-profile films that include leads having sex with both genders — Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Carol, Call Me By Your Name — are coded “gay” rather than “bi.”

Despite the rise in bisexual women on the small screen like Annalise in “How to Get Away with Murder,” Syd in “Transparent,” and Ilana in “Broad City,” GLAAD’s latest report on inclusion cited continued underrepresentation. While 28 percent of LGBTQ characters on television are bisexual, the majority are women (75 versus 18) and they are often associated with harmful tropes — sex is used to move the plot forward and the characters scan amoral and manipulative. This despite an increase in the U.S.’s queer population to 4.5 percent in 2017 from 3.5 percent in 2012 (when Gallup started tracking it). A notable detail is the extreme generational divide in identification: “The percentage of millennials who identify as LGBT expanded from 7.3% to 8.1% from 2016 to 2017, and is up from 5.8% in 2012,” reported Gallup. “By contrast, the LGBT percentage in Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1979) was up only .2% from 2016 to 2017.”

Here’s the embarrassing part. While I am technically a millennial, I align more with Generation X (that’s not the embarrassing bit). I am attracted more to men, but I am attracted to women as well yet don’t identify as LGBTQ. How best to describe this? I remember a relative being relieved when I acquired my first boyfriend (it was late). “Oh good, I thought you were gay,” they said. I was angry at them for suggesting that being gay was a bad thing, but also relieved that I had dodged a bullet. This isn’t exactly the internalized homophobia that Hannah Gadsby talked about, but it isn’t exactly not. My parents and my brother would have been fine with me being gay. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the standard I grew up with — in the culture, in the world around me — was not homosexuality, it was heterosexuality. I don’t judge non-heterosexual relationships, but having one myself somehow falls short of ideal. For the same reason, I can’t shake the false belief that lesbian sex is less legitimate than gay sex between men. The ideal is penetration. “That’s some Chasing Amy shit,” my boyfriend, eight years younger, said. And, yeah, unfortunately, it is. I have company though.

In a survey released in June, billed as “the most comprehensive of its kind,” Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News polled 880 LGBTQ Americans, almost half of whom were between the ages of 18 and 29, and found that the majority, 46 percent, identified as bisexual. While women self-described as bi four times as often as men (79 to 19 percent), the report did not offer a single clear reason for the discrepancy. It did, however, suggest “phallocentrism,” the notion that the penis is the organizing principle for the world, the standard. In other words, sex is a penis in a vagina. “While bisexual women are often stereotyped as sleeping with women for male attention, or just going through a phase en route to permanent heterosexuality,” the report reads, “the opposite is presumed of bisexual men: that they are simply confused or semi-closeted gay men.” This explains why women who come out, like Monáe and Thompson, are considered less iconoclastic in the popular culture than men who even just make vague gestures towards fluidity — the stakes are considered higher for the guys. In truth, few feel comfortable being bi. Though the Pew Research Center’s survey of queer Americans in 2013 revealed that 40 percent of respondents identified as bisexual, this population was less likely to come out and more likely to be with a partner of the opposite sex. Famous women like Maria Bello, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristen Stewart have all come out, yet none of them really use the label.

“Not feeling gay enough, that’s something I felt a lot of guilt over,” Akhavan told the Times. It is guilt like this and the aforementioned shame which makes it all the more frustrating to watch the ease with which the younger generation publicly owns their fluidity. It is doubly hard to watch young white men being praised for wearing bunny ears in a magazine that has so long objectified women, simply because the expectations are so much lower for them. “I’m not looking down on the younger experience of being queer,” Akhavan said, “but I do think that there’s a resentment there that we gloss over.” In response, many of us react conservatively, with the feeling that they haven’t worked for it, that it is somehow less earned because of that. This is an acknowledgment of that resentment, of the eye rolling and the snickering with which we respond to the youth (ah, youth!). In the end we are not judging you for being empowered. We are judging ourselves for not being empowered enough.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

From the Sidelines: A Reading List on the Need for Female Coaches

Arizona Cardinals training camp coach Dr. Jen Welter poses for photographers after being introduced, Tuesday, July 28, 2015, at the teams' training facility in Tempe, Ariz. Welter is believed to be the first female to hold a coaching position of any kind in the NFL and will be member of the Cardinals coaching staff throughout training camp and the preseason, working with inside linebackers. AP Photo/Matt York

After playing one season for the Dallas Cowboys and one for the New England Patriots, I huddled up for a third season with the rest of my flag football team wearing a uniform that simply read “NFL Flag.” The uniforms were relics of a world far from mine. I lived in Indonesia at the time; what I knew of football came from my dad wearing his Packers shirt around the house after work, where he discovered the scores of games played twelve hours and nine-thousand miles away from our dial-up computer.

As little as I knew about the NFL, my participation in flag football was never a question. I loved sports so much that I joined soccer, baseball, basketball, the swim team, and a running club where we ran at least five kilometers every Tuesday night. Because our school was so small, each team was co-ed. Athletes were known for their skills rather than separated by gender, which is a quality of those early years that I still treasure. Looking back, perhaps I idealized athletics, believing that sport could erase the expectations of gender placed upon me in other ways. On the field, I imagined myself not as a girl, but as a twirling blur of muscle and breath.

This illusion was punctured in a huddle during my third year of flag football. My coach that year was a man with a reputation for calling his sons “sissies” if they showed any sign of exhaustion on the field. He glanced around the gleaming faces of our team, signaling off starting positions. When he got to me and another girl, the only other on the team, he said “bench” to us both. I stood on the sidelines, cheering my team toward a touchdown, and waiting for the signal to tag in. There was an unspoken rule within our league that teams should be fair to both boys and girls by giving them equal playing time, and my coach gave a chance to the other girl, who was older, but quickly took her out again when he thought someone else could do better. When his son showed up to half-time sweaty and lagging, I thought I might have my chance, but he told him to “man up” and sent him back in. As the game stretched on and the lowering sun colored the sky a dusky blue, I remained sidelined. When I got home that night, I wept. I knew I was fast, knew I could hold my own — as I had for three years — against anyone in the league, and knew I cared enough about my teammates to run fake routes without a chance at the ball. But none of that was enough. To that coach, I was a girl. Someone who could watch the game, but not participate.

I won’t say that after that moment I began to negotiate gender and sport, but something in me shifted. I quit playing flag football after that season. Wondering if I would always be categorized as a “girl,” I pushed myself to the absolute brink of what was possible in every other sport I played, ensuring, for example, that when I crossed the finish line of the mile first, before all the boys, that I was acknowledged for my prowess and not my gender.

I competed in multiple sports for almost all of middle school and high school, and then went on to run for a Division I team. When I look back now, I’m amazed to realize I can count two female coaches across a lifetime, plus a handful of female assistant coaches. I’m not the only one to experience this inequality. The 2017 College Sport Racial & Gender Report Card, which assigns grades to sports based on a comprehensive evaluation of gender and race, notes that white men “dominated the head coaching ranks on men’s teams holding 86.5 percent, 87.8 percent, and 91.6 percent of all head coaching positions in Divisions I, II, and III, respectively.”

I’m not insinuating here that female coaches are superior to male coaches or vice versa, but I’m wondering where these discrepancies come from. Are the factors that lead to highly disproportionate numbers of white male coaches somehow related all the way back to childhood athletics, during which young female athletes are told that they belong on the bench? Or are there other factors at play? Female coaches are earning positions in sports previously coached only by men — Jen Welter became the NFL’s first female coach in 2015, and, in 2016, the Arizona Coyotes hired Dawn Braid as the first female coach in the NHL — but the fact that these titles are newsworthy indicates that we have a lot of work to do to diversify coaching staff not only by gender, but also by race.

1. College Athletics’ War on Women Coaches (Pat Griffin, March 8, 2015, Huffpost)

In 2015, Shannon Miller, who coached women’s ice hockey at the University of Minnesota Duluth, was notified by the university that her contract would not be renewed at the end of the season because of concerns that she was being paid too much for her work.

“Placed in the context of a disturbing trend in the diminishing number of women coaches and the treatment of the women in athletics over the last several years, this decision has more far reaching consequences for college women’s athletics.”

Pat Griffin summarizes a list of troubling action taken toward female coaches from 2007 to 2015 and argues that “the public rationale offered by athletic administrators for their decisions in each of these cases masks a deeper and more fundamental problem in college athletics: misogyny, sexism, and homophobia.”

2. An Open Letter About Female Coaches (Pau Gasol, May 11, 2018, The Players’ Tribune)

Pau Gasol of the San Antonio Spurs, in an open letter, not only successfully dismantles others’ arguments as to why Becky Hammon should not be head coach of an NBA team, but also urges the NBA — and fans of the NBA — to advocate and work toward a more inclusive league as a whole.

“Let’s recognize that one protest does not mean we have solved the problem of racial inequality in this country. One parade doesn’t mean we’re doing everything we can for the LGBTQ movement. And one coaching interview doesn’t mean we have solved the issue of gender diversity in our workplace.”

(Related: read Sidelined by Matthew J.X. Malady in Slate.)

3. American Running Needs More Female Coaches (Erin Strout, September 14, 2018, Outside)

By examining the sport of running as a focal point in this piece, Erin Strout illuminates the reasons why women are less likely to become coaches, interviews women in coaching positions to understand their challenges, and wonders about the future of women’s coaching and how more women in coaching positions could impact sport.

“Whether at the professional or collegiate level, Hogshead-Makar says that adding more female influence within the sport is crucial—not only to advance gender equity but also to provide a safer environment where athletes can thrive.”

(Related: read Reem Abulleil’s Why aren’t there more female coaches on tour? published by the Women’s Tennis Association.)

4. Where Are The Women? (Rachel Stark, Winter, 2017 NCAA Champion Magazine)

“In 1972, women coached more than 90 percent of collegiate women’s teams. Today, they coach fewer than half.”

In this 2017 piece for NCAA Champion Magazine, Rachel Stark investigates the effect that female coaches’ visible representation has on younger athletes who play sports, and also provides a number of resources such as “How to Support Young Coaches on the Rise,” “How to Strengthen Your Contacts,” and “How to Deepen the Candidate Pool” as a way to encourage more women to apply for coaching positions, and to open the conversation about gender, race, representation, and coaching within college sports.

(Related: read Number of Women Coaching in College Has Plummeted in Title IX Era by Jeré Longman published in The New York Times.)

5. The Field Where Men Still Call the Shots (Linda Flanagan, July 28, 2018, The Atlantic)

In this deeply researched essay, Linda Flanagan argues that a dearth of female role models in sport can negatively impact female athletes in several ways, such as leadership styles, lack of participation in sport, and an inability to visualize themselves as future coaches.

“According to a 2009 study by the sociologists Michael Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas, men typically coach, and women typically serve as “team moms”…In the researchers’ view, this imbalance stems from “institutional gender regimes” that divide the work between men and women based on traditional roles.”

6. The Rise of Women Coaching Men (Michael LoRé, April 26, 2018, culture trip)

When Natalie Randolph tells a man at the bar that she’s a former football player, he barrages her with questions.

“Wait, you played football? Did you wear pads? A helmet? Was it the Lingerie Football League? And you coached? So then, what’s a spread offense? Do you know the 3-technique?”

This instance, as Michael LoRé reports, is representative of the kind of frustrating and discriminatory reaction Randolph encounters frequently when she talks about her experiences as a woman of color who is both a football player and female coach of a male football team. And her story is not an anomaly. LoRé, using Randolph’s experiences as a thru-line throughout the piece, discusses the current state of coaching and weaves in stories from other female coaches.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness.

Beyond “Rumble”: Talking with John O’Connor About the Other Link Wray

David Warner Ellis/Redferns

Most stories about guitarist Link Wray focus on his 1958 radio hit “Rumble,” a vaguely menacing, instrumental rock song that had no predecessor. They talk about how he punctured his amp with a pencil to get a grittier sound, maybe about the way his slick-hair, rockabilly, leather jacket look predated Elvis’. For the Oxford American‘s new music issue, journalist John O’Connor focuses on Wray’s lesser known masterpieces: the three albums fans call the shack sessions.

Despite the influence Link Wray’s instrumentals had on rock and roll on both sides of the Atlantic, from The Who to Jimmy Page, nothing brought Link much financial security or relief from the grueling life of touring tiny holes-in-the-walls. To retool his career and break free from the instrumental rock genre where he made his name, Link and his brothers started jamming in the early 1970s in the family’s rural chicken shack. The sessions mixed blues, folk, gospel, and country, featured singing, and produced rootsy music that sound like no other in Wray’s vast catalogue. Yet somehow, few people have written about this milestone in his creative life. O’Connor’s story “Mystic Chords” stands alone in the Link Wray literary canon. O’Connor talked with me about Link, journalism, and writing this epic story.

If I read your story correctly, you didn’t know much about Link Wray before researching this article. How did you find him and the story of his shack albums?

You read it correctly. My friend Dacus put the song “La De Da” from Link Wray on a mixtape a few years ago (“mixtape” isn’t quite right, but you know what I mean, a Dropbox thing) and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” I’d always thought of myself as educated about obscure ’70s rock or Americana or whatever you want to call it. I’ve got a hard-and-fast rule in record shops about buying LPs from ’71, 72, 73 ─ precisely the Shack era ─ if the price is right, and especially if there’s a funny-looking dude on the cover. So I was embarrassed that I’d never even heard of Link. And puzzled. I mean, how was it possible that I made it into my 40s without ever hearing Link Wray and the other Shack records? What else had I missed? All this stuff came up online about him having invented the power-chord, and how the rock gods all worshipped him: Townshend and Page, Dylan and Young. My embarrassment deepened, as did a curiosity about Link. That he was Native American added a layer of intrigue, because at that point, besides Robbie Robertson of The Band and Buffy Sainte-Marie, I probably couldn’t have named a single Native American musician, I’m ashamed to say. Actually, I could’ve named some: Karen Dalton, Jesse Ed Davis, Jimmy Carl Black, who played with Zappa. But I just didn’t know they were Native American, which is weird. This was all very maddening to me. Then, trying to find out more about Link got to be pretty dispiriting pretty quick. So much of what was written about him seemed cursory, half-baked, or worse. I had two early conversations with folks ─ Greg Laxton of the now defunct website linkwray.com, and Sherry Wray, Link’s neice ─ that convinced me basically everything I thought I knew about Link was wrong. Greg put me in touch with the producer Steve Verroca, who nobody had heard from in years. The story was writing itself.

Wow, that’s a strong start. When writers have questions that they’re compelled to answer, things get interesting, and the stories that result can have more urgency than ones that arise solely from a desire to tell a story. So when you started searching for answers, was there just a dearth of information about Link? Or a lack of humanizing detail?

There were a couple of starting points, like Jimmy McDonough’s article, which came out not long after Link’s death. He knew Link and seems to have talked to everyone else who knew him. It’s a fun read. But it’s also a tribute, as McDonough admits, a piece of hero worship, and therefore limited. And it came out twelve years ago. There wasn’t much else. Link didn’t give many interviews. Not by choice. He just wasn’t asked. This partly explains why so many of the stories about him are recycled and/or patently false. When he died, some obits referred to him as “Frederick Lincoln Wray.” At no point in his life was he named Frederick. It was also said that he had one son, when he had four. Anyway, that stuff’s easy to check. What’s nearly impossible to dissect is all the family conflict and bad feeling that endure over Link’s publishing rights, and the competing narratives, some of them legal in nature, about Link and his legacy. It’s still very raw for these folks.

Producer Steve Verocca is a key player in this story. Was he surprised you found him? And what happened when you started talking to him?

Greg Laxton got me in the door with Steve. I think he was skeptical. But Link’s music is also Steve’s legacy, in a way, and he was ready to talk. He had a pretty successful and multi-tentacled career, but as I say in the piece, Link sort of presides over it all. After we talked a couple of times, Steve hinted that he had some Shack-era stuff he was willing to share with me, but he wanted me to come to Virginia to see for myself. He didn’t say what it was, only that my mind would be blown. I thought maybe he had some outtakes or something. He surprised me there. But this speaks to your question above, too. My two principle sources were Steve and Sherry Wray. They disagree on essentially every point. Not just about Link. They’d disagree about what time of day it is. By the time I started talking to Steve, I’d already spent a lot of time on the phone with Sherry. So what happened when I started talking to him was my head started really spinning.

As a journalist, how do you build trust with a skeptical source like Steve Verocca? 

By talking to them, being patient, listening. People, generally, want to talk, even to complete strangers about incredibly personal stuff. They want their versions out there. You just have to be patient. Most people will go their entire lives without anyone ever asking them what they think about something. Nobody’s ever asked them for their opinion about anything, ever, and then suddenly you come along.

So Steve Verocca and Sherry Wray’s accounts conflict on nearly every point. As a journalist, how do you negotiate that sort of conflict between sources, especialy when they’re your two primary sources?

Checking with other people as best you can. I forget what the journalism rule is, something like cross-checking with two or more sources, or trying to. I offer a caveat in the piece along the lines of, I’m just trying to find a plausible centerline here. You know, looking for the path of least resistance. I’m on the outside looking in. Link’s dead. His brothers are long dead. Almost everyone who knew him or played at the Shack is dead. So I’m kind of at the mercy of secondhand stories. Maybe a good way to think about it is like a conversation between two people who’re both monologists and waiting for the other person to shut-up so they can resume talking and finish what they were saying. You’re a moderator, but one who’s also speaking to a dozen other people who’re weighing-in about what’s being said.

Link fans will salivate to hear that a whole fourth shack album exists and remains unreleased. In your piece, Verocca says he’d like to release this “When the time’s right.” Do you know if he has anything in the works? Are you going to help get that music out there? Do I sound like a crazy fan here? It’s just, when a person reaches an advanced age, biology has sort of made the time right.

I hope he releases it, but I don’t think he plans to do it anytime soon. A mutual friend reminded me the other day that Steve’s an old school record biz cat. Releasing stuff digitally just doesn’t register. He wants a physical product. And the chances of that are probably pretty slim, unfortunately. But you never know. Steve loves this record. It’s his favorite Shack record. He’s very proud of it. So it follows that he’d want people to hear it.

You admit you’re not a fan of “Rumble.” Now that you know so much more about Link and his music, and have listened to about everything he recorded, what do you think of his earlier, better known rock instrumentals?

I mean, I know what this stuff must’ve meant at the time, given the context. A few years before, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” was No. 1 on the Billboard charts, a runaway smash hit! So, obviously an improvement. Which is the understatement of understatements. But it’d require some time-travel on my part to really appreciate “Raw-Hide” and “Jack the Ripper” and the rest.

The Humanities Marketplace As a Circle of Hell

Ian Nicholson/PA Wire/Press Association via AP Images

After earning two undergraduate degrees and a graduate degree, Athena Lathos, a self-described “Friendly Neighborhood Millennial,” still struggles to find adequate work, even in academia. Like many of us writer types, she had to work retail while applying to numerous other jobs that never contacted her back.

On her blog Bertha Mason’s Attic, Lathos shares her travails as a humanities major in the job market, as she tries to imagine that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t another dumpster fire. It isn’t as if she doesn’t recognize the pitfalls of her academic pursuits. It’s just that our capitalistic culture rewards too few people for them. The beauty is that her blog post makes her abilities evident: her wit, intellect, narration mixed with analysis, the engaging narrative voice, self-awareness, and deprecation so essential to compelling, insightful personal nonfiction. Please, someone help this talented, passionate writer and scholar find a job deserving of her.

Before I finished graduate school, I met with a career counselor at OSU and explained that I might like to pursue a career where I could remain part of university life, i.e. as a low-level administrator. For jobs even at that tier, she told me I would likely need another MA in “Higher Education Administration.” Really? Another MA? That I would have to pay in full for? To use the same programs and software that I had already been using as an instructor at OSU? Okay.

I heard her, but I also ended up applying to a lot of entry-level admin jobs, most of which amounted to working as a receptionist. I didn’t get any interviews.

After a summer of job searching, and increasingly desperate for cash, I began working retail at a local bookstore, thinking that I could continue looking for a position while I earned minimum wage. I ended up there for a year. Every few months, I was given tasks that increased in complexity and responsibility – everything from daily bookkeeping to making bank deposits for the store – while being told it wasn’t likely I would ever get a raise beyond a cashier’s minimum wage. At the store, nearly all of us had a college education or more, but we were treated like high schoolers with little to no intelligence. For example, one member of upper management referred to us as “the blind leading the blind.” Another, when I gave my two weeks notice, assumed it was because I was starting college as a freshman in the fall, expressing utter shock after she learned that I was 24 with an MA degree. In addition to those comments, there was the daily drudgery of being condescended to and degraded by everyone’s favorite I-must-speak-to-the-manager-immediately shoppers, who a) routinely berate you for store policies you have no control over and b) treat you like a thoughtless robot.

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The City I Love is Destroying Itself

Longreads Pick

In an interview illustrated with gifs created by the author, Nicole Antebi talks with historian David Dorado Romo about the fight to preserve the oldest barrio in El Paso from the City itself.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 16, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,438 words)

The City I Love Is Destroying Itself

All artwork by the author

Nicole Antebi | Longreads | November 2018 | 18 minutes (4,438 words)

For the past few years I’ve been working on a topographical film titled Fred’s Rainbow Bar and Other Stages on the International Border featuring a variety of animation styles along with live-action and archival imagery to interrogate histories, memories, and imaginings of the border landscapes of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the region where I grew up. During this time I’ve also been following the incredible story of “Paso Del Sur” a watch group in El Paso who have been fighting to save Duranguito, the oldest barrio in El Paso Texas.

At any time of day or night, a group of older residents can be seen patrolling the Duranguito neighborhood in downtown El Paso, Texas, located across the river from downtown Juárez, Mexico. Historian David Dorado Romo is one of several “Paso Del Sur” figureheads who have been fighting the City of El Paso, for over a decade, to preserve the spaces Romo has long been writing about. In his 2005 book, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Romo tracked the footsteps of Mexican Revolutionary folk hero, Francisco “Pancho” Villa and other historical figures of the period throughout Duranguito and greater downtown El Paso. I visited Romo this summer in Duranguito where I interviewed him about their battle with the City and the El Paso Del Norte Group, a bi-national consortium of developers who disobeyed a court order and illegally paid people to demolish their own property. At the time of our interview the neighborhood was in a state of limbo with a section punched out of each of five buildings by orders issued by the City; giving the distinct anthropomorphic appearance of a body disemboweled and left for dead.

The day after the 2018 midterms, while awaiting edits on this piece, I got word that the City of El Paso had increased their police presence in the neighborhood and resumed fencing in properties to speed up an archaeological study, with plans to resume displacement and demolition within the next week.

* * *

NICOLE ANTEBI: Where does the name Duranguito originate from?

DAVID DORADO ROMO: The provenance of the name is both anecdotal and historical. One of the stories Toñita Morales, who lives in the adobe-looking house over there, tells me, is that she first heard it when she was a young woman living in Segundo Barrio in the late ’40s. She told me that there was a family from the State of Durango with three daughters that lived here on one of the streets and when young men would go back to visit people would say “A donde vas?” and they would respond, “Vamos con las de Duranguito.”

What I’ve seen in some of the oral history records at the University of Texas at El Paso is that it was called Barrio Durango back around the turn of the 20th century and they don’t really say why, but I get the feeling that it may have been called that because one of the streets here is Durango street. So you can find all these streets in the Anson Mills plot map of 1859, even before the railroads came here, and these were all wagon destinations. So Chihuahua and Santa Fe streets were part of the old Camino Real and Durango was also one of those destinations where you would go.

Later, in the 1990s, you had the central business association led by Tanny Berg who had plans to gentrify this place and turn it into a destination with bars and a nightlife and he started calling this whole place Union Plaza based on the Union Depot. That’s a relatively new name. And so now the city is saying it’s not called Barrio Duranguito, its called Union Plaza.

Names and terrains have always been contested. That’s part of the identity of a place and that’s also part of the struggle. We are trying to revive what the neighbors themselves call it. But in fact, if you go back to 1827, it was called Ponce de Leon Rancho and it was the first land grant on this side of the river. In 1873, when El Paso was first incorporated, Duranguito was designated the First Ward. There’s an older parcel where the Chamizal or the Segundo Barrio used to be, that, it could be said, was the first, but it was still on the Mexican side of the border at that time. So in 1873, this became the first land grant on the El Paso side. And when they first broke ground, there were a lot of adobe structures that were designed to protect themselves from the Apaches. So that was also contested terrain. And even the Apaches were themselves contesting this place. There is archaeological evidence all around of Pueblo-style sedentary communities. So really, this is part of a long, long, history of contestation. But this isn’t the kind of history the City feels like it can promote.
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