STORIES
Grace Zhang, Jeffrey Liao, Sowmya Kannan
Grace Zhang, Jeffrey Liao, Sowmya Kannan
Tongues
Grace Zhang
Delicate brushstrokes unfurl on the slate, swirling and spiraling to form intricate characters. Jaw slack in awe and eyes stretched impossibly wide, I’m enraptured as my grandmother’s wizened hand deliberately sweeps across the page, leaving a trail of detailed characters in its wake. At only five, I couldn’t yet read the complex characters of my mother tongue, Mandarin, and instead saw secrets and magic concealed within those carefully inked words. Like the hieroglyphics of the late Egyptians, the characters glistening on the page held mysteries I could only hope to decipher and comprehend. Clutching my grandmother’s proffered bamboo brush tightly in a chubby fist, I attempted to emulate her exact strokes, shakily scrawling out a rudimentary rendition of her elegant calligraphy before adding my own embellishments, dabbling half-formed flowers and squiggles to adorn my work. 张欣宜, the page read. Unbeknownst to me, I’d written my own name.
As an avid artist, I anticipated learning calligraphy like I’d seen my grandmother do years ago. I began formally learning how to write Chinese characters a couple years later, after being first introduced to pinyin (literally meaning sound-spelling), a way of phonetically spelling out Chinese words using the English alphabet. Pinyin came easily to me; as an American-born Chinese (ABC), my English-learning process was identical to my other classmates’. Kindergarten was spent reading colorful picture books and tracing letters on flimsy papers, writing words on the thick lines from the “ground to the sky”. However, writing the actual pictographic characters proved an altogether distinct task. Saturday mornings were synonymous with Chinese school, learning how to read and write under the tutelage of parent-teachers. I vividly remember my blue and yellow workbooks, filled with pages of neat Chinese character grids. Each lesson was accompanied by consequent assignments to learn vocabulary, akin to English classes in school, but different in that Chinese characters—the exact orders and configurations of each stroke—must be memorized and cannot be phonetically guessed. I spent hours poring over my grids, carefully and precisely tracing the examples before gradually filling the rest of the page with neat rows of characters, my deliberate and boldly calculated strokes slowly becoming natural and free as my muscles learned and remembered each unique pattern. I’d initially wanted to learn the language beyond merely speaking to stay in contact with the entirety of my family in China, and my dedication in class paid off. My shelves slowly filled with awards for “excellent penmanship”, pictures of which I eagerly shared with my grandparents back in China
What initially began as a mere fascination with the beauty of the written dialect became unfathomably more. Throughout the entire process of learning, I began to truly appreciate language and its influence in my journey of self-discovery and identity. Over the years, when faced with the quintessential question, “What are you?” I’d always be conflicted. Especially in today’s society, one hopelessly prone to irreversible stereotyping and labeling, I always found myself torn between “who” I was, and what society assumed me to be. Through learning to write, as well as speak and read in Chinese, I was able to connect fully to my native culture, preserving the language my parents and grandparents and generations prior used for all their lives. Being able to write as well as fluently speak, therefore, was simply a natural extension of my identity as a Chinese-American, a means to pay homage to the centuries of ancestors that preceded me and inevitably shaped who I am today. And now, even though I am American-born-and-raised, I’m proud of my mixed ethnicity and heritage, cherishing my equal ties to both cultures.
Lips pursed in concentration, I carefully write in columns down the gray sheet, right-to-left like in traditional Chinese writings. I was given my own water-calligraphy set for my birthday, and the ensuing weeks were filled with painstaking practice as I perfected each stroke—撇, 捺, 钩 (“pie”, “na”, “gou”) -- different dots and hooks and strokes, each with a distinct brush angle and taper. As I finish writing my name in the bottom corner with a quiet flourish, I’m suddenly five-years-old again, elatedly puttering about my grandparents’ flat and brandishing my brush and blocky writing triumphantly for the family to see. And I realize that amid the relentless desperation of navigating my existentially questioning teenage years in a tumultuous mix of quarter-life-crisis and self-discovery, it’s through writing that I’ve come full circle, finding and returning to who I truly am at heart. Not American, not Chinese.
Both.
Grace Zhang
Delicate brushstrokes unfurl on the slate, swirling and spiraling to form intricate characters. Jaw slack in awe and eyes stretched impossibly wide, I’m enraptured as my grandmother’s wizened hand deliberately sweeps across the page, leaving a trail of detailed characters in its wake. At only five, I couldn’t yet read the complex characters of my mother tongue, Mandarin, and instead saw secrets and magic concealed within those carefully inked words. Like the hieroglyphics of the late Egyptians, the characters glistening on the page held mysteries I could only hope to decipher and comprehend. Clutching my grandmother’s proffered bamboo brush tightly in a chubby fist, I attempted to emulate her exact strokes, shakily scrawling out a rudimentary rendition of her elegant calligraphy before adding my own embellishments, dabbling half-formed flowers and squiggles to adorn my work. 张欣宜, the page read. Unbeknownst to me, I’d written my own name.
As an avid artist, I anticipated learning calligraphy like I’d seen my grandmother do years ago. I began formally learning how to write Chinese characters a couple years later, after being first introduced to pinyin (literally meaning sound-spelling), a way of phonetically spelling out Chinese words using the English alphabet. Pinyin came easily to me; as an American-born Chinese (ABC), my English-learning process was identical to my other classmates’. Kindergarten was spent reading colorful picture books and tracing letters on flimsy papers, writing words on the thick lines from the “ground to the sky”. However, writing the actual pictographic characters proved an altogether distinct task. Saturday mornings were synonymous with Chinese school, learning how to read and write under the tutelage of parent-teachers. I vividly remember my blue and yellow workbooks, filled with pages of neat Chinese character grids. Each lesson was accompanied by consequent assignments to learn vocabulary, akin to English classes in school, but different in that Chinese characters—the exact orders and configurations of each stroke—must be memorized and cannot be phonetically guessed. I spent hours poring over my grids, carefully and precisely tracing the examples before gradually filling the rest of the page with neat rows of characters, my deliberate and boldly calculated strokes slowly becoming natural and free as my muscles learned and remembered each unique pattern. I’d initially wanted to learn the language beyond merely speaking to stay in contact with the entirety of my family in China, and my dedication in class paid off. My shelves slowly filled with awards for “excellent penmanship”, pictures of which I eagerly shared with my grandparents back in China
What initially began as a mere fascination with the beauty of the written dialect became unfathomably more. Throughout the entire process of learning, I began to truly appreciate language and its influence in my journey of self-discovery and identity. Over the years, when faced with the quintessential question, “What are you?” I’d always be conflicted. Especially in today’s society, one hopelessly prone to irreversible stereotyping and labeling, I always found myself torn between “who” I was, and what society assumed me to be. Through learning to write, as well as speak and read in Chinese, I was able to connect fully to my native culture, preserving the language my parents and grandparents and generations prior used for all their lives. Being able to write as well as fluently speak, therefore, was simply a natural extension of my identity as a Chinese-American, a means to pay homage to the centuries of ancestors that preceded me and inevitably shaped who I am today. And now, even though I am American-born-and-raised, I’m proud of my mixed ethnicity and heritage, cherishing my equal ties to both cultures.
Lips pursed in concentration, I carefully write in columns down the gray sheet, right-to-left like in traditional Chinese writings. I was given my own water-calligraphy set for my birthday, and the ensuing weeks were filled with painstaking practice as I perfected each stroke—撇, 捺, 钩 (“pie”, “na”, “gou”) -- different dots and hooks and strokes, each with a distinct brush angle and taper. As I finish writing my name in the bottom corner with a quiet flourish, I’m suddenly five-years-old again, elatedly puttering about my grandparents’ flat and brandishing my brush and blocky writing triumphantly for the family to see. And I realize that amid the relentless desperation of navigating my existentially questioning teenage years in a tumultuous mix of quarter-life-crisis and self-discovery, it’s through writing that I’ve come full circle, finding and returning to who I truly am at heart. Not American, not Chinese.
Both.
Faith in Hollow Places
Jeffrey Liao
It is 1970. My grandmother wraps her daughter in her arms. She walks one hundred miles barefoot through the remains of the Jiangsu countryside, escaping a Nanjing ruptured by Chairman Mao’s paramilitary forces. Upturned dirt and artillery shells carve rivers of blood on the soles of her feet. Her daughter, blue and sick, cries endlessly as the pangs of hunger consume them. Two days earlier, my grandmother gave birth to ill-omened twins: a stillborn son and a living daughter. She begged her husband to forgive her, but he beat her senseless and bloody and left without a word. Hours later, when the soldiers descended upon Nanjing with gun-smoked fingers, my grandmother put her dead son in a cotton bag and grabbed her sleeping daughter. They fled the war-torn city, bullets sailing toward their fading bodies like hail. Now, my grandmother presses onward against the luster of dusk. The sun is an orb of fire burning into the horizon, staining the sky scarlet. Tears sting my grandmother’s eyes as a feral fear cuts through her, becomes her, destroys her. Wo de tianshi, she whispers to her daughter, caressing her like a glass doll. My angel. Sweat drips from her forehead, and she wipes it out of her windswept hair. Her bones ache, and as the light unclasps itself slowly from her eyes, my grandmother tells herself to keep breathing, keep breathing, if nothing else for the baby cradled in her arms, this miracle daughter who has become the pulse of her life, carrying her forward through the pain. Her feet, raw and blistered, kiss the cracked earth. Eventually, a mountain ridge creeps into view, a pyramid of rock and dust roaming with desert bandits. On the other side of the mountain is my grandmother’s hometown, a lacking village strung along the Yangtze River. She must scale the mountain before sunrise, when the bandits start to plague the land. For the first time, my grandmother feels God’s hand guide her through the mist of darkness. She clutches onto hope the way she held her son, purple and miscarried but with a blind devotion that cannot be quelled. She creates makeshift sandals from terracotta tiles and scraps of bamboo found on the road. Ascends the foothills. Under the veil of moonlight, she is a hovering ghost, skin beautifully cool, eyes sharp and cut as obsidian. When the air becomes too frigid and thin to breathe, when her legs are too numb to move anymore, my grandmother thinks of the faint heartbeat of the infant nestled in her arms. She presses onward. Soon, a thousand sweltering stars paint the canvas of the sky. My grandmother stands at the mountain’s crest. Below, the shadows of clay cottages sweep the vista, illuminated by the cosmic infinitude. Wo de tianshi, she says tiredly. My angel, we’re almost there. With her daughter bundled against her chest, my grandmother sinks down the gorgeous dip in the earth toward the place where the sun will rise. By the time they reach the village, her daughter will be weak with hypothermia yet still breathing. Between brewing herbs and preparing medicine, the apothecary bombards my grandmother with questions. She answers only in silence, for there are only so many words she can say without crying. The apothecary’s wife will call it a swollen wonder that my grandmother’s daughter is alive. A dream. My grandmother will work back-breaking hours on a tea plantation to scrape by. She will bury her son under a wide patch of earth and sky. When the Revolution is over and my grandmother saves enough money to move back to the city, she will meet my grandfather. They will own a small apartment and send their daughter to school. My grandmother will birth a second daughter. The ice packed around her heart will start to melt. Decades later, the eldest daughter, the child of swollen wonders, will become my mother.
It is 2018. My mother and I sit at the kitchen table, kneading dough for pork dumplings, our American radio crackling with words that don’t fit in our mouths, in a language that does not belong to us. She is practicing her English, which, even after all these years, is infested with an immigrant’s broken cadence. Her eyes are bruised and weary with exhaustion – exhaustion from the grueling hours spent at work, or the disintegration of her marriage, or maybe from the unbearable weight of not being heard, of never being enough. When my mother moved to America, a graduate student with hopes of becoming a doctor, she was wide-eyed and eager, brimming with the insatiable curiosity of youth. But as she crossed an ocean for more opportunity and power, my mother soon realized that what she found wasn’t what she was looking for. Besides the exoticism of her raven hair and unfolded eyelids, there was a cultural barrier that divided my mother from her peers. My mother remembers an incident: she saw a water fountain and mistakenly thought it was a place to wash her hands. Only when the snickers and whispers escalated into full-blown laughter did my mother realize the plight of her mistake. Her cheeks blushed flame-red and she casted her eye downward. Another incident: after finishing a chemistry lab, my mother overheard a conversation between her professor and the teaching assistant. There are enough people like her, the professor remarked indignantly. I don’t want to endorse another Asian student. Why can’t they just stay in their own country? If there’s anything my mother learned from graduate school, it is the toxicity feeling like an alien in her own skin, of being seen as a construct rather than a human. One day, I ask my mother why she came here. She looks at me with a far-away gaze. I did it for you, she says. You are the reason I endure. I wonder what it is she’s enduring – this country, or the loneliness of being the perpetual foreigner, or maybe the impossible burden of being, of living. I imagine her as a student: twenty-three and packed with ambition, stripping away her whole identity to come here, only to meet nothing that wants her. My mother never got the PhD she wanted. She never became a doctor. Instead, she spent her days cleaning dishes at a seafood restaurant. At night, she searched through the local newspaper for job offerings. Eventually, she found a lowly position at an accounting firm, her old ambitions crumpled and disposed of like pieces of chewing gum. On the days my mother looks lost and small, I wonder if she regrets coming to America, if she misses the pieces of herself she left behind in China. I realize there are things I can’t put into words, like how it feels to hear the desperation in her voice when she asks me to translate something for her in English, knowing that no matter what she does, she will never truly belong here. Or how the only time she is sincerely happy is when talking on the phone with her relatives, my mother slipping into her native tongue like a rush of water in a season of drought. Tonight, my mother and I will sit in front of the couch and watch a Chinese drama together – her favorite. Through the bright blue flickers of the TV screen, she will be reminded of the future she sacrificed in order to give me a better one. She will wrap her arm around mine, wishing life wasn’t so bittersweet. That she could somehow make it all better. But there’s still hope, I want to tell her. There’s still time.
Wo de tianshi, you’re still breathing.
Jeffrey Liao
It is 1970. My grandmother wraps her daughter in her arms. She walks one hundred miles barefoot through the remains of the Jiangsu countryside, escaping a Nanjing ruptured by Chairman Mao’s paramilitary forces. Upturned dirt and artillery shells carve rivers of blood on the soles of her feet. Her daughter, blue and sick, cries endlessly as the pangs of hunger consume them. Two days earlier, my grandmother gave birth to ill-omened twins: a stillborn son and a living daughter. She begged her husband to forgive her, but he beat her senseless and bloody and left without a word. Hours later, when the soldiers descended upon Nanjing with gun-smoked fingers, my grandmother put her dead son in a cotton bag and grabbed her sleeping daughter. They fled the war-torn city, bullets sailing toward their fading bodies like hail. Now, my grandmother presses onward against the luster of dusk. The sun is an orb of fire burning into the horizon, staining the sky scarlet. Tears sting my grandmother’s eyes as a feral fear cuts through her, becomes her, destroys her. Wo de tianshi, she whispers to her daughter, caressing her like a glass doll. My angel. Sweat drips from her forehead, and she wipes it out of her windswept hair. Her bones ache, and as the light unclasps itself slowly from her eyes, my grandmother tells herself to keep breathing, keep breathing, if nothing else for the baby cradled in her arms, this miracle daughter who has become the pulse of her life, carrying her forward through the pain. Her feet, raw and blistered, kiss the cracked earth. Eventually, a mountain ridge creeps into view, a pyramid of rock and dust roaming with desert bandits. On the other side of the mountain is my grandmother’s hometown, a lacking village strung along the Yangtze River. She must scale the mountain before sunrise, when the bandits start to plague the land. For the first time, my grandmother feels God’s hand guide her through the mist of darkness. She clutches onto hope the way she held her son, purple and miscarried but with a blind devotion that cannot be quelled. She creates makeshift sandals from terracotta tiles and scraps of bamboo found on the road. Ascends the foothills. Under the veil of moonlight, she is a hovering ghost, skin beautifully cool, eyes sharp and cut as obsidian. When the air becomes too frigid and thin to breathe, when her legs are too numb to move anymore, my grandmother thinks of the faint heartbeat of the infant nestled in her arms. She presses onward. Soon, a thousand sweltering stars paint the canvas of the sky. My grandmother stands at the mountain’s crest. Below, the shadows of clay cottages sweep the vista, illuminated by the cosmic infinitude. Wo de tianshi, she says tiredly. My angel, we’re almost there. With her daughter bundled against her chest, my grandmother sinks down the gorgeous dip in the earth toward the place where the sun will rise. By the time they reach the village, her daughter will be weak with hypothermia yet still breathing. Between brewing herbs and preparing medicine, the apothecary bombards my grandmother with questions. She answers only in silence, for there are only so many words she can say without crying. The apothecary’s wife will call it a swollen wonder that my grandmother’s daughter is alive. A dream. My grandmother will work back-breaking hours on a tea plantation to scrape by. She will bury her son under a wide patch of earth and sky. When the Revolution is over and my grandmother saves enough money to move back to the city, she will meet my grandfather. They will own a small apartment and send their daughter to school. My grandmother will birth a second daughter. The ice packed around her heart will start to melt. Decades later, the eldest daughter, the child of swollen wonders, will become my mother.
It is 2018. My mother and I sit at the kitchen table, kneading dough for pork dumplings, our American radio crackling with words that don’t fit in our mouths, in a language that does not belong to us. She is practicing her English, which, even after all these years, is infested with an immigrant’s broken cadence. Her eyes are bruised and weary with exhaustion – exhaustion from the grueling hours spent at work, or the disintegration of her marriage, or maybe from the unbearable weight of not being heard, of never being enough. When my mother moved to America, a graduate student with hopes of becoming a doctor, she was wide-eyed and eager, brimming with the insatiable curiosity of youth. But as she crossed an ocean for more opportunity and power, my mother soon realized that what she found wasn’t what she was looking for. Besides the exoticism of her raven hair and unfolded eyelids, there was a cultural barrier that divided my mother from her peers. My mother remembers an incident: she saw a water fountain and mistakenly thought it was a place to wash her hands. Only when the snickers and whispers escalated into full-blown laughter did my mother realize the plight of her mistake. Her cheeks blushed flame-red and she casted her eye downward. Another incident: after finishing a chemistry lab, my mother overheard a conversation between her professor and the teaching assistant. There are enough people like her, the professor remarked indignantly. I don’t want to endorse another Asian student. Why can’t they just stay in their own country? If there’s anything my mother learned from graduate school, it is the toxicity feeling like an alien in her own skin, of being seen as a construct rather than a human. One day, I ask my mother why she came here. She looks at me with a far-away gaze. I did it for you, she says. You are the reason I endure. I wonder what it is she’s enduring – this country, or the loneliness of being the perpetual foreigner, or maybe the impossible burden of being, of living. I imagine her as a student: twenty-three and packed with ambition, stripping away her whole identity to come here, only to meet nothing that wants her. My mother never got the PhD she wanted. She never became a doctor. Instead, she spent her days cleaning dishes at a seafood restaurant. At night, she searched through the local newspaper for job offerings. Eventually, she found a lowly position at an accounting firm, her old ambitions crumpled and disposed of like pieces of chewing gum. On the days my mother looks lost and small, I wonder if she regrets coming to America, if she misses the pieces of herself she left behind in China. I realize there are things I can’t put into words, like how it feels to hear the desperation in her voice when she asks me to translate something for her in English, knowing that no matter what she does, she will never truly belong here. Or how the only time she is sincerely happy is when talking on the phone with her relatives, my mother slipping into her native tongue like a rush of water in a season of drought. Tonight, my mother and I will sit in front of the couch and watch a Chinese drama together – her favorite. Through the bright blue flickers of the TV screen, she will be reminded of the future she sacrificed in order to give me a better one. She will wrap her arm around mine, wishing life wasn’t so bittersweet. That she could somehow make it all better. But there’s still hope, I want to tell her. There’s still time.
Wo de tianshi, you’re still breathing.
Chinatown Diptych
Jeffrey Liao
In New York’s Chinatown, where the fish outnumber people, I am a foreigner among my own blood. The silver-scaled sea of flailing salmon and ice-packed yellowtail stares at me, a thousand eyes wide and unseeing, hollowed out into corpses. Old women with tongs prod at crabs in wooden crates, their hands calloused like the topography of the Himalayas, knuckles scabbed red like borders wrenched apart. A wishbone beggar coughs black spittle onto white- bricked walls, cigarette smoke thrust from his throat like a page lit on fire. No one notices. My mom and I walk onward to the hazy pulse of the city, our limbs swaying along to this chorus of bodies.
This is the portrait of my Saturday afternoons. While most teenagers spend their weekends relaxing with friends or cramming for tests, I spend mine lost amid crowded market stalls overflowing with Peking ducks and bloodied shark carcasses, the scent of soup dumplings and exotic spices permeating the air. I watch in silence as my mom bargains with a toothless street vendor for a batch of chicken feet, as Mandarin syllables clash in the air like a discordant symphony, a type of music I no longer know how to sing along to.
Growing up, I often felt different from those around me. At home, my tongue was a split nation, bleeding from the warring syntax of dual languages, the rough syllables not quite fitting in my mouth. From age five, I became both child and translator. Under the bruised glow of moonlight, I spent restless nights cradling the phone to my ear while my parents sat helplessly on the couch, assisting them with everything from insurance bills to taxes. Their tongues, knit with the acrid tang of ginseng and tsingtao, did not know how to baptize themselves clean of their homeland. At the grocery store, when middle-aged white women snickered at my mom’s broken English, she stopped speaking at all, knowing that she could not mispronounce silence, that she only belonged through closed teeth.
Yet in the bustling streets of Chinatown, my mom is a fluent speaker. Among the aisles of lychees and moon cakes, steaming baozhi and burning tea leaves, a new language--the language of resilience, of sacrifice, of cultural beauty--bursts to life, and my mom is an expert in its cadences. Here, I observe my mom as she hums along to a Huangmei opera song, as she claps along to dancers in colored silk gowns, as she laughs with a friend while buying a pound of dragon fruit. All around me, people are searching for a semblance of themselves. The market in which I felt like an alien among the harsh and unfamiliar chaos was also where I first found solidarity in my raven-black hair and unfolded eyelids, in the endless crowds of people with gleaming copper skin and oriental-spiced tongues, whose stories reflect my own.
Perhaps this is the distinction between boy and man: to stand in the middle of the seafood aisle, as women with gloved hands and silver knives hack away at the sleek bodies of dying fish, and feel not discomfort in their empty, jaded stares but instead a sense of understanding. To know the tapestry of my identity--woven from red lanterns and firecrackers at sunset, from my parents’ hardened eyes--and smile with pride. I have forgotten the language of my homeland, but I do know the language of the body, of being Chinese-American--the way parents hunch their shoulders inward, weary from carrying the weight of fractured bloodlines, the way children race each other barefoot over dusty roads, the rhythm of their feet against earth its own soaring melody. How the city trembles in the wake of its young. We have sparked an anthem with our voices. All around me, the sonorous din of Mandarin translates to young one - we built this dream for you. Now carry it forward.
Jeffrey Liao
In New York’s Chinatown, where the fish outnumber people, I am a foreigner among my own blood. The silver-scaled sea of flailing salmon and ice-packed yellowtail stares at me, a thousand eyes wide and unseeing, hollowed out into corpses. Old women with tongs prod at crabs in wooden crates, their hands calloused like the topography of the Himalayas, knuckles scabbed red like borders wrenched apart. A wishbone beggar coughs black spittle onto white- bricked walls, cigarette smoke thrust from his throat like a page lit on fire. No one notices. My mom and I walk onward to the hazy pulse of the city, our limbs swaying along to this chorus of bodies.
This is the portrait of my Saturday afternoons. While most teenagers spend their weekends relaxing with friends or cramming for tests, I spend mine lost amid crowded market stalls overflowing with Peking ducks and bloodied shark carcasses, the scent of soup dumplings and exotic spices permeating the air. I watch in silence as my mom bargains with a toothless street vendor for a batch of chicken feet, as Mandarin syllables clash in the air like a discordant symphony, a type of music I no longer know how to sing along to.
Growing up, I often felt different from those around me. At home, my tongue was a split nation, bleeding from the warring syntax of dual languages, the rough syllables not quite fitting in my mouth. From age five, I became both child and translator. Under the bruised glow of moonlight, I spent restless nights cradling the phone to my ear while my parents sat helplessly on the couch, assisting them with everything from insurance bills to taxes. Their tongues, knit with the acrid tang of ginseng and tsingtao, did not know how to baptize themselves clean of their homeland. At the grocery store, when middle-aged white women snickered at my mom’s broken English, she stopped speaking at all, knowing that she could not mispronounce silence, that she only belonged through closed teeth.
Yet in the bustling streets of Chinatown, my mom is a fluent speaker. Among the aisles of lychees and moon cakes, steaming baozhi and burning tea leaves, a new language--the language of resilience, of sacrifice, of cultural beauty--bursts to life, and my mom is an expert in its cadences. Here, I observe my mom as she hums along to a Huangmei opera song, as she claps along to dancers in colored silk gowns, as she laughs with a friend while buying a pound of dragon fruit. All around me, people are searching for a semblance of themselves. The market in which I felt like an alien among the harsh and unfamiliar chaos was also where I first found solidarity in my raven-black hair and unfolded eyelids, in the endless crowds of people with gleaming copper skin and oriental-spiced tongues, whose stories reflect my own.
Perhaps this is the distinction between boy and man: to stand in the middle of the seafood aisle, as women with gloved hands and silver knives hack away at the sleek bodies of dying fish, and feel not discomfort in their empty, jaded stares but instead a sense of understanding. To know the tapestry of my identity--woven from red lanterns and firecrackers at sunset, from my parents’ hardened eyes--and smile with pride. I have forgotten the language of my homeland, but I do know the language of the body, of being Chinese-American--the way parents hunch their shoulders inward, weary from carrying the weight of fractured bloodlines, the way children race each other barefoot over dusty roads, the rhythm of their feet against earth its own soaring melody. How the city trembles in the wake of its young. We have sparked an anthem with our voices. All around me, the sonorous din of Mandarin translates to young one - we built this dream for you. Now carry it forward.
Excerpt from "En Pointe"
Sowmya Kannan
Misty Copeland. The woman. The myth. The legend. Her very name invoked a sense of awe in me, and I was filled with wonder from the very first moment I saw her. With her intense gaze, muscular build, and cafe au lait colored complexion, she looked different from anyone that I had seen before. Coming from humble beginnings, Copeland was raised by a single mother and shared the floor of a motel room with five other siblings every night. I could just picture her waking up, stretching her cramped muscles and finally finding freedom in ballet. She was performing en pointe in three months, winning international competitions in a few years, and soon performing as the first African American principal ballerina of any major ballet company. Misty Copeland was a goddess to me.
That was why I was shocked to learn that she had ever been insecure or faced rejection. Ballet companies blatantly told her she had the wrong body for ballet. The wrong feet, the wrong turnout, the wrong achilles tendon and torso. She- the obvious epitome of greatness, hope and grace, strength and perseverance - she had been dismissed by top ballet academies and critics, and even she had taken it to heart. After finally joining a ballet company with 60 dancers and finding that she was the only African-American dancer, she struggled for years with binge eating and self-doubt. Her insecurities nearly took over, and she recollects even wanting to stop going to dance on some days, leaving the largest passion in her life. The thought of her quitting still makes the breath catch in my chest.
What breaks my heart further is that this story is not uncommon in the ballet world. Take Michaela Deprince, 22 year old soloist with the Dutch National Ballet. Born in Sierra Leone with a skin condition called vitiligo, she was teased, taunted, and shunned as the ‘devil’s child’ for the white spots on her dark skin. After her parents died in the aftermath of the civil war and starvation, she was left at an orphanage and given the smallest possible portions of food and clothing, isolated and shunned for the way she looked.
She tells the tale of how one day at the orphanage, she caught sight of a magazine blowing in the wind and snatched it out of the air it to find a ballerina on the cover. Standing en pointe, on the very tips of her toes, the dancer invoked a sense of invincible joy in Deprince, sending her in the unstoppable pursuit of ballet, the art form that she believed would bring her joy as well.
She was four then, and ripped the cover off, keeping it till she was adopted less than a year later. The cover was the first thing she pulled out to show her adoptive mother, and the hope that she treasured throughout the next few years when she was faced with her first ballet lesson: exposed and vulnerable in a simple pink leotard, she was terrified of being mocked again for her vitiligo. Yet she swallowed whatever feelings she had and walked with confidence into her classes, rising to be an inspirational figure for all today.
It was astonishing to me, still, how the greats of ballet could have ever felt insecure about themselves. The very thought fills me with sorrow. Yet I think we all forget that everyone starts out as ordinary before they become extraordinary; common before they become the inspiration and motivation of others.
It’s rather frightening to think what would have happened if Copeland or Deprince had done things differently- what if Copeland had decided to stay home from the company’s rehearsals one day, just to avoid facing her insecurities and differences? What if Deprince had lost sight of that picture of the ballerina, letting the horrible, sneering voices of her past corrode her confidence, forcing her to drop her dreams at the studio door? They certainly didn’t know that they would be one of the greats then, but if Copeland or Deprince had decided to pass for that one day, letting their insecurities or the world’s rejection get to them, what would have happened?
It’s obvious: not this. They would not be in pursuit of their joys and passions. By pushing for that extra effort, that last pointed toe, the extra hour at the studio, that final drop of perspiration - by pushing for excellence in the face of insecurity and rejection, that is how a story is changed. Whether it’s a dreary Wednesday’s ballet class, a trialing day in one of the most prestigious ballet schools in the country, or the battle for achieving your goals when the world dismisses you, that is how you change a narrative: by lacing up those shoes, standing to face the world, and persevering in what makes you feel en pointe.
Sowmya Kannan
Misty Copeland. The woman. The myth. The legend. Her very name invoked a sense of awe in me, and I was filled with wonder from the very first moment I saw her. With her intense gaze, muscular build, and cafe au lait colored complexion, she looked different from anyone that I had seen before. Coming from humble beginnings, Copeland was raised by a single mother and shared the floor of a motel room with five other siblings every night. I could just picture her waking up, stretching her cramped muscles and finally finding freedom in ballet. She was performing en pointe in three months, winning international competitions in a few years, and soon performing as the first African American principal ballerina of any major ballet company. Misty Copeland was a goddess to me.
That was why I was shocked to learn that she had ever been insecure or faced rejection. Ballet companies blatantly told her she had the wrong body for ballet. The wrong feet, the wrong turnout, the wrong achilles tendon and torso. She- the obvious epitome of greatness, hope and grace, strength and perseverance - she had been dismissed by top ballet academies and critics, and even she had taken it to heart. After finally joining a ballet company with 60 dancers and finding that she was the only African-American dancer, she struggled for years with binge eating and self-doubt. Her insecurities nearly took over, and she recollects even wanting to stop going to dance on some days, leaving the largest passion in her life. The thought of her quitting still makes the breath catch in my chest.
What breaks my heart further is that this story is not uncommon in the ballet world. Take Michaela Deprince, 22 year old soloist with the Dutch National Ballet. Born in Sierra Leone with a skin condition called vitiligo, she was teased, taunted, and shunned as the ‘devil’s child’ for the white spots on her dark skin. After her parents died in the aftermath of the civil war and starvation, she was left at an orphanage and given the smallest possible portions of food and clothing, isolated and shunned for the way she looked.
She tells the tale of how one day at the orphanage, she caught sight of a magazine blowing in the wind and snatched it out of the air it to find a ballerina on the cover. Standing en pointe, on the very tips of her toes, the dancer invoked a sense of invincible joy in Deprince, sending her in the unstoppable pursuit of ballet, the art form that she believed would bring her joy as well.
She was four then, and ripped the cover off, keeping it till she was adopted less than a year later. The cover was the first thing she pulled out to show her adoptive mother, and the hope that she treasured throughout the next few years when she was faced with her first ballet lesson: exposed and vulnerable in a simple pink leotard, she was terrified of being mocked again for her vitiligo. Yet she swallowed whatever feelings she had and walked with confidence into her classes, rising to be an inspirational figure for all today.
It was astonishing to me, still, how the greats of ballet could have ever felt insecure about themselves. The very thought fills me with sorrow. Yet I think we all forget that everyone starts out as ordinary before they become extraordinary; common before they become the inspiration and motivation of others.
It’s rather frightening to think what would have happened if Copeland or Deprince had done things differently- what if Copeland had decided to stay home from the company’s rehearsals one day, just to avoid facing her insecurities and differences? What if Deprince had lost sight of that picture of the ballerina, letting the horrible, sneering voices of her past corrode her confidence, forcing her to drop her dreams at the studio door? They certainly didn’t know that they would be one of the greats then, but if Copeland or Deprince had decided to pass for that one day, letting their insecurities or the world’s rejection get to them, what would have happened?
It’s obvious: not this. They would not be in pursuit of their joys and passions. By pushing for that extra effort, that last pointed toe, the extra hour at the studio, that final drop of perspiration - by pushing for excellence in the face of insecurity and rejection, that is how a story is changed. Whether it’s a dreary Wednesday’s ballet class, a trialing day in one of the most prestigious ballet schools in the country, or the battle for achieving your goals when the world dismisses you, that is how you change a narrative: by lacing up those shoes, standing to face the world, and persevering in what makes you feel en pointe.
Excerpt from "Bleached"
Sowmya Kannan
Step in. Take a step into the water and see if you can feel it, those cool waves washing over your feet. Take a step further and you can feel it better now, the push and pull of the waves, the sea breeze roaring in your ear and tousling your hair. Close your eyes. You can’t hear it yet, but listen, listen closely. Can you feel it?
There. That warming water, that tingling sensation on your toes, and that feeble, feeble coughing you hear. There. That is the sound of me dying.
If you choose to continue, follow the current. The gentle push and pull, they will guide you further down the ocean and into the reef. Amongst the gentle pulse of the last anemone, beneath the beams of the filtered sunlight, deep in the heart of the ocean’s jungle- this is where I am. You could see us from miles away, once, but you will have to look a little more closely to find us now. There. Underneath you, that sandy gray wasteland filled with the crumbling corpses of coral. This is where I am, and this is where I am dying.
Don’t be afraid; you can swim closer. These ghostly white tentacles you see are not what I used to look like. There was a time when the water was cool against my skin and our vast, ever-moving reef was more than this shriveling tundra. It spilled over the hills and valleys, masking hidden caves behind beds of vibrant coral, a lush oasis for the most beautiful fish in the land. You would have come to visit this place once, come to see the regal Maori wrasse, dashing schools of damselfish, the gossamer sea butterfly so silent that you wouldn’t notice until it was right beside you. You would have come then, for the reef that was worth beholding, caressing, treasuring even. But of course, those despondent creatures have dismissed us now; they have taken us for dead. You would stay away. Save your awe for elsewhere.
After the water grew warmer, the tourists that came by the boatloads slowed to a trickle. They used to arrive with eyes full of wonder and mouths open with awe. Now they leave with heavy hearts, tears pooling and only one word spilling from their lips: bleached.
Such a cold, clinical name they have given this slow demise. So meager it seems, so insufficient to describe this calamity, but at the same time, so true. These bone-white skeletons of coral around me have been bleached, yes. Drained of color, drained of algae, drained of movement and life. Bleached. That is what I am. Bleached and on the brink of death…
...They don’t hear anything, of course. You might not have either, if you hadn’t taken a moment to pause, to listen. I suppose they think we are rocks, or plants of some sort. Not living, animalian creatures like them who feel pain as we die and care for the coral fish and look after the algae within us. Perhaps these creatures live in such seclusion that they do not understand what it is to support and depend on one another. This is seclusion, so painful to be away from the ones you love and yet at relief to escape their prying hands...
...Let the current pull you in, float just above the seabed. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine it, remember it, feel it. Before this water grew warm, before the pollution and the acid and the tourists and the dying, before this all, there was life in this reef. There were fish that came to feed, there was algae and there were coral. Sea sponges, mollusks, sharks, crustaceans, they all lived and fed and grew here. I don’t know where they are now, or if they have found another reef, but I do know that they won’t be able to survive in this desert of an ocean without us. Pause in this eerily silent graveyard, and you can see not the ashy white bones of the coral littered around me, but the mosaic of color that was once here.
If you open your eyes now, I think you will be able to see it. Look closely on my bleached and graying surface. There, do you see that little flowering pod? It sways like a bird battered in a storm, but it will grow. Perhaps there is really hope for this graveyard to become a garden, but it will take time. I don’t know if the water will ever become cooler, or if this little polyp stands a chance. They may have left this reef for dead, but for the other coral, the fish, and for the reef, I must try.
Take a breath now, and you will find yourself back where you started. The sea breeze tousling your hair, warm water lapping up at your feet to the beat of the ocean’s pulse. Under the pale moonlight, look out to sea as your toes grip the grainy sand. Listen closely.
There. Can you feel it?
I am living.
Sowmya Kannan
Step in. Take a step into the water and see if you can feel it, those cool waves washing over your feet. Take a step further and you can feel it better now, the push and pull of the waves, the sea breeze roaring in your ear and tousling your hair. Close your eyes. You can’t hear it yet, but listen, listen closely. Can you feel it?
There. That warming water, that tingling sensation on your toes, and that feeble, feeble coughing you hear. There. That is the sound of me dying.
If you choose to continue, follow the current. The gentle push and pull, they will guide you further down the ocean and into the reef. Amongst the gentle pulse of the last anemone, beneath the beams of the filtered sunlight, deep in the heart of the ocean’s jungle- this is where I am. You could see us from miles away, once, but you will have to look a little more closely to find us now. There. Underneath you, that sandy gray wasteland filled with the crumbling corpses of coral. This is where I am, and this is where I am dying.
Don’t be afraid; you can swim closer. These ghostly white tentacles you see are not what I used to look like. There was a time when the water was cool against my skin and our vast, ever-moving reef was more than this shriveling tundra. It spilled over the hills and valleys, masking hidden caves behind beds of vibrant coral, a lush oasis for the most beautiful fish in the land. You would have come to visit this place once, come to see the regal Maori wrasse, dashing schools of damselfish, the gossamer sea butterfly so silent that you wouldn’t notice until it was right beside you. You would have come then, for the reef that was worth beholding, caressing, treasuring even. But of course, those despondent creatures have dismissed us now; they have taken us for dead. You would stay away. Save your awe for elsewhere.
After the water grew warmer, the tourists that came by the boatloads slowed to a trickle. They used to arrive with eyes full of wonder and mouths open with awe. Now they leave with heavy hearts, tears pooling and only one word spilling from their lips: bleached.
Such a cold, clinical name they have given this slow demise. So meager it seems, so insufficient to describe this calamity, but at the same time, so true. These bone-white skeletons of coral around me have been bleached, yes. Drained of color, drained of algae, drained of movement and life. Bleached. That is what I am. Bleached and on the brink of death…
...They don’t hear anything, of course. You might not have either, if you hadn’t taken a moment to pause, to listen. I suppose they think we are rocks, or plants of some sort. Not living, animalian creatures like them who feel pain as we die and care for the coral fish and look after the algae within us. Perhaps these creatures live in such seclusion that they do not understand what it is to support and depend on one another. This is seclusion, so painful to be away from the ones you love and yet at relief to escape their prying hands...
...Let the current pull you in, float just above the seabed. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine it, remember it, feel it. Before this water grew warm, before the pollution and the acid and the tourists and the dying, before this all, there was life in this reef. There were fish that came to feed, there was algae and there were coral. Sea sponges, mollusks, sharks, crustaceans, they all lived and fed and grew here. I don’t know where they are now, or if they have found another reef, but I do know that they won’t be able to survive in this desert of an ocean without us. Pause in this eerily silent graveyard, and you can see not the ashy white bones of the coral littered around me, but the mosaic of color that was once here.
If you open your eyes now, I think you will be able to see it. Look closely on my bleached and graying surface. There, do you see that little flowering pod? It sways like a bird battered in a storm, but it will grow. Perhaps there is really hope for this graveyard to become a garden, but it will take time. I don’t know if the water will ever become cooler, or if this little polyp stands a chance. They may have left this reef for dead, but for the other coral, the fish, and for the reef, I must try.
Take a breath now, and you will find yourself back where you started. The sea breeze tousling your hair, warm water lapping up at your feet to the beat of the ocean’s pulse. Under the pale moonlight, look out to sea as your toes grip the grainy sand. Listen closely.
There. Can you feel it?
I am living.