I’ll Find You With Golden Buns by Isabella Wu

I am born into the world screaming, my breaths stuttering against the blankets that swaddle me. The air around me stenches of subdued hope, warm fingertips weigh down my eyelids and there is the soft feeling of lips against my blushing cheeks.

“有一天她会让我们感到自豪,” whispers a voice. She will make us proud one day. My grandpa’s words are slow and deliberate.

I am born into the world with hope on my shoulders, an anchor of love on my chest.

At five years old, I taste brilliance for the first time. I’m standing, my tiny legs wobbling, on top of the dark oak chairs and watching with unmasked glee as my grandpa kneads the dough carefully, his old and cracked palms expertly maneuvering them into perfectly round circles caked in flour. The sunlight pouring through the windows makes every grain twinkle like freshly fallen snow.

“What are you making?” I ask.

“Baozi,” is my grandpa’s quiet reply. Steamed meat buns. His eyes are focused, his hands gentle yet purposeful as he presses expert fingers against the dough.

“爷爷,” I whisper, my voice tight with awe, “Can you teach me?” My grandpa laughs, pausing for a moment to dust his hands on his apron. The apron itself resembles an American flag in some way – blue stars, pale red, and white stripes. I remember that I didn’t like it — that it didn’t fit him and the gentle curve of his smile, and the blue was an ugly contrast to his baby blue irises.

“Come here,” he instructs. With strong fingers, he gently wraps my small hands around the rolling pin and teaches me how to roll the dough. The dough sticks, devastatingly, to the rolling pin each time I attempt to slide it across the board. A pout forms on my lips — even then, I didn’t like the feeling of failure. But he didn’t quite mind, and I found that I didn’t either. He’d just laugh, shake his head, and extract the rolling pin from my hands.

“Here, like this.” And he shows me, step by step, how to get them into perfect circles and how to scoop in the filling, savory pork filling with chives and other vegetables. The baozi began to really take shape then, circular dough wrapped around small balls of filling into a plump onion shape. It smells of hearty oils and the sharp tang of cooked scallions.

“This is where the magic happens,” he whispers. The baozi are placed into baskets, stacked one on top of the other in a never-ending toppling tower of golden meat.

Twenty minutes later, there’s a fluffy and hefty bun in each hand, and I giggle with glee as I watch the steam curl from the tops of the puckered lips of the buns. They shine, brilliantly, like gold to me. The bun itself has always been my favorite part — the beautiful off-white color, the spring of the dough, and the chewy gummy feeling as I pull at it with my teeth. The filling is warm and it sits comfortably in my stomach, steeping with warmth and love.

My grandpa holds a bun in his palms, offering it to me with a fond smile. “What do you think?” he asks in broken English.

“I’m happy I can eat all this yummy Chinese food,” I say, honest in the way five-year-olds are.

My grandpa laughs, a loud ringing sound. “I’ll bring you to China with me one day soon, and you can get a taste of the real deal.” I want to tell him that this is the real deal, that being here, eating his buns so filled with love, is all I’ll ever need.

But I go to sleep that night dreaming of sparkling aqua seas and a country filled with people that look like me. I dream of a place that smells like home.

At six I venture across the seas for the first time, staring in wonder at the towering colorful arches that welcome me with blazing smiles. My grandpa holds my hand as we twist through the marketplaces, the words falling from his lips light like they have wings. He tells me stories of his youth in his low rumbling voice, pointing out small flashes of memories from his childhood.

He takes me to a baozi house, his eyes alight with glee as stacks of golden buns are placed before us, washing our faces with curling steam. “This is what authentic baozi tastes like,” he gushes around a mouthful of glistening meat. I smile at him, swallowing my own bite. The flavor of it lingers on my tongue, rich and sweet.

I want to tell him that his buns are even sweeter, that these buns are delicious but they’re lacking something. Something like love.

I can’t help but think as we pass through the bustling streets, watching him so alive, filled with youth and his eyes blazing with the type of belonging you only feel when you return home, your true home, for a long time. I can’t help but think that he’s so much happier here, where his words flow freely from his lips, unobstructed by the constraints of the English language. I realize then, that he has no real reason to struggle daily, testing unfamiliar vowels against his tongue. No real reason, except to be able to talk to me in both Chinese and English.

We return to the Americas and it feels like I’m supposed to have found something, but I only feel more lost, losing my grasp on strings that won’t untangle themselves.

At seven I learn to blend in, learn to swallow my tongue, and let my words fall silently against the soaking earth.

As we crowd together on the playground, a girl turns towards me, her mouth opening and it’s clear she has a question as her eyes drag over my features. “Why are your eyes so small?” she asks finally, and everyone around us grows silent. She stares at me, expectant and a little impatient. There’s a null rushing noise in my ears as I curl into myself. I stare back, at her hands, pale as milk, soft and pretty. I look down at my own, tainted yellow. My voice dies in my throat and I’m speechless.

A teacher yells something, and the buzz of the playground slowly resumes like nothing had happened. The girl turns away from me, boredom flashing in her eyes and a scowl on her lips. I stay paralyzed where I stand, still staring at my hands.

For the first time, I am ashamed. For the first time, I am overcome with a bitter longing to be someone else. Someone with golden hair and stars in their eyes, someone who fits in. The children loop their arms around mine and my feet drag against the blacktop, carving a threaded line on the loosely packed clay soils. It makes more of a mark than I ever will.

At eight, my mother asks me when my skin had become so dark.“No daughter of mine should have this tan,” she says, poking at my arm. “You need to be more conscious of yourself and how you present yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. My words are lost, falling against deafened ears. I stare at my hands again, at my nails bitten down to their beds, and wonder when I had become so flawed.

And so – I become so very conscious, my eyes lingering on smooth expanses of pale pale skin, of bright doe eyes and golden hair. Like this, the cycle starts. Like this, I feel myself distancing myself from my culture, throwing away bits of myself until I can barely recognize the girl that stares back at me in mirrors and shiny reflective surfaces. I begin to lose myself in this game of imitation, of pretending until I can almost believe that I’ve become what I crave to be.

I lose sight of the sun, and I lose myself in this game of make-believe.

At nine, my grandpa asks me when I had lost my happiness. “You don’t speak to me anymore. Your eyes are sad, always. Why?” He asks the question in his slow, broken English, staring at me with a face so filled with expectations and hope. Bitter annoyance claws up my throat and I turn away. Part of me wants to scream, to tell him to just speak Chinese, to stop torturing himself to speak English just for me.

The other part of me freezes when I realize that even if he did, I wouldn’t be able to understand his words now. The Chinese language, the one that had graced my tongue so easily before…it escapes from me now like trickling water through the cracks of my hands. The realization hits like ice water to a stinging wound, and I say nothing and try not to break as the sound of his slow footsteps eventually fades.

That night, my grandpa makes me baozi. I turn him down and tell him that the filling has staled in my mouth after years of the same taste, and close my eyes so that I don’t have to see the crestfallen expression on his face.

I tell myself that I’m unlovable.

At ten, it leaves me – finally, and fully. The language that used to taste like saccharine tangerines and warm soaking honey on my tongue burns like acid on my lips now, foreign and laced with unfamiliarity. It rings loud and ugly in my ears, and I tell myself that this isn’t what it’s supposed to sound like. This isn’t the beauty of the language that burns me now from within. So I close my lips and vow to never speak it again.

The language dies fully then, hidden in the depths of a treasure chest that I had long since lost the key of.

At eleven, I feel like I’ve failed my identity, lost every bit of what had made me human, had made me unique. I float helplessly, without an anchor to tie me down, without anyone to tell me who I am or who I should become, or who I was. This is the story of someone who lets go too easily, I realize.

I want to learn to love again, want to learn how to piece myself together again and hug myself tight so that I am whole.

I want to try again, but a hissing voice inside of me tells me that it is far too late, that I’ve abandoned myself for too long, let myself lose too much – I listen to the voice, and I sink like this.

At thirteen, I leave. Leave home, abandon all that I have ever known, and cross the threshold to the grand halls of a new home – boarding school.

Maybe this is my chance, I think as the acceptance letter wrinkles in my hands. The “Congratulations” is printed in bold at the top and it feels like hope, it feels like finality and a new beginning all at once. I tell myself that this is my chance to find myself, I allow myself to lose my grounding in reality for a moment and dream in the stars again.

So I leave, expectations crushing on my chest and my breath caught in my throat and for the first time, I see so many people that look like me, gorgeous people with long black hair and glowing olive skin, smiling and laughing with their families as they bid them goodbye.

It is here that my eyes open to the beautiful diversity of human life – people from every corner of the globe, all together here within the same buildings, eating the same food, sharing their own pieces of themselves with each other, and keeping bits of others with them too.

I meet people that come from across the seas, from the country that I hadn’t stepped foot in since I was six years old. Their voices are filled with joy as they speak in their mother tongue, their words so beautiful that it aches, that the chest that I had locked so deeply inside of me fills again with longing and threatens to burst open.

They ask me if I know any Chinese, tell me that they’d love to have someone to speak with, stare at me with hope and familiarity that I don’t deserve. I shake my head no, and they never ask again.

It’s easier, too, to lose contact with my family. To pretend that I haven’t seen their calls, to tell them that I’m busy and stressed, and—eventually though, everyone finds themselves drawn back to their roots, to the place that is home. I give in, weak and lonely and aching for familiarity.

“You’ve never tried to call us,” my mother hisses. It’s the first time in three months that I’ve tried reaching out.

“I’m coming home soon,” I say simply. The exhaustion envelops me like a sprawling weight and I let it seep into my words, let my voice waver for a moment before I’m silent. I stare at the stroked paintings behind my mother’s pixelated features, at the swans and pastel bridges and fading mountains that are so often captured in Chinese paintings. Longing fills my chest, coats my lungs, and twists bitterly in my gut and I turn away. I’d lost the right to feel like this, to want like this, long ago when I had let my own language die in my throat three years ago.

“Your grandpa misses you,” my mother says after a moment. I look up, staring at her through the screen. The overwhelming guilt washes over me like crashing salt waves and I duck my head, unable to maintain eye contact.

“Is he well?” I ask finally. And there, in that moment, something gives in my mother’s eyes – a small flicker of sadness, and fear overtakes me until I feel like a string about to snap.

“He’s-he’s starting to forget things.”

That night, I stare at the ceiling with her words ramming against my skull over and over again.

“Come home soon, before he forgets you entirely.”

At thirteen, I learn what it’s like to be afraid of your own family. Of being afraid of those you love, of the terror that fills me when I step foot on ground that is unfamiliar and too familiar all at once. To be afraid of your own roots, to press your hands against your abdomen and clutch blindly at the chest that’s still there after so many years, its lid begging to be freed and filled with scraping cobwebs and the burning taste of shame.

I see him when I step off the boat. I see the way his features alight when he catches sight of me, the wrinkles on his cheeks drawing tight into a small smile. For a moment we stand there, the flurry of winter’s first snow gently swirling around our figures. For a moment I am paralyzed by a potent fear of rejection, of being unloved. We stare at each other, so many unspoken words between us but suddenly I’m rendered speechless, my mouth open but only silence coming out.

“You’re back,” he says finally. “How are you?” My heart aches at the familiar voice, filled with endearment. I glance up at him, at his oh so familiar blue irises, the kindness and patience that has always lived there — and the English sounds so wrong now from his lips, not when I’ve seen the joy of the man with feathered words flying from his lips, surrounded by choruses of vendors and the smell of chili oil hitting black coals. The cold seeps through the warm padding of my winter coat but in this moment—

At this moment, everything is clear. The chest opens on its own, blushing and beautiful and I feel…whole again.

I reach forwards and embrace him. ”爷爷,” I whisper. “我想吃包子.” I want to eat baozi.

 

Isabella Wu is a junior at Choate Rosemary Hall who loves to read novels, write short stories and poems, create art, and play music. In her writing, she aims to authentically convey her experiences and connect with readers through themes such as identity, love, regret, joy and more. Her work has been recognized by several National Gold Medals and the American Voices Award by Scholastic Art and Writing.

Visual art by Sofia Montelibano 

 

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the Thazin orchid is beautiful

On the Myanmar coup d’état, 2021

We walked to Gardens by the Bay¹ that night
within the domes we perched on the verge
of stasis; hungry the camera snapped once, twice

She told me poets in her house are shot,
the side of her cheek tender
lashes acrid. The Thazin² orchid
Have you seen it? Myanmar was not at peace to her
so she swallowed it and made it so. She
swallowed the bitter grain of news clippings
the deaf husks of static come to
commiserate through the radio. I turned away to let her
cry.

Did you know, the Thazin orchid is beautiful
She asked me what it meant to bleed. I did not want to know
so that night she drew red and the water in it: the iron in her
native soil – the slick overripe hope
sticky with perennial dissent – the night
macerated to uneasy sleep. I saw, I shot, but dared not
touch.

Did you know, the Thazin orchid is beautiful
I bought her a Vanda Miss Joaquim³ frozen in acrylic
but she laughed and said
I just wanted to go home
My Burmese hands, you still want to hold them?
Yes, yes, of course I do, but
Before the sun has set upon us
the Thazin orchid would be beautiful
In the veins of cells but not prisons
In the lens of strangers’ tears.

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¹ Gardens by the Bay: A nature park in the central region of Singapore. A popular tourist attraction.
² Thazin orchid: One of the national flowers of Myanmar.
³ Vanda Miss Joaquim: An orchid and the national flower of Singapore.

Cheryl Tan is a 16-year-old Singaporean of Chinese and Indian descent. She has been published in Amber: The Teenage Chapbook, sourcherrymag and Eye on the World, an anthology by the Creative Arts Programme, Singapore, among others. In her free time she writes poems and social commentaries by the sea, and hopes to become a writer someday.

 

Visual art by Adiya Nabiyeva

 

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Staring Into a Multicolored Abyss by Ally Brunner

And just like that, you’ve given yourself away for the third time.

 You’ve revealed a little piece of yourself, burying what’s left of you a little deeper –– a little farther away from the beaming lights that flickered through the heart kaleidoscope you had as a child. 

The angles that once lined up to reflect the colorful expanse before you have sharpened, creating darker images that make you uncertain whether you’re still staring at your brother’s blue handprint on the wall or something else entirely. 

The speed at which the kaleidoscope turns astonishes you. One second you’re staring at an array of sunset-colored diamonds, the next a pool of blue stars. You reach out to grab them, hoping to grasp a morsel of beauty in your ragged hands, but each star slips through your fingers, landing in the hands of those with longer nails and ornate gloves that carry a grace and confidence you so clearly lack. 

Jewels and gems can’t hide the solitude that surrounds you.

Your ears pick up the slamming footsteps in the outside hall but your mind is too obscured by the twist and turn of the kaleidoscope to notice the blue paint running under the door. 

In your long and suitably uneventful life, the omnipresent kaleidoscope is removed only long enough for the splash of your brother’s thumbprint to become visible once more.

The lies spin as quickly as your fingers brush around the edges of the banged-up object. 

“I love you. And nothing you do can ever change that.” 

 

Ally Brunner is a high school junior from New York, NY. She enjoys playing sports, reading, and writing both prose and poetry. 

Visual art by Sylvie Mizrahi

 

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Beneath His Kaleidoscope Eyes

The rattle of an aging radio agonizing over war and the address of his childhood home are faded structural realities. He grew up in isolation with an erased memory after contracting encephalitis, and he also grew up embraced by a loving family. He had nothing or he had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.

From his pipe, wispy gray strands of smoke swayed like living ghosts. Sunshine shimmered through his dusty window shades onto strewn book stacks and his silver threaded hair. Now with the wind exhaling, drifting the smell of fish from the bay into the walls of my grandpa’s apartment, he sat alone once again—this time in the vortex of the COVID-19 crisis.

When time slowed to a tormenting crawl, he turned on CNN. The news led him through the possibility of death and despair, a borderless sphere where loneliness reigns and hope is an ancient entity. With the click of the off button, he entered into a state of pure illusion, a state of numbness, like the numbness that follows an injury, before pain starts to make its way through. Everything seemed less real under the waves of oblivion, and that’s what he needed. I knew he longed for fiction.

Like the planets in celestial orbit, he was distant and lying beyond reach. Growing up in an era where silencing pain was status quo, Poppy maintained an emotional shield against vulnerability. To bridge the generational gaps between us, I searched the apartment for remnants of his former life. I found a 1960s Diana Camera wedged between tattered baseball cards and faded news clippings.

This unassuming blue and black piece of plastic was embedded with supernatural sorcery. With its transcendent powers, Diana dismantled Poppy’s manufactured illusion and revealed the true emotions beneath his facade. I photographed the lines of solitude etched in his forehead, the deep ravines of shadows that shrouded his existence. Through the lens of this vintage telescope, he communicated his untold stories and sorrows from youth: bursts of uncontrolled electrical activity between brain cells and his body bound to the wheelchair he called home. Emotional transparency, once an elusive concept, became a source of healing.

In my garage, aka the makeshift darkroom, I began to develop this picture while listening to Stevie Wonder’s “Love’s In Need of Love” melting on the record player’s rusting needle. In tune with his melody, it occurred to me that this fragmentary image allows me to peer into the larger questions of the moment, into a country mourning the loss of human connection. The pandemic has been an exercise in subtraction. Poppy has experienced the voids left by neighbors who have succumbed to COVID-19 and the absence of friends and family. And then there are the intimate things that are gone: the handshakes, pats, and the strokes that warm daily interactions.

As the photograph dried and the gradients of grey took form, I analyzed Poppy. In his chair surrounded by tchotchkes, he stared at the pictures of his former dog and my Grandma in the 80s with cheekbones adorned in bubble gum pink rouge at the roller skating rink. When days meld into one and the pipe’s vapors envelope his being, he entered into a permanent haze of oblivion to escape living in a constant flashback. His current existence cloistered in his apartment is reminiscent of his childhood when his fever rose and was forced to stay in isolation to recover. The black and white film replicated his portal to the past. Somewhere at the intersection of peace and longing, his concealed pain thawed within the picture.

I picked up Poppy the day I finished processing the film, and we went to the deli on Cross Bay Boulevard. I had not seen him for a long time and his sullen face slowly waned. It was early in the morning and for a fleeting moment the chaos of the pandemic blurred into stillness. We ate our bagels and lox together by the bay, the salty threads of air whispered and the ebb and flow of waves hummed. In between coffee sips, we talked about our shared feelings of loneliness and yearning for normalcy. I finally knew what was beneath his kaleidoscope eyes, once a confusing mosaic of opaque colors. Now, a translucent vision of an old man trying to nourish his relationship with his granddaughter and cope with childhood trauma.

When Gabrielle Beck is not writing or photographing, she can be found repurposing vintage denim. She is a finalist for New York Times “Coming of Age in 2020: A Special Multimedia Contest for Teenagers,” and recognized by the National Council of Teacher’s of English.

Art by Sarah Little

 

 

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Finally: an Un-cliché Depression Story

Cassandra Hartt, The Sea is Salt and So Am I, hardcover $18.99, ISBN: 987-1-250-61924-2

The Sea is Salt and So Am I, a novel by Cassandra Hartt, is a thoughtful and accurate portrayal of depression, coming-of-age, relationships, and heartbreak. Any teenager can see themselves in the town of West Finch — somewhere quiet and close to the water, where everyone knows their neighbours and their vices, soon to be washed away with the town itself as the earth erodes into the sea. Twin brothers Tommy Macqueen, who struggles with depression, and Ellis Macqueen, who bears the emotional burden of his brother’s depression, along with teenage activist Harlow Prout, who fears change and losing her best friend Ellis, are accessible and multidimensional narrators whose lives and issues create a space for each and every reader to feel heard in one way or another. But just because the stories told through these characters are accurate, doesn’t mean they are handled in the best way. 

The town of West Finch isn’t so much a setting, as a character itself. West Finch is sinking into the ocean little by little — a metaphor for everything wrong with the three narrators, and the fights they each battle in their own chapters of the story. Hartt says this most succinctly in the very first sentence of the book. “Any other town, it’d be all they could talk about: how much longer until the house on Ocean Drive hurls itself into the sea” (Hartt, 3). Each storyteller in this novel has their own set of mental obstacles, whether it be fear of change, the future, or straight-up mental illness, such as depression. Interestingly enough, the issue of the town’s fate is secondary to their personal struggles. 

Tommy’s suicide attempt occurs early on in the book — he tries to drown himself while swimming in the sea. He is promptly sent to a mental hospital, where he spends seventy-two hours. The neighbourhood — family, friends, classmates, etc. — highly anticipates his return home, and Mr. and Ms. MacQueen decide to throw him a party at the family diner. Harlow, afraid of losing best friend Ellis due to the emotional burden of his brother’s depression, is determined to take matters into her own hands and cure Tommy’s illness herself. Her strategy is to start “fake dating” him; she thinks making out with him behind closed doors and flirting with him when parents aren’t around is better medication than any antidepressant. While this strategy improves Tommy’s mood in the moment, it causes more harm than good in the long run. 

Harlow’s greatest downfall, like the other two narrators, is that she acts on impulse. While Hartt accurately portrays the immaturity and inexperience of adolescent minds, this also makes the book a little bit unbearable to read at times. A common problem that adult authors run into while writing teenagers is that they make them a bit too clueless — Harlow is as naïve as a thirteen or fourteen year old, while Ellis is on his way to becoming an adult. Tommy is the only one of the three narrators who is portrayed with a true seventeen-year-old mind, but so many of his thoughts and decisions are drowned out by his mental illness. Hartt’s teenage characters are relatable, but not completely truthful. 

Despite its downfalls with inaccuracies regarding the experiences of Tommy, Ellis, and Harlow, I would recommend this book. Readers can find themselves in these characters. Hartt sheds light on common teenage concerns that many people are too afraid to bring up themselves, or maybe feel are taboo to talk about. While it is hard to truly convey the struggle of depression and mental illness as a whole, Hartt achieves to tell the story in an original way. However, do not be fooled by the description on the back — this story is about so much more than mental health issues. It tackles matters such as the fear of growing up or growing apart, diving into the unknown, and taking the reins of your own life with your newfound independence. Hartt’s characters are lively, but full of flaws; most importantly, they are accessible to anyone in this book’s target audience.

By: Josephine Sporte

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Something About Living

The veteran lives in his daughter’s house. He draws his curtains and lies on his bed. Its frame creaks, and it rots, and its mattress depresses with his weight, and a war torn land crosses his mind again. He thinks of barrenness, as he lies in his bed. But in spite of the sounds that come and stay, he lies and finds comfort in his bed’s depression.

He glances at his nightstand. A lamp, unlit, rests atop. A sepia woman sits next to it, captured in a photograph, darkened by light’s shadow—insignificant to the forgetful veteran. She had fled him, he had fled her. Besides the war he forgets most things.

He reaches for the nightstand in hopes of remembrance. He aims for the sepia woman, but he shakes and shakes more. The hand, a steamship, transports to the nightstand. But the hand, the feminine fingertips, the importance, the ship, she diverts her path—her hull trembles. She succumbs to a brighter light, guiding her into deeper, bluer obscurity. Steam puffs and flies in a different direction. She changes her course, the ocean’s breezes. The hand finds itself atop the handle of an antique drawer. She forgets again the photograph for which she had once lived. But reasons to live are only memories to the ship, drunken by the ocean. 

The hand clenches the nightstand’s hinge, and she pulls toward her person. The drawer glides ajar to reveal tall bottles, hard liquor, poison to the curtains, drawn evermore. The veteran thinks of war and screaming memories. The steam’s puffing and flying ceases, the dark room falls silent, and the drawer empties along with the old man’s mind, drunken.

Adjacent to the veteran’s room, a boy sits in a caned chair facing a mirror he stole from his mother’s vanity. His window grants passage to a mid-afternoon light, readying itself for the profound tone it saves for evening and night. He had grown up wishing for a lake by his house, one to reflect the colors of a setting sun, perhaps to echo birds’ songs. 

The old man’s sorrows reach his grandson. The boy hears an opening of a drawer and a clinking of tall bottles, making way for more clinking and more bottles and emptiness. However, he does not dwell on the tall bottles, but the thin walls, and he wishes quiet, blissful little things for his grandfather. He hopes these things would happen within their lifetimes, but maybe ideals belong to a world with a lakeview through his window. Maybe bliss belongs to a world of birds’ melodies. 

Deliberately the boy studies himself in the mirror. He hopes to the mirror often, mostly for materials, objects to display and then to discard. But today he hopes for clarity. He sees an unbrushed hair and combes it to his scalp. The mirror reflects a beauty, one exclusive to novelty and soft changes in light. 

First the walls hear clinking of full bottles, then empty ones. They hear an old man sigh dimly upon a glance of a photograph; he obliges another drink. And the boy who sees himself in the looking glass sighs, too, as he hopes and prepares for changes and a setting sun. Maybe a setting sun could bring him acceptance. The walls mute the family’s stilling echoes. 

As his mother warms gravy in the kitchen, the doorbell rings, and the boy descends to where the wallpaper peels in the foyer. The doorway’s opening reveals a boy his age, who smiles at the sight of him. The boy leads his visitor to an area outside the screened-in-porch. He closes the door shut before arriving there, however, and he smiles back at his guest. The door sends an echo throughout the house, which travels to a room with drawn curtains. 

The veteran had been sleeping, his fingertips embracing tall bottles. He had heard a door meet its threshold and, somewhere in the scape, a latch accept its lock. He wakes and moves to the windows and furls their drapes. The daylight instills in him a feeling so warm that he chooses to furl the rest of the blinds and do away with them completely for the evening. He looks outside from his bedroom’s vantage, escaping his dark room through the pane. He searches for the person who closed the door, who made him furl his drapes. 

The veteran sees his instiller of light, his grandson, standing before his daughter’s house’s façade. He presses delicate hands to the window and sees another boy smiling slowly at his grandson. It seems as though the guest offers something to the boy, something blurred, as the old man’s eyeglasses render useless from the nightstand. The boy’s hand approaches the guest’s in reach of the blur. Gently it transfers between the two silhouettes, and after, the guest’s eyes shimmer for a moment, which passes so quickly that if the old man upstairs had blinked or drunk or died, he would have missed the shimmer.

He is unsure of what overcame his grandson in response to this shimmer. His countenance directs away from his window. However, he believes his grandson reciprocated the guest’s sentiment, as their hands still linger where the blur’s transfer had taken place. Then the guest holds tighter to his grandson’s hand for one unapologetic second. 

He leaves the front door and the screened-in porch and the boy, who smiles slowly, stunned.

The veteran realizes the possibility of there having been no object, no blur, and their hands only touched because of the moment’s clarity. They were only but silhouettes, after all. He notices his fingertips embracing nothing but the window.

The sun descends loftily. The veteran no longer thinks of war and screaming things, but of his grandson, who held a boy’s hand and found acceptance under the shadow of a setting sun. 

An unfamiliar sobriety shields the old man’s face. He looks at the sepia woman atop his nightstand, and he sentinels himself before her. The window, blurry yet tender, had reminded him to protect her, their memory. In truth, he may have seen her in color for one fraction of a moment. 

He turns on the lamp next to her. He lets it shine onto her frame, giving her light like his grandson had for him. He becomes her sun like he had become his. He remembers forgotten things and descends to his daughter, who warms gravy in the kitchen. He brings his glasses with him. 

—Adelaide, he says at the bottom of the stairs. He sees clearly. He pauses. He repeats himself and apologizes. He mumbles subtleties to his daughter. His eyes tear slightly, blueing lightly. My darling, he says quietly. He whispers to her more.

His daughter leans over the stove but releases her wooden spoon after hearing his mournful cadence repaired. She lets go. She holds his face and serves him dinner. 

The boy, however, forgoes his mother’s gravy while he protects his guest’s path and watches it stretch into disappearance outside. Our lifetimes will meet again, he thinks. But in the meantime, I’ll stay with your memory. The walls might forever hold the smell of that night’s gravy. 

His path disappears, so the boy comes inside. The sun has set. He sees his mother holding onto, collapsing her entirety onto a delicate man who misses evening meals. His shoulders, scarred from the land where they fought and the bottles they emptied, feel embraced, beloved, felt. 

The veteran sees his grandson enter the kitchen. He lets his eyeglasses glide the bridge of his nose. The boy seems delighted and his mother complete, but the old man shows no emotion and says not a word. He only breathes a labial hum one expels when they can finally grasp something with an intense understanding.

His grandson had shifted something inside him. Unclear whether he feels heavier or more light, he knows nothing left him, but something old thawed. A war inside the veteran had broken; a window, opened. His grandson had alighted him from the nightstand, from the sepia woman, from the depression in his mattress. 

The old man considers thanking his grandson for daylight and for remembrance. He had shown him a setting sun, something about life, and something about living. 

Meanwhile, the boy thinks again of his guest. The setting sun had brought him what he wanted. He imagines a songbird’s call echoing off a lake. He feels the same tingling he had earlier, yielded by that affectionate hand on his.

Adelaide lets down her hair and pulls out a chair after hanging her apron by the stovetop. She sees her father already sitting, already sniffing warm gravy, already dropping warm, blue tears onto his placemat with every glance he steals from her son.

At the table, the veteran sees his grandson thinking of another boy’s shimmering eyes. So with his own, the grandfather weeps volumes of prideful acceptance.

Benjamin Herdeg is a high school student who just started creative writing over the summer, during the pandemic. He “uses writing as a vent into which he pours lots of emotion and unfinished thoughts.”

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To Fit The Part

 

Japanese square watermelons glisten in edges

a perfectly rounded cube, never sharp enough to draw blood

but shaved into beauty, enough corners to stay in place.

 

I wonder what came first, did an abnormal watermelon

happen to grow into a square that happened to be the shape of its cage

     or did the cage halt the fruit’s breath

     just early enough to fill

 

\\

 

I am quiet at first glance, five foot two, a fan of sweet earl grey tea,

a thin girl who likes to cook, Asian, a writer, not necessarily

     in that order, but then again, who decides this order?

 

Did I grow into a stereotype because that was all that was expected

of me in the country that once deemed me

unassimilable, then exceptional

 

A dirty carrier of the kung flu, spit on and cursed at then scrubbed clean

of color on a Washington performance report

 

     in the same breath

     in a matter of weeks

 

When I am white wiped of color, am I catered enough for you?

 

Does my neutralness signal lack of trauma

and does that sit well with you?

 

Will washing me colorless ease the white guilt that you so despise?

 

Or did I grow up with autonomy,

rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”,

to be as Asian as whoever I want to be?

 

     Hanbok trailing in watercolor silk and silver threads

     Midnight squid ink yielding thick Korean calligraphy

     Bullet-paced bargaining at traditional Sijangs

     Red hot rice cakes coated in Gochujang on winter nights

 

I look back at Seoul with my almond eyes

when it calls out to me, hands outstretched,

and know that I fit yet another mold here,

 

one that I am learning to describe. Forgive me, the privilege

of fitting in makes it hard to see what exactly you fit into.

 

and because of the way both halves of my life

have carved cages that seem to meld into my body

 

I may fit the part, but only by my will

     is what I repeat to set myself free.

 

Elina is a highschool junior from Seoul, South Korea. She attends Phillips Academy and is a graduate of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. She is the executive poetry editor for The Qualia Review and loves to draw in her free time.

 

Visual Art by: Woohyung “Garfield” Jung

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Two Poems by Serena Deng

Day Six

Remember that our hands do not belong to our wrists

nor our wrists                                       to our bodies nor we                    

to each other. Black sheep take                     themselves into the fold

unknowingly and never run again. Perhaps blinded, perhaps

at night we mistake white wool for                  open air.

We do not choose                              ourselves or each other.

Remember that all our joints pull in different directions

and wish to be separated and one day 

the sheep outlive                                 the shepherd.

We roam free over hill and gully, forgetting

safety, company, how we fit against the other.

Still our names stay                          tacked to our ears.

Remember that God makes Adam with His own hands

and the red earth sticks to Him like second skin.

There is a moment, I think

when Creator and creation                               lock fingers and

never forget it.

 

 

This is the Summer

This is the summer we prayed for

mercy, strung ourselves out like laundry

sighing to the sun. This is the

summer our knuckles learned the grooves

of a washboard better than they

knew each other. We worked this tin machine over and

over and over again, five times,

six times,

day into night,

blisters pouring back into horizon.

This is the summer we prayed for

blood to wash us clean:

starched white cotton,

sparkling water droplets,

chlorine bleach.

This is the summer we prayed for

a new body, prayed to

turn our skin in on itself

and start again.

 

Serena Deng is currently a senior in high school. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing awards, the NCTE, and Temple University, and can be found in Invisible City and Ricochet Review. She lives in NYC, where she drinks water straight from the tap.

 

Visual Art by: Elaine Zhang

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when i talk about the moon

i do not mean/ the sweet crescent-shaped thing in the sky/ from the cartoons we used to watch on channel twenty-four/ that glowing thing the princess drifts to after she swallows the magic pills/ and becomes immortal/ after the bad guy breaks into her home and gravity breaks/ like window pane/ i say moon and mean the moon the old poet bids his brother to look at on the nights they are not together/ the nights the moon cracks into two faces and falls out of/ old vending machines/ i saw the moon hanging by the skin of my heart the second time i broke it in the sink/ trying to make it paler than it is/ in the stranger who watched me watch him flit in and out of the subway window/ as it shudders and tilts to one side & there’s one night every year when my mother does not cook dinner/ she stays in her room with the door closed and watches the moon rise and set on the back of her eyelids/ i imagine it must look so peaceful/ and so white like my grandfather when he entered the room in an expensive suit/ and came back out in a metal ashtray/ i saw the moon sitting cross-legged on his femur when they pulled him out of there but nobody else did/ because there was so much water in their eyes/ dandelions bloomed from their sockets & i watched them get smothered/ by hands on which their carnage left an endless trail of ruined tutus/ i wrote a poem on my hand today and/ it too blossomed to the size of the moon so i/ get it if you don’t want to hold onto my hand anymore when the subway/ shudders/ i promised someone i would miss them today you see/ but i’m not sure what i mean when i say these things/ like when i say immortality i do not really mean the one who hogs all the seats/ who chews with his mouth open and gets off one stop too late/ anyway it is getting late in the station now and gravity/ is snapping each femur as the sidewalk/ bends/ so here/ take my swollen hand and what fingers you can still find while/ i hail a taxi and pray that it arrives before the streetlights come on/ and i explode into one thousand dandelions

 

*Cultural note: The beginning of this poem references a Chinese folktale. A princess and her husband are gifted with pills that make them immortal and enable them to fly to the moon. They promise to eat the pills together someday. One day, a jealous man breaks into their home and forces the princess to hand over the pills, but, in the moment, the princess swallows all the pills so the man will get none. She flies to the moon where she lives forever without her husband.

 

Henie Zhang is a high school senior from Shanghai. She is the editor-in-chief of the Zeitgeist Literary Magazine and can often be sighted fiddling with a camera or trying to keep her plants alive with debatable success. 

Visual Art By: BaS

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To Linger

When I called my mother from the settling dark of the cold November night, she was unprepared for the news. She rushed down forty floors of cold apartment steel with the tiny shovel and gloves in her hands, ran across the cold dead rubber of the playground floor in her purple rain boots. All I could do was point with shaking eyes and strained fingers at the cold box in the kudzu. I remember my cold fingers all but digging through my shirt, watching my mother trudge over the undergrowth like she had done every night for over a year, bending over to push apart the bushes like she had done every autumn night. The dead leaves crunched under her feet.

 

I remember being sent to wash my hands- wash the scent of deteriorating mammal from my pores. I remember looking into my own eyes and telling myself over and over, this was bound to happen, this was bound to happen. When I returned, my mother was holding a small, stiff bundle wrapped in a red blanket. And as she lowered the cold form into the hoary ground, the tears finally burst from my eyes- I crumpled in front of the small hole, unable to form words but begging his name over and over in the small prison of my clenched hands.

 

His name was Mang-gae. I named him on a malingering summer evening, crisp and clean as the first bite of an apple. I named him for a wrinkled, ugly traditional rice-cake- didn’t the orange kitten look a lot like a rice-cake, rounded and scrunched up? I named him for longevity-the ugliest names will go the longest. I named him first. Out of the litter of five, he was the first to venture out into the open air, buttery and clean and yet infused with the limber grip of summer. He hissed at me as he ate snacks from my hand- then came back for more. I recall that one evening he swiped at me and left a bloody gash on my left palm, but was forgiven with the slightest brush of his whiskers against my mosquito-bitten calf the next day. I loved him as one would love a younger brother- complaining yet with a ferocity impossible to hide.

 

When he was named, it was as if he sprung up from a bed of identical kittens as a fully grown tiger- his face popped out at me like a flashlight from the box his family lived in. I learned his features. The pink nose, the high forehead, the delicate stripes on the back of his head. I learned his habits- the quirk of the tail when he was pleased, the negligent hiss when he pretended to turn his back on me. My father would watch him jump in and out of the same cardboard box for hours on end, almost purring with him when he settled down. I squatted in front of his closed eyes, wishing every day to speak to him.

 

Sometimes these days, I wonder what a year meant in the life of a fun-sized ginger cat. Was it an expanse of time he didn’t dare to encompass with a single flick of his paw? Or did the year he spent with us fly past like his baby-faced meow? I suppose I never will know. But if Mang-gae asked me the same question, asked me my bulksome human opinion on our shared year in broken yowls and hisses, I would tell him it meant more than any bond I had ever shared, whispering sweet nothings to him as if he had never left. Every summer night I spent with him seemed rosy with the remnants of the evening sun, but now I know that light was never the verdant vermilion of a summer day but his blooming warmth leaning against my hand. To look into the eyes of a creature unable to speak and enjoy its company was unbelievably precious, precious beyond conversational frippery and dated gestures. He changed my world solely with his acknowledgment of its existence.

 

To be able to look at a feather and think of someone who won’t be able to remark on it- to look at a torn sleeve and automatically see the night it ripped play out in front of your eyes. To trace an old scar on your finger, so faint you can barely see it, and forgive the claw that ripped it a thousand times over. To wonder if the small furry mind thinks the same. To wonder out loud to a bare grave, wonder if the hours I spent with you meant the same to you and know the answer before the tears hit the earth. To indulge in the vivacity of a living being during its short tenure on earth. To see it flown, escaped from its shallow prison of clay. I pushed my feet against the ground and begged the name that now meant nothing but a wrinkled, cheap rice-cake. Why had I ever named you for longevity? The dirt kept settling over the red blanket, over and over and over.

 

When my mother prompted me to say a few words for you, I could not. How could I ever let fly in a few words a bond that had never been expressed in words? Sobbing, I stammered out a generic prayer. I wish for you to be happy, I wish you all the things I could never give you, I wish for you to live in a haven with all the small things that make you happy- pureed cat snacks, inexpensive neon toys, cardboard boxes rimmed with cheap yellow tape and God knows what else. Certain things can only be said in words, clumsy and awkward. Some nights I have wanted to call after you, wherever you live now in the clouds. Most nights I did not know what to call, and now I think I may understand. You were many things- none of them spoken, many of them simply felt. And when I leave as you took flight, I should like to linger as you did- not as a broken call malingering in the kudzu, but as the fading light of a summer day, inexpressible in words yet blooming in syllables of faint touch.

 

Min Lee is a sophomore at St Georges School in Rhode Island. She enjoys reading fiction and creative nonfictions. Her interest in the field of neuroscience will lead her to pursue the study in college.
Visual Art by: Rita Yiting Ruan
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