Issuu

A Brown/RISD Visual & Literary Arts Magazine Vol. XVI Issue II

VISIONS

letter from the editor

Dear Reader, I am proud to share with you VISIONS’ Spring 2015 issue. Selecting the pieces to publish in this issue was a great challenge, but also a great pleasure–a pleasure I hope you will find in turn. This semester, as in every cycle of publication, we asked ourselves: What does it mean to be Asian in the United States? And how do we best represent that as an Asian and Asian American magazine dedicated to the arts? The answers are multitudinous and ever evolving. At the second annual E(RACE) D But Not Forgotten conference this year, dedicated to unpacking the Asian experience in the U.S., we hosted a poetry workshop where we found our footing on one possible answer: to create literature and art that resists definition by others. We drew inspiration from Junot Diaz: “You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might seem themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.’” My belief is that VISIONS can serve as a kind of re-humanizing mirror. In addition to Diaz, we looked to Cathy Linh Che, who wrote in February, “Who says or has ever said that that Asian & Pacific Islander American story is only immigration lit/family conflict/identity politics? If anyone has ever said that, I’ve certainly never bothered to listen.” This refusal to let others define yourself and your work, to carve your ownership into your art and your identity, is exemplified by each one of the writers and artists in this magazine. Throughout my four years here, I have been continually astounded, enriched, and moved by the work that we’ve reviewed. It has been an honor to lead such a passionate, critical, and hard-working editorial board. Leaving VISIONS is bittersweet. Yet I am confident that in the hands of a such a talented team the magazine will continue to grow and thrive as a vital pulse in our community. Thank you for reading. Sincerely yours,

VISIONS

table of contents

writing

VISIONS

Crowd Jenice Kim

Rear Window Aya Bisbea

Untitled Ran Zheng

art

Crowd Jenice Kim

Rear Window Aya Bisbea

Untitled Ran Zheng

Crowd Jenice Kim

Rear Window Aya Bisbea

Untitled Ran Zheng

Crowd Jenice Kim

Rear Window Aya Bisbea

Untitled Ran Zheng

Crowd Jenice Kim

Untitled Ran Zheng

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artwork :

Behind the Asakusa Stand | Photography Lauren Shin ‘18

Juan Tang Hon ‘17 had a windy picnic.

what are you becoming, anyways?

I Think about the time during first-grade when you fell asleep by staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. Something about the darkness bothered you. You never thought of anything in particular. You tried not to. II Think about the time you had morning tea in Chinatown, when your grandfather pointed to this person wearing pink and asked Julio, “嗰嗰女人似唔似男人呢?” (“Doesn’t that woman look like a man?”) Julio gives him a reply that sounds awfully a lot like, “Uhhh.” Your grandfather tries again, tapping the air in the same general direction. “嗰嗰呀,係唔係好似男人呢?” (“That one, looks a lot like a man right?”) You didn’t say anything in particular. You tried to. III Think about the time you went to a clothing store with your mother. She slowly paces through. A gentle caress of hands. You try on a red sweater. She says, “我jue得呢件太过乸型,无mai囉。” (“This one is too feminine, don’t buy it.”) You buy it. IV Think about now needing complete darkness to fall asleep.

VISIONS

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Sentiment, Sediment | Artist book Jia Gao, RISD â€˜17

VISIONS

artwork :

Angnyang Insists | Photography Rena Rong, RISD ‘17

Emily Sun ‘18 is fond of eggplant, sleep, and other comforting purple textures.

contacts excerpted from full text

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“Look how big they are.” “Yeah, Mandi is a little zhuang.” Stella’s family laughs in the silence that follows, and I eye my mother to say I know perfectly well what zhuang means. Her pupils dart towards me, and the gleam is sharp like a reed but not like a knife. I take it as an apology. She is only good at lying with her mouth closed. “Wow, nobody asked you to bring so much.” “Lai, lai, let’s eat.” Stella’s grandfather does not move like we do towards the steam and the meat and the mantou: pale, doughy mounds that remind me of breasts. We split off into two tables based on age, and separated in this way, Stella, our brothers, and I can speak English now. Sips of Tropicana melt bites of pork filling that someone probably spent most of Sunday afternoon kneading to get the consistency right. Stella eats carefully, taking her time. “So, how’s the East Coast?” “Good, I guess.” She waits for me to elaborate. “There are fireflies,” I say, even though I hadn’t seen any. How did our mothers become friends, I want to ask. Perhaps I could learn by entering the next room, where the adults are catching up on what Stella and I don’t have, but I imagine we do. I imagine we broke a tricycle by my old elementary school, that we learned about time capsules and buried one by the fence, that she told me what a pad was but not how to use it, that after she moved away I no longer played in the basement where we pretended we were wolves. I imagine I wrote her a letter when she moved that said I dreamed I was in a red hallway and had gotten pregnant while chewing gum and she didn’t reply. I imagined meeting her again in this house and the little

rock of anger from the forgotten letter dissolving upon recognizing her face. I laugh as I imagine these things. We are just girls. On the way back for seconds Stella’s grandfather looks at me as if trying to figure out how he knows me. I don’t want to smile in case it disrupts his memory. At our brothers’ suggestion, we begin to play a board game where we try to acquire as much land as possible. Our grandmothers slowly clear the plates off the table, and Stella’s sets out a dish of watermelon. I quickly scrape the rich, pink flesh from its sturdy green rind, my chin itching from the sticky juice. I ask Stella for the bathroom, but her grandfather interjects. “I can show you,” he says, rising from his post on the couch. I hold his tender, flaccid hand to help him up the stairs. Clad in maroon slippers, his feet make almost no sound on the freshly vacuumed carpet. When my fingers are clean once again, I look around the hall for him, expecting us to descend together. I glimpse him in what I guess is his bedroom, as Stella mentioned that since she moved to California her grandparents have lived here all year round. He beckons to me as I ease the door wider. The room is simply furnished with a bed on one end and a dresser on the other. “What do you think?” “Beautiful?” My eyes dart furtively to see what he is referring to: the watercolor painting we stand in front of, the bed on one end, the dresser on the other. I think maybe my guoyu is not good enough, and the word hangs in the air, attaching to nothing. Seeming pleased, he meets my gaze, lets me study him like I do my own reflection. His placid face could be stillborn, the

sunlight wearing his hair threadbare, his ochre eyes blooming oil in water. An eggplant-colored mole spreads onto his smooth, broad cheekbones, which I find too proud for his slack mouth. The warmth of his breath and body casts over me like a shadow. Above us, a bare light bulb marks the center of the slanted ceiling. Its metal cord trembles from a draft. “This room wasn’t always mine,” he says. He opens one of the drawers and starts transferring its contents, one by one, onto the dresser surface, which is coated by a thin layer of dust. Each time he removes an object he adjusts it a little and smiles shyly at me. A comb with a long, black spine and short, fine teeth. An embroidered pocket purse stuffed with receipts. A gold safety pin. A coil of pipe cleaners. A red and yellow cardboard box. I open it to find

two raisins at the bottom. The last thing he pulls is a case of transparent pieces, delicate and slightly misshapen. “These are Stella’s old contacts,” he says. “They are eyes through which I can see her past.” The blue plastic shards smudge the light, like the tracks tears leave on ruddy cheeks, or scales glittering in the sun. We leave the objects in a still line, as if to erect our own private shrine for the dead. Who knows when we will see each other again, but Stella and I exchange Facebooks and telephone numbers as my mother ushers us out the door, and I say goodbye to the Christmas tree that I know will still be there, even as August heat withers away into its next incarnation, even as Stella and I become juniors and seniors

and graduate, as if continuity has to be fought for, as if it is harder to leave the tree up than fold the pine branches and stuff the six foot green into the two foot box, and soon we are all crammed in the doorway, our faces dappled yellow and blue, and I can smell the extra mantou hiding in napkin folds in my brother’s baggy jeans, and no one wants to be the last to say goodbye, and upstairs a draft blows a lens onto the carpet, and in the kitchen the edge of a barely eaten chocolate cake collapses a little, but I don’t know this, I only know that as we drive away, Stella’s grandfather has come to the door and is waving with both backlit hands fluttering in the night.

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artwork :

Nim | Oil painting Juwon Jun, RISD ‘18 likes the idea of pink faux fur.

Ajin Lim, RISD ‘17, wants to give birth.

fertility goddess

The fertility goddess wouldn’t stop bleeding. Every month she spent fifty boxes of pads and tampons as she ovulated not once but seventeen times each month, and her uterine wall replayed the cycle of thickening and shredding seventeen times a month. Upon her very first conception she thought when an egg is fertilized the womb is enclosed, and as long as the baby stays, my child-bearing belly will cease the blood-dripping. So the fertility goddess thought, yet she was gushing nevertheless. Later uncovered were the multiple wombs of the incredible woman — the doctor lost count after fifty-six. So each day at least fifty-six wombs oozed out blood-streams that joined at her vaginal opening and flowed down her groin, briefly forming a puddle at the embankment of pads, only to overflow and cascade onto her plump thighs, painting red whatever it fell upon. Amidst the bleeding and birthing and nursing and nurturing, she sought rest and had a doctor tie her tubes from all her seventy-eight wombs (they counted) and from each womb fifteen sets of tubes. On the surgery table draped a green cloth, a cut-out square revealing her fertile belly. The doctor reached in knotted with care and speed, as he had a thousand hundred and sixty-nine more to go. Each knot aborting forthcoming babies, the goddess de-fertilized, un-birthed, de-glorified, un-created, and at last she stepped down from divinity, no longer a creator, and lived her life.

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Moonlight Melange | Pen and Photoshop Julie Benbassat, RISD ‘19 is an illustration major.

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Food Delivery Man in Beijing | Sculpture George Duan, RISD ‘17 Designer.

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Connie Shen, byline.

jiejie excerpted from full text

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Together, they endured the torment, their arms intertwined as they walked through the school building two weeks later. Two Chinese, one tall with sharp elbows, the other round with puffy cheeks. Fan had taught Mei how to be a witch on the first day she came, sitting in science class surrounded by plastic skeletons and anatomical hearts. Fan’s mother had long ago taught her the way how to deal with white ghosts—do not flee and they will soon flee you. “Some of them once tried to hurt us,” Ai-named-Sherry had said after closing time, scrubbing at the pools of peanut oil that had sat collecting in the wok. The veins in her arms glowed purple underneath the florescent lights as she made soapy motions in the sink. “The first customers we had asked too many questions. ‘When did you come to this country? Where are your papers? What relatives do you have in the States? What makes you think you belong here?’ Looking down, I saw that one of them had a knife. We had come over here to raise you; my belly was so swollen I feared it would burst. I ran to the back and told your father what was happening. He had never been scared of anything—in China, he was the one they called to drive out the spirits of dead baby girls from their parents’ homes—but in that moment, I saw something like fear. ‘No English,’ he said, even though we had been practicing for weeks, months. He passed them the $6,000 that he had been saving inside of the

cabinet for you. Believe me when I say that it hurt him to do that. The customers took the money and left and never came back. If he had fought back, your father would have been disgraced. And that is what it means to be Chinese.” A disappointment had surged through Fan’s stomach that night after her mother finished the story, but there could be no questions. Tired after story-telling and hours of restaurant-working, her mother had turned off the lights and went wordless up the stairs. Fan had listened as her parents’ snores mixed with the damp, greasy scents. To Fan, paying white people to leave seemed cowardly. Her mother had told her stories about witches, women who drank the blood of goats and received eternal life and spat curses at villagers who tried to approach them. Fan admired these creatures, so vibrant with their sallow skin and sullen speech. Why could her father not have been a witch too, ripped out the customers’ throats, cast a curse or two upon their families? Disgrace was something that could be earned back. True honor lay in fighting your enemies despite the possibility of loss. “Here is how you perform a curse.” Fan pointed her pencil toward her target, a girl with brown hair who enjoyed tripping her in gym class, and waved. “Ni kan. Watch.” She drew the characters for sickness (疾病) and stomach (胃) on a sheet of paper, carving out a circle around them. “Now turn it three times and ask the gods for it to happen.” A fast learner,

Mei performed the curse quickly, muttering a small request under her breath. They watched to see if the girl would fall onto the floor vomiting, but nothing happened. “Sometimes, it takes a while for it to work.” “I see.” Mei was the one who convinced Fan that they should begin wearing capes. Her mother, a seamstress, fashioned long black cloaks made out of curtain fabric when Mei announced that she was in a school play about American super heroes. The velvety warmth felt heavy upon their skin as they surged across the tiled floors toward the lunchroom, sinking into the red plastic seats. “Look, look,” they laughed, emerging from around bathroom corners and hallways, sticky with after-gym sweat, “the Chinese think that they are witches.” The bravest of the bunch cut off a piece of Fan’s cloak with a pair of sharp red scissors. “What are you going to do now?” He brandished the square of black fabric in front of their faces. “What are you going to do now, weirdos?” Fan and Mei continued to scrape the bottoms of their Tupperware, as quiet as the stagnant leaves outside. Mei slurped noodles without stopping, tendrils of ramen seeping from her mouth. Fan shoved a clementine in her mouth and ate it whole, bright orange flashes of rind and seed caught between her cavernous teeth. Their twin capes rippled with their motions as if enchanted.

“Freaks,” he muttered, tossing his stolen token to the floor. The boy decided to stay away from them, afraid of such immovable silence. Underneath the table, Fan felt her friend’s small hand clasp her own in victory and smiled. On their walk home, they went over the day’s accomplishments with one another. “Remember how scared his face looked when he ran away.” “His ugly face. His ugly red face.” “And when I whispered in Chinese to you and Marsha screamed.” “Yes, yes. She sounded like a donkey!” The girls laughed until their lungs were void of laughter. Mei drew a bag of candies from her backpack and offered one to Fan. They sucked on sweets until their mouths felt raw, falling into sugared silence, happy with their day’s work. For once, Fan felt as powerful as the women in her mother’s stories. “Some wu even sacrificed their own to receive favors from the gods,” her mother, Ai (whose American name was Sherry), had once said as they rolled chicken in sauces and batter. Her father was outside, calling the crippled grandmother still in China whom Fan had never met. “What do you mean, mother?” Fan had asked. Her small fingers made circles in the salt-and-pepper seasoning spread across the metal counter. “They would give up their happiness to receive good fortune?” “No, gau, stupid girl. They killed their own families.”

A familiar thrill rose in Fan’s stomach and coated her throat with bile. By the time her father had returned from talking to po-po, slamming the back door behind him and retying his apron with strangely shaky fingers, Fan had already decided that witches were more powerful than men—they could easily overpower white ghosts, wouldn’t have paid them to go away. They would have just eaten them instead. Maybe cannibalism would be Fan and Mei’s next move. When they came to their separate streets, Fan departed first. Stretching out a pink-gloved hand, she waved goodbye with all her might. They yelled their secret names loudly from a safe distance so that the gods would not suspect them of evil. “Zaijian, wu jiejie.” “Zaijian.” That night, as Ai-Called-Sherry washed the dishes in the sink, Fan grabbed her mother’s wrist and whispered low. “I want a story about sisters.” Fan watched as her mother turned around, Ai’s eyeballs glistening black as beetles in the shadows of the lamplight. “Tell me about two Chinese sisters who love each other.” Ai frowned. “I don’t know any happy stories. Only sad ones.” “What about a medium-happy one?” “What about medium-sad?” “A quarter-sad.” “Okay.”

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I Am An American | Medium Jason Fukijuni, RISD â€˜17

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artwork :

Untitled | Photography Tiffany Ng, RISD ‘18

Micah Lau ’16 is going home.

my brother dean

My brother Dean in his seventeenyear-old dream standing outside the video store in the starry strip mall night smoking a cigarette by street light is the image I’ll hold.

cityscape yearning, unknown heir to the hopeless lonesome beings dropping their seeds over the Sierra Nevada, tired of waiting for their turn coming round again in this wheel.

All scraggly beard and gangly, fucking the sister of Babylon till dawn, whispering love in her ear on the dewy rooftops of bedroom suburbia, she’s no good I tell him when he comes home red-eyed high and passes out on the living room floor.

When they find him, the red-dirt congregation of Kauai fills the room with their wails, clipping the dye from his hair and scrubbing the paint from his nails, his methamphetamine father stays for a day, silent Delilah cries one tear on his cheek.

From the hard plastic chair in the corner of neglected dyslexic Hell, my brother Dean spits on the ars poetica, the modal jazz, the dead etymologies of our race and culture and country, he wants only a few dollars for the midnight movie and the window seat on the last bus back from the city,

In the morning between two seas my brother Dean begins his journey to the arms of our Mother up the river in the ravine that would flood when it rained down to the dark-water seafloor that puts out every fire in the heart.

the wall of shoegaze sound in his head, sitting in a circle passing cheap brandy with Lilith on his arm and good moon-faced Danny, who put the blade to his leg a few years later, playing a song on the guitar for the hilltop wind through the crabgrass garden during the meteor showers of ‘09, a house with a pool, a blue truck, two dogs, a boy named Dick and a girl named Starr, I read in a letter to his half-hearted lover a long time after what could have been became what would never be —

My brother Dean, there’s no story to tell, no roads you’ll travel, I mourn you no longer because you want it that way; you freed me and I leapt back into that machine as soon as you took your eyes off me and I’m sorry. My brother Dean I won’t finish your poem. My brother Dean will you look at all the old photographs where we are young and wide-eyed beautiful alive forever and say to me yes you are truly my brother? My brother Dean sometimes I see you waiting by the roadside.

my brother Dean: toilet paper mummy when he was three, shepherd through empty smoky hallucinogenic New Year’s Eve, lord of half-light Tantalus

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artwork :

Tiger | Digital Sarah Lee, RISD ‘16

Christine Collins ‘19 is prone to spontaneous outbursts of song.

what to do with the transracial adoption excerpted from full text

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Step One: Accept that once you resemble an adult, people will stop recognizing that you and your parents are part of one familial unit. Restaurant hosts and cashiers at McDonald’s will take your parents’ order and then look at you politely, smile, and say, “Can I help you?” Look them in the eye and say, “No, thanks,” Explain you’re with your parents Do not falter if disgust or confusion flickers across their features, do not even blink, just smile and proceed.

Step Three: Don’t be alarmed that the rest of the world will label your adoption as a manifestation of the White Man’s Burden. Actually, come to think of it, you realize that maybe as a system, transracial adoption really is just the White Man’s Burden, just first-world white affluents trying to save the world, one underprivileged child at a time.

Step Two: Realize that although your parents mean well, they cannot help you when the other children turn out to be racists. How could they? They’ve never felt it, they’re white, they’re quote-unquote normal, they’re society’s default race, they’ve never had to think twice. When you bring home stories about white boys pulling at the corners of their eyes and calling you a chink, do not be surprised if your parents shrug it off and tell you not to listen, tell you that the boys don’t mean anything by it, that they’re just stupid. Your parents want to protect you, they want to do right by you, but sweetie, Your parents simply can’t help you with this one.

—

Step Four: Don’t let that realization undermine your understanding of family, because No matter what anyone else tells you, your family is a real family.

Step Eight: Forgive yourself for the yearning that lives deep in your heart, the pull toward your original culture. You aren’t betraying your family, never believe that, because you’re not. Forgive yourself for wondering about your birth family, forgive yourself for the what-ifs and the if-onlys, it’s okay to think about the life you might have lived. It’s okay.

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“PRESENCE+PRESENTS”|Limitededitionzine Esther Fan & Olivia Park, RISD GD ‘17

Presence + Presents was sold at Yale’s Odds and Ends Art Book Fair as a set of 10 limited edition zines. Each box includes: “WOW! You have 1 Asian Friend” Ribbon; Sad Asian Girls Club/Donald Trump lighter; Asian Eyes on White Models book; 3 assorted temporary tattoos of Asian designer logos; 2 assorted Asian protest stickers; Crying White Man button

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artwork :

Disembodiment I, III | Graphite One of these days, Karen Ko, RISD ‘18 is going to wriggle up on dry land.

Sonja John, RISD ‘17. She only ever comes for blood.

mestiza

When asked the perennial question, “So, what are you, really?” I tend to make a long story short I am the thing made between borders, A hopeless wanderer, Ship’s hull lost between Middle Passage and Pacific With no port to call home. I am always stuck in limbo, In perpetual request for passport In halfway point between “nigger” and unknown A trade route skin en route to nowhere A question mark on every map of the world. A stranger with no category Not white or Black or yellow Just brown To be Black and Filipina is to be Brown skin Brown eyes Brown hands like the good earth that made me & cane sugar, always sweeter Unrefined What you call Exotic A tropical fruit sliced just so for consumption That thing that men would like to fuck Just once, What am I? Beauty with an asterisk Exception to the rule The Black girl with Light skin Mestiza with coarse hair Foreigner A half breed mutt claimed by no one Just Some happy Accident of Breeding

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To be Black and Filipina is to carry two tongues, Two names, two sets of colonizers, & a white man’s accent between my teeth It is to kill my mother’s tongue every time I open my mouth This voice of mine A beast, half-raised on my mother’s silence My father’s patois half-tamed with English speech And Spanish cognates With skin always grammatically incorrect I am always incorrect To be Black and Filipina is Wearing this body like a no man’s land and a target A heap of bones and flesh lying in wait for an unmarked grave Or a gun Or sea to drown in A white flag claiming Peace Treaties unsigned By white hands A border with no lands To be Black and Filipina is to resist Flag and treaty and prison Documentation Unlawful incarceration It is To write dictionaries for brown mouths with these two brown hands This lineage This trade route yet traveled This sugar and good earth & live & live & live

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Disembodiment II | Graphite Karen Ko, RISD â€˜18

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the future of food | agar-agar and baked crickets Ruth Lin, RISD ‘17

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small abstracted dreams | oil paintings Ruth Lin, RISD ‘17

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artwork :

Ancestor Dance | Oil on paper Hugo Nakashima-Brown, RISD ‘17 is a painter.

Isue Shin ‘17 won a circle drawing contest in seventh grade; that was probably the only good moment of seventh grade.

america, dad, dad, america

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Whenever I would go to Subway with my dad, he would always make me order both sandwiches. “I don’t feel like going in,” he would say, passing me a 10 dollar bill, “I liked the chicken sandwich you got me last time, with lots of jalapeños.” It wasn’t a matter of laziness though; I knew he was intimidated by the involved ordering process. Every ingredient would loom as an obstacle. First, he would falter between the difference of 9-grain oat and 9-grain honey wheat. A foot long, he would mumble, toasted. He was lactose intolerant, but he would pick Swiss anyway, forgetting what it tasted like. Vegetables, everything, except for the onion. And finally… chipotle. That confounding word. Had there been a day my dad was comfortable in America? The man I knew who would lead long-winded philosophical discussions at Korean dinner parties suddenly became a faltering mirror, stammering and apologetic. His charisma would melt into self-consciousness. I remember my parents and I went on a trip to New York City sometime during high school. While my mom and I shopped, my dad, interested in cameras, went into an appliance store. Two hours later, we received a

panicked call. “I bought a $20 filter, and the cashier charged me $200. He won’t give me a refund no matter what I say.” The cashier had seen my dad as another Asian tourist, a brokenEnglished ignorant, someone who could be easily beguiled. When my mom walked into the store with her menacing put-togetherness, the cashier quickly turned polite, as if being able to read between the lines with her fluency alone. The refund was handled swiftly, undermining the hours my dad had just spent in sweating, stuttering frustration. My dad was silent the whole drive home. The most frequent expression I saw in my dad’s public American persona was his hasty nod, reassuring the other that he understood, even if he hadn’t. Speaking became a strain for him, speaking became political. Most English-speaking people will meet my dad and call him a quiet man. He wasn’t always quiet.

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Sana Siddiq ‘16 enjoys melodrama a little bit more than is strictly good for her.

departure, arrival excerpted from full text

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This is bad. This is real bad. I mean, I’m just going to go back to sleep in the plane like I always do, but damn, what about our interview. Baba’s dealing with it like he usually does—with his I’m sure it’ll work out attitude and a slightly strained facial expression. Mama has descended into panic mode, and now we are obligated to sit there and endlessly comfort her. Osama doesn’t care too much. I forgo my obligation to comfort and decide to pass out again, largely indifferent. For this, I get a dirty look from Mama. Oh yes, this will come to a head at some point. We’re disembarking now. Game plan is to make the airport a home for the next few hours while we wait for the word on another flight. They gave us lunch vouchers, which is sweet I guess. We get settled into an empty boarding area, put our bags down. I pick a place near the airport windows to get the most out of that glowing afternoon sun. It’s funny how the grotesque metal arches and the fancy tiles and the rows of maroon seats can become expansive, almost beautiful, with the touch of the sun. Having recovered my sleep, I am in a much better mood. I’ve always liked airports and flights because they give you a chance to disconnect from the world. The Wi-Fi services tend to be spotty internationally, I have no roaming, and in my disconnect, I unravel myself and my thoughts and lay them out and think. But this time, there’s the whole family. So Baba is trying to be cheerful, he starts thinking about lunch options as though we had the world’s cuisine at our fingertips. (Honestly, I didn’t appreciate it then, but my dad actually tries real hard to make the best of things and keep us all on board.) My

brother says he’s honestly not too hungry. Mama is still agitated and becoming more and more so as the rest of us attempt normalcy. ‘There’s no need to eat. We need to find another flight out of here.’ Which of course is not really up to us, which is of course is what is stressing her out. ‘I think I want some ice cream,’ I say. Baba and I debate the merits of a McFlurry versus a regular ice cream cone (do they have the ones dipped in chocolate? heaven!) Mama is still waiting for a response to her outburst. Osama says he wants a cone, too. Baba asks for a sundae. ‘Okay, Sana, here, take the cash and get us all ice creams.’ I take the money and then turn to Mama—‘do you want anything Mama?’ And shit goes down. We’re standing sort of at the front of the boarding gate, Osama and Baba to my left and Mama standing slightly apart to my right. ‘Kya ho gaya hai tum sub ko? Kya mein he eik pagal hoon jis ko is flight ke koi tension hai? Hah? Koi dhururat nahi hai is ko ice-cream khilanai ki. Waisai to kuch nahi karti ghar war main or bus usko ice cream khilado! Chup chap ke bait jao, kiso ko koi icecream ke dhururat nahi hai.’ She’s yelling now. And my face is screwed up as I’m trying desperately not to cry. Why does she always do this? Always make her frustration about me and something that I’m somehow doing wrong? It’s probably because I’m the only one who might give a shit about her breakdown.

out of the airport and pooling at its open doors. People cutting in line, the evil looks congealing into a tangible oiliness overhanging the small room, the bodies too close together, the four of us attempting to stop people cutting in between our group. The silence is stony among us but once or twice we yell at the man who’s tried to get in front of us and it provides some relief. The khuary is at our throats now, slowly tightening its noose. We wait at the baggage carousels along with many faceless others, and mine arrives. Then my dad’s, then my brother’s. My mom is angry at the universe and she concentrates her voluminous contempt at one point in space, at the carousel, and waits. And we all wait some more. Her bag, of all our bags, is lost. Unhelpful flight representative says not much can be done. Her angry tears are barely kept at bay. She is a warrior fighting on, on her own, against the manifest unfairness of the world, and of her lot in particular.

— Arrival in Islamabad. Pleasant evening, light breeze. Disgruntled family. Passport control lines leaking 34 | VISIONS

Suspension Lounge Chair | Medium Pezanne Khambatta, RISD ‘17 is an Industrial Design student.

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My Second Home | Photography Do-Kyung Lee, RISD ‘17 is longing for the exotic scenes of summer in Vietnam.

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artwork :

In Between | Intaglio drypoint print Tiffany Pai, RISD ‘17 BFA Illustration

mary ngà nguyen ’17 finds peace and kindred spirits in floating mangroves.

mãt gõc// rootlessness

“oh you’re returning to your motherland?” when do a land and history that you never knew become yours? my “motherland” is a mix of oppressed and oppressor by blood, a history of suffering by nation, a history of imperialism remember, I’m hyphenated “were your parents affected by Agent Orange?” why does a war that I never knew shape my life? perhaps because it never ended in my father’s mind a Việt Nam preserved in cut ties and crossed borders pain that reaches through time and bodies remember, I’m hyphenated “can you read this?” how does my tongue feel for unfamiliar letters? speaking becomes a negotiation of accents enough eloquence for respect enough fragmented phrases to float remember, I’m hyphenated uống nước nhớ nguồn remember the source when drinking water mary (ngà)

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untitled (tableware) | medium Brandon Kento Saisho, RISD ‘16 is currently soul-searching.

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portrait | oil on canvas Jefrey Hsueh, RISD ‘17 Illustration

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artwork :

Mother’s Bean Paste Stew | Hand colored linocut on paper Joanna Seul, RISD ‘17 is an illustrator and an avid coffee consumer from California.

Lloyd Sy ‘16 has a gym schedule that varies by day.

last grains of rice

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By July 2013 my grandfather only had four toes left. He had lost an entire set of toes in the Korean War, something that gave me an “interesting fact about myself ” in icebreakers for years to come. Another toe had developed gangrene a few months before (a consequence of his diabetes) and needed amputation. His worsening health necessitated a visiting nurse’s appointment three times a week. I had a relatively lax internship that summer, so I spent most days sitting with my laptop next to him in our living room, waiting for the nurse to come. It was his habit to be early: he woke up at five and slept at six. “When is she coming?” he asked me one day, at eleven in the morning. “In a few hours,” I said, not looking up, reading a dozen news stories in thirty minutes. He grumbled and smacked his lips in disapproval. Then he did nothing. What astounded me about him was his ability to sit sedentary with absolutely nothing to do for hours. I wondered if he was reviving old memories, re-watching the montage of greatest hits accumulated over eight decades. Perhaps the yellow, fish‐like eyes that stared at the wall were in fact instruments of a projector, like ones they used on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Incheon in the 1950’s. My grandpa was well‐renowned for his calligraphy there; other sailors had him write their love letters. 11 AM is time to start getting ready for lunch in our household. Only he and I were there that day, so we were planning on eating leftovers. But one always needs fresh rice. Rice typically takes twenty to twenty-five minutes to cook. It’s a simple process: scoop half of a cup per person into the stainless steel container, then fill it with

water so that the distance between the top of the rice and the top of the water is half of an index finger. Click a little switch on the rice cooker, and wait. I prepared to do so today ‐ but when I pulled out the rice container I saw that the last person to use it had not removed the extra rice, the grains that hadn’t been scooped out after dinner. There are competing philosophies on how to deal with these remains. My father advises picking them out and throwing them away, because reheated rice in small amounts never tastes good. My mother, who is several orders of magnitude less patient, prefers to leave the rice in the container as the new ones cook ‐ the old rice will burn up and disintegrate. My grandpa, however, told me that whoever finds the straggling rice grains has to scoop them out and eat them right then and there. Rice, after all, comes into this world to be eaten, and it would be cosmic injustice to do otherwise. That day I followed my grandpa’s advice. Several hours after we had eaten, the visiting nurse arrived. Today she was showing me how to change my grandpa’s gauze, which was covering up his scars. Delicately, the woman unwrapped the bandages from his foot and threw away the old gauze. “First, you wipe it clean, removing any strands of gauze. Then you put in the new one, right here — wedge it in this cavity where the toe used to be — and then wrap it all up again.” Procedural, like cooking rice. As she explained this I examined my grandfather’s foot, pale compared to the rest of his body. Sheets of skin peeled away from the crevice, former home of his middle toe. He couldn’t move his toes separately anymore —they swung up and down as a unit, a collusion that had

banded together after the fall of their lost comrade. Every night I helped my grandpa climb the stairs. One‐two, one‐two, at each step. I wondered about the proper way to deal with the rice stragglers, those grains which had to be dealt with before the new batch could be cooked and eaten. How was it that my grandpa could sit in a room for three hours without saying anything, without

occupying himself ? “Are you happy?” I asked him at the top of the steps. “Of course!” he replied enthusiastically. Rice exists to be consumed; life to be met with enthusiasm. My grandpa passed five months later. His final cause of death, however, was not disintegration: his failing health did not peter its way out gradually unto silence. One morning in the hospital, he fell down and hit his head.

Suddenly, like a lightning bolt. Had he not, he might have had a few months left. It would be easy to say that death robbed him early. I would prefer to think that he had conquered life.

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A Sense of — | Typographic/Illustrative Book Project Sarah Im, RISD ‘17

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Editors-in‑Chief Mia Gold ‘17, Lisa Lee ‘17

Elizabeth Huh ‘19 Victoria Huynh ‘19

Managing Editor Soyoon Kim ‘18

Copy Editing Staff Paige Morris ‘16 Alicia Devos ‘18 Atalanta Shi RISD ‘17

Art & Photography Editor Eveline Liu ‘19 Literary Editor Andrea Zhu ‘17 Layout & Design Editor Sarah Im ‘17

On the Cover Mirror Frames Jean Wei, RISD ‘17 Digital

Layout Editor Emeritus Jason Fujikuni ‘17 Networking Chair Ananya Shah ‘17 Webmaster Grace Sun ‘16 Publicity Chair Miranda Chao ‘18

Inside Cover Mirror Frames Yuko Obe, RISD ‘17 Digital

mission statement

Freshman Representative Linda Park ‘19 Editorial Assistants Haley Lee ‘18

Printer Brown University Graphics PrintNinja Made in PRC A very special thanks to ... Kisa Takesue Undergraduate Finance Board Pan Asian Council Asian American Heritage Series Brown Center For Students of Color JNBC Public Humanities Center Office of Institutional Diversity Department of Comparative Literature Department of Music Department of East Asian Studies Contributors and staff Contact visions.brown@gmail.com visions-magazine.org facebook.com/Visions.Brown @VISIONSBrown

Visions is a publication that highlights and celebrates the diversity of Brown and RISD’s Asian/Asian American community. We are committed to being an open literary and artistic forum for Asians and Asian Americans, as well as other members of the university community, to freely express and address issues relating to both the Asian and Asian American experience. visions further serves as a forum for issues that cannot find a voice in other campus publications. As a collaborative initiative, VISIONS attempts to strengthen and actively engage Brown and RISD’s vibrant community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as the larger Providence community and beyond.

the family

Miranda Chao, ’18 aspires to be an old and friendly village witch. Yvonne Fong, ‘18 We finish each other’s… Jason Fujikuni, RISD ‘17 sandwiches. Mia Gold, ‘17 tries to find harmony between nostalgia and wanderlust. Elizabeth Huh, ‘19 has an unusual and impressively flexible neck. Victoria Huynh, ‘19 ~contacted Sarah Im, RISD ‘17 yearns for a side of butterbeer with every meal. Soyoon Kim ‘18 nods yes, takes your hand, and leads you through a door. Haley Lee, ‘18 ~contacted Eveline Liu, ‘19 is a homebody. Linda Park, ‘19 ~contacted Ananya Shah, ‘17 ~contacted Grace Sun, ‘16 needs to just do it. Andrea Zhu, ‘17 ~contacted

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