Finding Bigfoot Is Easier Than Finding Myself

Posted on by Wynter Miller

“BI6FOOT” by Jacqueline Vogtman

I’ve always lived within view of a church steeple. From my childhood apartment to the living room of the duplex where I received my first kiss from the landlord’s son to the small split-level my parents were able to buy when I was in high school, there was always a church steeple in the distance. Maybe that’s what was missing my first year away at college, all the way across the country in California. When I returned home, the steeple was a comforting sight. Far away, the church looked magical, rising from the pages of a fairytale. Up close, though, one could see the chips in the paint, the cracks in the plaster, the repairs that were so desperately needed.

That’s what we did over the summer, my father and me. Since the recession hit two years earlier, he’d been making money fixing up old homes in the area, doing everything from painting to drywall to roof repair. Because I was home from school, my dad enlisted me to help with his new project, restoring the time-bruised Reformed Church—paint, shingles, shoring up the steeple so it would last another hundred years beyond the three hundred it had already been standing.

The first day on the job, I saw it: the truck with the license plate that read BI6FOOT. It was a mid-sized pickup, the generic type one often sees here in our corner of rust-belt Pennsylvania. The bumper was covered with stickers. I BELIEVE, with a shadowy image of Sasquatch. THEY’RE OUT THERE, with the cartoonish face of Bigfoot. BIGFOOT RESEARCH TEAM. A Bigfoot family, an angry Bigfoot giving the middle finger, an even angrier Bigfoot with a speech bubble saying DON’T TREAD ON ME.

I stood there for a long time looking at the truck. At first I chuckled, and then I felt a sort of sad curiosity. I should have been helping my dad haul paint cans, but I stood staring at the I BELIEVE sticker. The truck was empty, parked on the side of the road next to the church. It fascinated me that a person could believe so unwaveringly in what was almost certainly a myth. How could someone have so much faith in Bigfoot when God and even people were so hard to believe in?

My dad called my name, so I grabbed the last two paint cans and went to help him lay drop cloths over the church’s rose garden. By the time I looked back, the truck was gone.

I saw the BI6FOOT truck again a week later. We were working on the roof now. Many of the shingles had fallen off, but there were a few intact. It reminded me of my mom’s chemo hair when she had breast cancer a few years ago, the little patches that clung to her scalp, stubborn. My dad was up on the roof scraping off those remaining shingles, the ones that had weathered the storms, when I spotted the BI6FOOT truck right before it turned the corner. I caught a glimpse of the driver this time—just a dim figure wearing a baseball cap. I called up to my dad.

“See that truck?”

He paused, looked down at me, wiped his forehead. “What truck?”

I pointed, but the truck was already out of sight. “Never mind.” I picked up an errant shingle that had fallen onto the grass, chucked it onto the tarp with the rest. “Just a truck covered with Bigfoot stickers.”

“Huh,” he grunted. “Yeah, there’s a group around here that goes hunting for Bigfoot. Call themselves the Sasquatch Society.” He coughed, spit. “Funny what people will believe.”

I thought about him and Mom. They made me go to church my whole childhood, get all the sacraments. I hated confession. Why did I have to tell my secrets to a stranger who proceeded to scold me for them? Like the time I told the priest my neighbor had asked to look down my underpants the summer before I turned eleven, and since I pulled them down myself I suspected it must have been my fault, and the priest confirmed my suspicion.

Still, I believed back then. I’m not sure I could say the same for my parents. They brought me because they thought they were supposed to. And when my mother’s father died, she stopped going altogether, didn’t even go back to bargain with God when she was diagnosed with cancer. So my dad and I bargained for her, and he continued to take me to church until I left for college. That first semester, I often joined the other Catholic students at Mass in the quad. Right before spring break, though, I stopped. Something happened that I wanted to forget, something that damaged the part of me that believed, like a scratch in a record so I could no longer hear God’s voice.

I stared at the empty corner where the BI6FOOT truck had turned. “Yeah,” I agreed with my dad, too late. “Funny.”

When I wasn’t working with my dad, I went to parties. The party spot was in a forest called Genevieve Jump. There’s a legend attached to the name, which goes like this: Some servant girl hundreds of years ago is chased by a group of prominent townsmen trying to rape her, and she runs into the woods to escape them. They follow, and she finds herself on the ledge of a cliff. Jump, Genevieve, Jump! they taunt, not thinking she will. But she does. And while the legend says that halfway down she turned into a bird, the truth is she probably just died, dashed on the rocks below. But at least she got a forest named after her.

The woods were dense and blue-green, the floor blanketed with pine and studded with moss-covered rocks, cut through with narrow trails leading to a clearing. That’s where the parties happened. Someone would build a fire. Sometimes someone would bring a keg, but usually there was just a lot of booze in backpacks and coolers. Always there was someone playing guitar. Always there were faces I half-knew in the firelight.

That night, I got a text about a party and drove my dad’s truck to the lot by the woods. As I was walking up the trail, I heard rustling. I stopped and turned toward the noise. I heard leaves crunching and then saw a dark shape, larger than myself, moving through the trees. My heart quickened; I thought of the BI6FOOT truck, the I BELIEVE. I heard another noise behind me then—it was a couple acquaintances from high school, walking up the trail carrying a cooler. I turned back to the shape in the woods, but it was running off, a streak of white. I shook my head, laughing at myself. A deer. That BI6FOOT truck was giving me ideas.

About a dozen other people were in the clearing. I sat on a log beside the couple I’d walked up with, and they offered me a beer. I declined. Over the past year at college, vodka had become my drink of choice, the best drink for forgetting.

I drank with these two, a girl and guy who’d been dating since high school, and we told sad stories: a kid none of us knew too well who’d died of an overdose, another who’d died in a motorcycle accident. When there was a pause in conversation and I had downed a quarter of my bottle and was feeling a glow, my mind went back to BI6FOOT.

“Have you guys heard of the Sasquatch Society?” I asked.

The guy laughed and rolled his eyes, and his girlfriend playfully hit him. “Shut up,” she said. “My uncle’s a member. He goes to the woods and tries to get photos. I think he’s part of some alien hunter group too. People around here are into weird shit.”

“Unemployment,” the guy followed up. “Too much time on their hands.”

I stood up, swayed, stared into the woods.

“Do you guys think he’s out there?”

“My uncle?”

“No,” I said. “Bigfoot.”

“You’re drunk.”

I saw someone playing guitar on the other side of the fire, surrounded by a group of people, some I knew from high school, some who graduated ten or even twenty years ago. I walked over, wondering how they all ended up here. In high school, everyone talked about wanting to get out, but then somehow they all returned, kept showing up at parties like this one. I guess I was no exception.

I was starting to wonder if something was hiding, waiting for me to find it.

In California, the woods were different. The trees—it’s hard to imagine their enormity without seeing them. Like dinosaur thighs. And the smell was unlike any forest I’d been to. The sharp scent of pine mingled with earthy cedar and dank loam. There was magic in those woods, strange bugs and light that danced. When I walked around the ferns, I imagined fairies lived under their leaves. My hometown woods, though, had never seemed full of magic. Until now. Because now, I was starting to wonder if something was hiding, waiting for me to find it. I wasn’t sure I believed just yet. More like the poster hanging in Mulder’s office in the X-Files reruns I sometimes watched with my parents: I want to believe.

I drifted and swayed. At one point I got up and started dancing. Someone grabbed my hips, but I broke away. Then I heard rustling in the woods and wandered over to the edge of the clearing. I made out a sound, low, guttural. I clutched my bottle and walked into the darkness.

Something was moving up against a tree. When I got a few feet in, I felt my heart drop when I realized it wasn’t Sasquatch I was seeing; it was a man, pushing a woman up against a tree trunk, kissing her, rubbing his hands over her body. One breast was exposed, bare nipple to the cool night. My own nipples hardened, arousal or fear, I wasn’t sure.

I stepped back and was about to walk away, but I landed on a twig, and the man turned around. His face had a thick look about it. His eyes burned through the darkness as they stared at me. I was afraid he was going to yell or chase me, but instead he smiled.

Somehow, that was worse.

I met Asher in the darkroom at college, though I didn’t see him at first, just smelled him. It smelled like someone had been jogging through a spice market, and I was attracted to that smell even before he stepped out of the shadows. He had been taking one of his photos out of a developing tray when I came in. He was a photography major, declared, I found out later. I admired that kind of firm decision. I loved photography too, but was still undecided.

After our first meeting, Asher invited me to his dorm, which smelled like him and was delightfully messy, the walls plastered with art. The next week he invited me to a photography exhibit, and then we were pretty much a couple. We went to parties together, because that’s what freshmen did, though I always got so much drunker than him. Asher once told me he liked me better when I was sober, which made me secretly happy even though I acted offended at the time. Everyone else at college seemed to like me better when I was drunk. Asher, to my great surprise, seemed to like me the way I was.

Over winter break, I found myself missing him. When I got back, I told him I was ready. We spent that first night after winter break on his small, squeaky mattress, trying to have sex for the first time. It took a while, and when he was finally able to enter me, it hurt—a stinging pain, sharp and burning. In the days afterward, I took naked selfies and immediately deleted them, trying to see what he saw when he looked at me. But then I remembered he wasn’t seeing me like this; he was on top of me in the dark, too close to see the whole of me.

On the nights I didn’t spend with him, I touched myself, tried to give myself pleasure and succeeded, only to be too self-conscious to come when he was inside me. Still, I enjoyed it—the way he lit a candle, dangerous because it was prohibited in the dorms, and the music he streamed from his computer, always some echoic guitar and sad voice like Nick Drake, the glow of the screen illuminating his silhouette as he leaned over me and asked Is this okay? and Are you ready? and Does this feel good? The answer, with him, was always yes.

Asher was about the same height as me, which hadn’t been the case with my few boyfriends from in high school. It was exhilarating, really, to stand toe to toe with a man and be staring directly into his eyes. He had one hazel eye and one green, and black hair that curled down over the light brown skin of his face, the product of a Haitian mom and an Irish dad. He was sensitive about his height, but I never thought of him as short because he carried himself with such confidence, like the time he stood on a picnic table in the quad during a thunderstorm and did an impression of Prince singing “Purple Rain” to a crowd of drunk freshmen.

One of Asher’s friends from photography class, a blond boy named Erit, was about a foot taller than him. Erit was his nickname, pronounced Errit-Errit-Errit; he said life was about making records, and he was scratching them. Erit was a senior and was a staple at all the parties, in dorms and frat houses and the ones in the quad that got busted, and he always had a new girl, usually a freshman.

One night there was a party in Erit’s dorm. Asher left early; I stayed. There was music, dancing. Someone snorted a Xanax and fainted. We laughed. Erit touched my neck and told me it was small, so small he could probably snap it. Somehow, I took that as a compliment. Plastering the walls were posters of musicians and naked women, not the artistic black-and-white nudes that Asher had on his wall, but glaring, oil-slicked porn stars with impossibly pert breasts. I noticed these naked women more as the crowd thinned out and became just a few of us, and finally just me and Erit. By that point I was drifting in and out of blackout. I found myself sitting on the toilet, not sure how I got there. I was aware of my body only in long blinks of consciousness.

The next morning, I woke up to fuzzy light, dry mouth, pounding head, a sick feeling. I was in Erit’s bed, naked. The significance of that didn’t hit me until he said, his back turned, “You need to get the morning-after pill.”

I tried to remember what happened but couldn’t. The memory was in a locked drawer that I couldn’t open, would never be able to open. I would never know if I wanted it or if I didn’t. At first I didn’t tell anyone, but I wanted answers to those questions, and I figured if I couldn’t answer them, maybe someone else could. I told my roommate, then my RA. They both laughed it off: That’s what happens when you drink too much. I told God, too, and he seemed to call the same thing down to me in his booming, deep voice, and then I began to wonder why God’s voice was booming and deep, and not more like mine or my mother’s. That’s when I stopped going to Mass and swore off ever going to confession, convinced the priest would say the same thing, or worse, chastise me for having sex in the first place.

When I came home for spring break, my mother seemed concerned. Is everything all right, honey? I said yes. My dad sat me down and told me money was tight, and I would not be able to return to school in the fall. Even with my scholarship, tuition was expensive, and so was airfare. He told me this with a grave face, holding his body stiff. Okay, I shrugged. I won’t go back.

I spent my final two months of college drinking as much as I could, trying to forget—but what was there to forget, exactly? I was waiting for someone to tell me I was wronged, but no one did. The only one I didn’t tell was Asher. He texted and left voicemails and finally knocked on my door, asking me what was the matter, but after weeks of me ignoring him, he finally cooled, and since what we had was unstated anyway, there was no messy breakup. We just stopped hanging out. The day I left campus for the last time in May, I was hoping to say goodbye to Asher, but instead Erit caught me in the quad. He gave me a hug, and I hugged him back, even though his body made me feel like retreating into a shell. The last image I had of college was Erit’s face, smiling, and then the feeling of his eyes on me as I walked away.

The morning after the party in the woods, my dad woke me and said we had to work, so I popped a couple Advil, gulped some coffee, and followed him out to the driveway. He stopped short. “Why’s the truck parked so crooked?”

The coffee churned in my stomach. “I was tired, I guess?” I looked down at my hands, tried scratching some of the dirt out from under my nails. “Sorry.”

He stared at me for a long time like he wanted to say something. Finally he just said, “Let’s go.”

I hopped in the truck, and we drove to the church, a five-minute drive through town. We had just finished the roof, so we were moving on to the steeple. My dad said there were only minor repairs. We were going to replace some of the old siding and fix the little vented windows my dad called louvers, but it turned out, for a minor job, there was a lot of work involved. Rather than using a ladder, one of us had to be in a harness attached to a pulley, suspended in between the scaffold and the steeple. My dad set everything up, but when he tried to put on the harness, it wouldn’t buckle over his beer-and-soda-swollen belly, even when he loosened the straps.

“What is this, made for kids?” he grumbled. “I bet that’s why I got it so cheap.”

I watched him struggle with the harness, his big hands fumbling with the buckle. Finally I said, “I can do it.” I needed to do something to make up for drunk driving his truck the night before.

“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll just call Red or Flint.” His buddies always had colorful names. He took out his phone.

“I want to do it, Dad.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, and asked again like a hundred times as he attached the harness to me. Then, as I was being hoisted up, he switched to, “Are you okay?”

At first it was almost fun, like being a kid on the swings at a carnival, but as I got higher I began to feel unmoored. I wanted to grab hold of something, but there was nothing except the steeple, which I couldn’t wrap my arms around. I swayed in the air, imagined myself falling like Genevieve Jump, dashed on the sidewalk. I thought about praying, but could no longer imagine who I’d be praying to. My heart was speeding, pounding against the harness, which was squeezing my chest, making it hard to breathe. Everything seemed brighter. The cars sped by below, so far away but so loud. A car horn blared and a man yelled something out the window at me, making my heart speed faster. I started to shake.

“I’m not okay,” I squawked. And then, louder: “Get me down!”

My dad lowered me as fast as he could and let me sit in the grass still wearing the harness, crying. I knew he was looking at me, wondering what to do, feeling helpless, but I was neck-deep in the muck of my own feelings. Hungover, tired, and trembling, I didn’t even know what I was saying. Later, when he drove me home, my dad told me that I kept repeating, “I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure.”

I decided to take the next week off. My dad said the steeple was a bigger job than he’d thought, so he’d get a few of his buddies to help him. I also decided to take the week off from drinking. It was strange, waking up with a clear head. Every morning I got up early, took my camera, and drove my mom’s car to the woods.

For the first few days, I stayed on the trails, breathing in pine, listening to birds. By mid-week, I was venturing off-trail, searching for something I wouldn’t yet admit to myself. I was sure there was magic in these woods, even though we were minutes from a highway. By the end of the week, I had photos of trees, birds, leaves, dappled light, mossy rocks, my own shadow—and nothing else.

I was sure there was magic in these woods, even though we were minutes from a highway.

Then, on Friday, after wandering the woods all morning, I walked back to the lot and saw the BI6FOOT truck. The driver must have been searching for the same thing I was. I went back to the car and called my mom, asked her if it was okay if I kept her car out a bit longer. She said it was fine. She was a kindergarten teacher and was off for the summer, spent her days dipping her feet in the same plastic kiddie pool I used to splash in over a decade ago, her chest flattened under her bathing suit from the mastectomy, a sight that made my knees weak but also made me want to be strong like her. I was about to end the call, but on the other end of the line there was a long pause thick with some kind of question.

“Honey, is something wrong?”

I wanted to tell her. I wanted so badly to tell her what was wrong, but I couldn’t. So instead, I talked about Bigfoot.

“You know that truck I was telling you about, with all the Bigfoot stickers? It’s here. So I’m gonna wait ’til the driver gets back, maybe see if they’re heading over to one of those Sasquatch meetings.”

I could hear the worry lines forming on her forehead. But all she said was, “Just be careful. And be home for dinner, okay?”

I was oddly disappointed when I hung up. Maybe part of me wanted her to give voice to her worries, to confirm what I was beginning to suspect about the world. I slumped down in the seat, waiting for the BI6FOOT driver to return. It took over an hour, but he finally did, a man wearing a baseball cap that shadowed his face and holding what looked, in my first heart-pounding glance, like a gun, but was actually a camera with a very long lens. When the truck pulled out of the lot, I did, too, and I followed it down the road into town. We drove past the church, where I saw my dad’s friend Flint poised in the air, dangling beside the steeple. He was laughing, smoking a cigarette up there, making it look so easy.

The truck pulled into the Elk Lodge lot. I parked on the far end and watched the man emerge from the truck. I waited until he had entered the building to get out of my car. I was in luck: there was a flyer at the door advertising the Sasquatch Society.

When I entered the large hall, I felt eyes on me. I was suddenly too aware of my body. I waved awkwardly, but no one waved back, just resumed their coffee and conversation. The chairs were arranged in a semi-circle like an AA meeting or a therapy group, both of which I had attended very briefly and then dropped in my first couple weeks home from college. I couldn’t tell which man was the BI6FOOT driver, because everyone in the room looked alike, late-middle-aged white men wearing work boots with relatively little evidence of work. There were variations, of course; some had bushy beards, some had scruff; some shirts were emblazoned with Budweiser logos, some with American flags, some with both. They all stood with their legs spread, large men with beer bellies in various stages of gestation, their voices competing for loudness.

I hovered near the refreshment table until most of the men were sitting down, and then I grabbed a powdered donut and sat down, too. I shifted in my seat, pulling at the hem of my shorts. A man stood at the front next to a screen and welcomed everyone to the meeting. I thought he would launch into the slideshow, but instead he pointed at me.

“It looks like we have a new member.”

Everyone stared. I tried to smile. “Hi,” I croaked, powder from the donut stuck in my throat. They examined me for another excruciating moment, as if waiting for me to share something like in the therapy group, but I was as wordless now as I was then. They turned back to the slideshow.

The man up front clicked through slide after slide of fuzzy pictures, the men claiming they saw something at the edges, a snatch of fur, a shadow. I began to find the way they were talking about Bigfoot unpleasant, their voices dripping with hunger. Caught, they said. Caught a glimpse. Caught a scent. Caught on camera. One man stood up and shared his encounter story. He said he rode his motorcycle out to Genevieve Jump in the middle of the night and walked through the woods, off-trail, no flashlight, nothing. He followed every footstep, and eventually he felt his skin brushed by the rough fur of some large beast. He tried to grab hold of it, but the creature growled and ran away. He knew it was Bigfoot because it had a smell like nothing else. A deep musk, more pungent than a herd of deer, like the smell of a wet hairy pussy.

The men laughed. I stiffened.

The speaker looked at me, as if suddenly remembering I was there. “Oh. Sorry, sweetie.” They laughed again.

I had an urge to flee but decided to wait until the slideshow ended. Before I could leave, though, one of the men cornered me by the donuts. 

“So you’re interested in Bigfoot, huh?”

I nodded, tried not to look him in the eye. “I guess so.”

He chuckled. “We don’t get many girls here.” He paused, stepped closer, trying to be conspiratorial. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”

I could smell his breath. Coffee and gingivitis. The fluorescent lights were bright, and everyone around me was moving, voices in the background like mechanical chirping. Without saying anything, I shrank away from the man and ran out of the building. I sat in the car and cried.

Next to the lot was a playground with rusty equipment I used to play on after school. The empty swings creaked in the wind and seemed to taunt me: How could you have believed? I thought about going home but didn’t want to face my parents and their worried foreheads, their unasked questions, the answers to those questions swarming inside me, stinging. I needed something to ease the sting. So I went back to the woods.

That night, I walked the trail until I heard the pop and crackle of the bonfire, the faint music of bottles clinking, sloppy guitar strumming. In the clearing, I saw about a dozen people. I recognized them as regulars, but at the moment they felt like strangers. I sat on a log alone and drank until I didn’t feel alone anymore.

I got up and danced with a red-headed girl I knew from high school. I chugged gulps of vodka until the woods spun around me even when I wasn’t spinning. Eventually the faces at the party blended together, but there was one that stood out. It was the man with the thick face I had seen a week ago pushing a girl up against a tree. The whites of his eyes were red. He smiled and asked my friend to kiss me. She did, and I let her. Then the man took my hand, and I followed him, one foot in front of the other, into the woods.

I tripped and fell onto the damp leaves. The man rolled me over onto my back.

“Oopsie daisy,” he said, looking down at me. He was so tall, a skyscraper. I felt dizzy even lying on the ground. I hoped he would help me up, but instead he bent over me. I made a feeble attempt to rise.

“Where you going?” he asked softly, and began to kiss my neck.

I felt vomit rising in my throat. He unzipped my hoodie and ran his hands over my breasts. Finally I pushed against his chest, and when I couldn’t shove him off, I raised one of my legs and kneed him as hard as I could in his groin. He rolled off me, and I ran.

I didn’t know where I was running. I was deep in the woods before I realized I was lost. I wanted to lie down. And then I heard something. A rustling that sounded like the swish of chiffon skirts. Twigs snapping like wishbones. And I smelled musk, deep and dusky, reminding me of old churches and the basements of childhood duplexes, reminding me of menstrual blood or the scent left on my fingers after I touched myself at night thinking of Asher. I thought of Asher now. I thought of Erit. Then I thought of the thick-faced man.

Had he followed me?

But it was not him.

I saw the shape as it passed. Even in the dark I could tell it was not human, nor was it animal. It was something else entirely.

I always thought Bigfoot would have a lumbering frame, eight feet tall, five hundred pounds. But this creature was lithe. It wove through the trees gracefully, effortlessly, while I followed, clumsy and drunk.

The woods became less dense, and finally there was a clearing, and on the other end of the clearing, a cave. As the figure approached the cave, I was able to get a better look at it, the light of the half moon shining down. Rust-brown fur over the body. Slightly bigger than a human man, but not by much. And a shape that curved outward at the hips, a shape sort of like my mother’s. This creature: it had breasts. She turned to stretch in the moonlight, made a whining growl, a sound of pleasure.

Bigfoot was female.

My fear, which had followed me here, was gone. I stepped closer to the lip of the clearing. I tried to step quietly to avoid detection, but the truth was I wanted her to notice me. I was so alone. I wanted this creature to see me, to know me. She was alone, too.

I stared at her, willing her to stare back. Finally, she did. First it was a head-cocked empty stare in my direction, and then her gaze narrowed, focused, and the darkness of her eyes seemed to capture me in a beam of their light. I wondered how she saw me. Small figure, dressed in black, long hair wild with twigs, I may have appeared to her a kindred spirit. I was, I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her so many things. But the way she looked at me, the kindness softening her eyes, it seemed like she could smell it on me, in the knowing way that animals do, like a wound. Maybe she was wounded too.

She turned and walked into the cave. Heart pounding, I followed. But when I entered, there was no sign of her. The only thing that remained was her musk. She must have escaped deeper into the darkness, where I wouldn’t follow. I stared into that darkness for a long time, hoping to see her shape, until fatigue took over and I reclined on the cool cave floor. I was asleep in minutes. I may have been dreaming, but I thought I felt my cheek brushed with fur, coarse and warm. I thought I felt arms carry me to softer ground.

When I woke, I was lying on a pile of leaves. I didn’t see any sign of Bigfoot. I walked out of the cave, and in the weak dawn light I was able to find my way back to the trail. I followed it down to the parking lot, where my car was the only one left, and then I drove through the summer morning, cool enough to be misty but with the threat that heat would soon settle in. As I drove down the forest-framed highway, I kept wondering if I’d see a dark shape standing on the side of the road, staring at me as I drove away. I didn’t.

In town, I approached the corner of the church. The work was almost done now. I pulled over and got out of the car. I thought about the many people who had worked on the church over its three hundred years, from the ones who built it to those, like us, who repaired it, the evidence of our hands invisible. Deep magenta slashed across the sky behind the steeple. I had missed this when I was away at college, looking up at steeples, at points converging in the sky, evidence of our blind human reach into mystery like the faith of a girl leaping off a cliff and believing she’ll fly. The church looked fresh and young, new again, paint unchipped, smooth and white like spilled milk, but a scaffold was still erected beside it, a sign of repairs unfinished. A small bird perched atop the steeple cocked its head, as if asking me a question. I stood there a long time searching for the answer.

A truck pulled up to the curb behind me. When I turned, I saw my mom and dad rushing toward me, their faces knotted with concern. They stood on either side of me, a thousand unsaid words swarming, and because I didn’t know how to say sorry, I pointed at the bird.

“Starling, I think,” my dad said after a while. “Shakespeare’s bird.”

“Up close,” my mom said, “they’re iridescent. Green, purple.” She picked a leaf out of my hair. “They’re actually quite beautiful.”

The bird cocked its head again, and this time I knew the answer to its question. I held out my hands, palms up, between my mom and dad, like I used to do when I was little and asked to be lifted into the air. They grabbed hold.

“I have something to tell you,” I said, “and I hope you’ll believe.”

9 Books About Asian American Women Exploring Identity and Sexuality

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Even with recent superhero blockbusters, Asian Americans in modern media are often presented as traumatized restaurant children with angry parents or as nerds who finally made it into Harvard or Stanford. All these books by Asian American women move away from traditional narratives into stories about unique individual experiences that celebrate and interrogate womanhood, identity, and sexuality while breaking free from societal expectations of how we should be and act. 

American Woman by Susan Choi

American Woman is a fictionalization of the true kidnapping of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of a publishing magnate, by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Jenny Shimada, once a radical activist, has largely left the world of radical protesting behind until an old friend asks her to shelter and transport fugitives and their victim, Pauline, the fictionalized Patty Hearst. The novel focuses on the interactions between the group as they attempt to hide from the authorities and concludes with notes on how Asian Americans are perceived in the larger media and who really is the American woman.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li

Each story joins both the pain and luxury of living across borders between China and America, and explores who we want to be versus who we end up being. Love in the Marketplace follows a woman years after her boyfriend left her for another. In the titular story, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, a Chinese man visits his daughter in America shortly after her divorce and must come to terms with his own failed marriage. Yiyun Li paints the details in how expectations can fail reality and the ways we must come to terms with our values and ourselves.

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee’s debut, Free Food for Millionaires, focuses on hungry, social-climbing Casey Han and her journey to find herself instead of going to the prestigious Columbia Law School. Filial obligations and personal desires clash in this tight novel, especially in the backdrop of the upwardly mobile Korean American community in Queens. Min Jin Lee imbues each of her characters with an anger and a hunger; women do not fade into the backdrop as passive, well-educated beauties, but thrash with spite and longing.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

Bliss Montage highlights the apathy of daily life with the fantasy of the speculative. The first story, Los Angeles, originally published in Granta, follows a nameless woman who lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends and comes to grips with the emotional and physical abuse by one of her exes. Peking Duck makes readers question what a story is and who owns a story, especially the story of an immigrant woman who may not have the means to voice her dissatisfactions in English. The women in these stories are imperfect and are often highly aware of their imperfections.

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Sneha starts her corporate job in the Midwest and finds herself in a group of young people hoping to find love, meaning, and community in the midst of a recession in a society that values money and monotony. She develops a crush on Marina, a dancer from New Jersey, and deepens her friendship with Tig, another queer person of color, even as she admits that she is only attracted to thin, white women. The book is an honest portrayal of class dynamics and how we can build emotional intimacy despite the quiet chaos of modern life.

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

An unnamed 18-year-old woman works as a pizza delivery girl in Los Angeles and forms an obsession with a stay-at-home mother who orders pizza with pickles. Combining slacker novels a la Jack Kerouc and Asian American Twitter culture a la Cathy Park Hong, Jean Kyuong Frazier upends the “model minority” myth and presents us a wildly sympathetic protagonist who we understand not because we hope to aspire to her accomplishments, but because we can see ourselves in her faults.

The Sorrow of Others by Ada Zhang

In her debut book, Ada Zhang makes readers question what it means to understand others and thus, to understand ourselves. In Propriety, a young woman loses her virginity after a breakup with her Chinese boyfriend to distance herself from her mother before college. In The Subject, an artist paints the elderly stranger she lives with in Flushing. These stories ask readers how identity, expectation, and loneliness influence our interactions and relationships with the people around us.

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman

Narrator Razia has grown up in the close-knit Pakistani American community in Corona, Queens. While the story is, at its core, a coming-of-age novel about queer desire, it also touches upon religion, patriarchy, and teenage rebellion. As Razia’s world expands, she struggles against her parents’ fears and questions her own expectations and desires.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri’s second story collection focuses on Bengali immigrants to America and their children. In the titular story, a woman confronts similarities between her life and her late mother’s when her father returns from a trip in Europe. In Heaven-Hell, a woman remembers her mother’s love for her father’s graduate student.  The title and the epigraph, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House,” represent both the unpreventable disasters of daily life and the changes we actively choose to implement.

8 Books About the Lives of Single Mothers

Posted on by EL Assistant2

When I first became a single mother, I hid it from everyone, including myself. In my new book, The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays, I track the evolution of my relationship with motherhood, starting as a reluctant mother of two in a married household and ultimately ending as a single mother in suburbia (I openly considered this my personal nightmare for most of my youth, but I’m slowly coming around). Throughout the book, everything I thought I knew gets blown apart, including my belief that I am not a natural mother, or that there even is such a thing.

The stereotype of single mothers is one that reeks of shame and desperation. I knew there was more to that story, but it took me a long time to realize that I was a part of that cliché. I’ve since worked to search out stories of single motherhood that feel more nuanced, intellectual, and, even, joyful. There is plenty of complication and darkness—although single motherhood was a revelation for me personally, there is nothing about any kind of motherhood that is easy or uncomplicated. 

Here are a few books that delve into the life of single mothers, both fictional and real:

How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family by Sonora Jha

Sonora Jha is a single, immigrant mother who uses her own hopes and fears surrounding the possibility of raising a feminist son in America to reflect on the stories we tell each other about gender, violence, and love. Jha takes a hard look and offers clear-eyed and realistic blueprints for including social justice and feminist practices into everyday parenting in an effort to help build the next generation of men. She has a ferocious intellect, unstoppable warmth and generosity, and an uncompromising vision. The gorgeous mix of personal story and reporting makes the stakes of this narrative so intense that it becomes about so much more than mothers and sons.

Operating Instructions: A Journal of my Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott

In her mid-30s, Lamott has a child on her own, and the book is a chronicle of the very real mix of dark and light that is life with a newborn, from unending colic nights to the crack of your chest expanding from the overwhelming amount of sheer love. Even in the midst of chaos, she manages to find warmth and humor.  Lamott’s vulnerability with her struggles with sobriety, her brand of honesty and self-deprecation, and playfulness are what makes her book such a compelling read.

Animal: A Novel by Lisa Taddeo

A thriller and wild romp, we follow the protagonist, Joan, as she at once self-destructs and resurrects in the Los Angeles hills, where she has escaped to after a long history of being used and abused following a tony but tragic youth. While predatory men and a culture of sexualizing women are the focus, Joan is ultimately complicit in unexpected and difficult ways. I cannot give the full reason why I’m including this book in the roundup without giving away too much of the plot, but suffice to say that ultimately the heady mix of female rage, burning love, and cracked open desire is deeply redolent of the most animal parts of motherhood.  

Galatea: A Short Story by Madeline Miller

As with Miller’s other masterful stories, Galatea is a feminist retelling of an accepted Greek myth, in this case tracing the story of the sculptor Pygmalion who creates his perfect woman in marble. After a blessing from a goddess, the sculpture comes to life, but Pygmalion soon boils over with rage when he realizes that by breathing life into her stone beauty, his creation now also has a mind of her own with desires and independent thought. After giving birth to their child, Galatea can no longer pretend to be submissive and obedient, understanding that unless she leaves, she is locking her own daughter into a cycle of thwarted independence. Galatea breaks free, working to build a beautiful life alone with her child, for a period. This tiny book (all of 64 pages) feels giant, with characters who dig their talons into you and refuse to let go.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

When this collection blazed onto the scene in 2020, it won every award possible, putting West Virginia University Press on the map. The nine stories in this shatteringly beautiful collection are all part of a loosely interconnected galaxy in which Black women and girls move through kitchens, bedrooms, and back parking lots, searching for, and often finding, desire, agency, religion, and care. In the“Peach Cobbler,” a single mother is observed through her teenage daughter’s eyes, handing down her family recipe for the dessert, as well as much more than she intends. 

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Chan’s inspiration for this novel came from a real-life news story about a mother who left her child home alone to go to work and lost custody as a result. Frida Liu, the main character in this hauntingly incredible novel, also risks losing custody of her child to her ex-husband and his hyper-perfect younger mistress after a similar incident. She enters into a dystopian government reform program in an attempt to prove that she can become a “good mother” in the eyes of the state. It’s a kind of Margaret Atwood meets Octavia Butler-esque twist, but unfortunately, this commentary on the sacrifices and hard choices mothers are forced to make every day between providing for and caring for their children feels disturbingly realistic.

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

After 15 years of marriage, Olga’s husband abandons her and their young children one summer during a stifling heat wave in Italy. Throughout their marriage, her husband shaped Olga’s personality and choices, so much so that when he leaves she no longer knows who she is anymore in his absence. As the story unfolds, and she struggles to continue to care for the children while moving through the black hole of devastation that threatens to engulf her, Ferrante allows the reader such an intense and intimate look into Olga’s mind as she comes to terms with her new reality, and the claustrophobia of caring for children is heightened when the three of them become stuck in their high rise as Olga begins to unravel. Ultimately, Olga comes to understand it is not she who has been abandoned, but is the one who did the abandoning long ago, and Ferrante allows us to view a woman returning to herself: “He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong

Poet Jane Wong’s gorgeous memoir functions as a love song to her mother. This bi-coastal story flips between Wong’s childhood in New Jersey lived primarily in the family’s Chinese American restaurant and her adulthood as an academic in the Pacific Northwest. Wong’s portrait of her postal worker mother is blazingly beautiful, even and especially after her father abandons the family, disappearing into a gambling addiction. Although there is despair and heartbreak, the resounding note here is one of joy, resilience, and beauty.

A Secret Reverberates Across Four Generations of an East African Indian Family

Posted on by EL Assistant2

In her debut novel A History of Burning, Janika Oza gives us the story of a family, one migration journey at a time. Beginning with indentured labor that leads the first member of the family, Pirbhai, from his home in India to East Africa, we follow four generations across several continents and over one hundred years. In the next generation, Pirbhai’s daughter Rajni faces a second exile when she and her family are forced to leave Uganda during the expulsion of Asians in 1972. The family is set to migrate to Canada, but at the last minute, her revolutionary daughter Latika chooses a different path. Starting school in a new country, Latika’s son Hari feels the weight of these social and personal fissures before he even discovers the whole truth about his kin. The narrative ends in 1990s Canada in the midst of the Rodney King protests, though the family’s arc is far from finished. As Oza puts it, the ending is not an answer, but rather, a landing point.

Oza is a master of time, equipped with the ability to render a historical arc in mere paragraphs or to expand a single moment into the joys and sorrows of a lifetime. In 2022 Oza won the O. Henry Prize for her gripping short piece Fish Stories, originally published in The Kenyon Review. It’s a piece I can’t stop passing around between my students and colleagues, who become equally gripped by its sensory detail, its interplay between reality and grief, and its immense heart. 

I had the privilege of reading early excerpts of A History of Burning during a Tin House workshop in 2019, led by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Even then, the viscerally moving nature of the story leapt from the pages. That same year, a chapter of the novel was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize and published in Prairie Schooner. 

Recently, Oza and I sat down to have a conversation about the novel. We spoke about who gets to feel safety and security, writing an intergenerational narrative, and finding inspiration in her family history. 

Rosa Boshier González: A History of Burning stays true to its title by cataloging the symbol of fire throughout the novel. Can you unpack this symbol and how it shifts through the book? And why was that symbol of burning important to you? 

Janika Oza: I wanted a title that spoke to the themes of complicity and resistance running through the book. I landed on burning because when we think of a burning, what usually comes to mind is something that’s destructive or harmful or violent. Very often that’s true. But a burning can also be something that is purposeful or regenerative, like a controlled burning of a forest to encourage new growth. Throughout my novel, both of those possibilities are there.

RBG: I’m curious about the way that implication works in A History of Burning. Throughout the novel, you very deftly render the prejudices on both sides of ethnic and social conflicts, be it between Asians and Africans in Uganda and Kenya or white Canadians and recent immigrants in the wake of the Rodney King protests in 1991. Without giving too much away, towards the end of the novel there are twin acts of violence between two parties with very different ideologies. Was this a motif you were actively working towards?

JO: Bookending the motif of burning was not something I was actively working towards. But when I was thinking through these questions of complicity and resistance, I came up against questions of security and belonging: Who gets to feel safety and security in these countries? What does it mean for us to find refuge in a place that is also causing harm to other communities? What does safety mean in that context? 

What does it mean for us to find refuge in a place that is also causing harm to other communities?

The Rodney King protests in Toronto spiraled into a solidarity movement and series of internally-motivated protests around racial violence and police brutality; that felt like another moment to really dig into those questions of safety, and to consider how different communities are experiencing these adopted homes, which we’re told are havens. In many ways they are and in many ways they are not. 

RBG: Can you talk to me about the chronology of the book? 

JO: The reason why I wrote it chronologically is partly because of the scope. The novel spans over 100 years. So for pure practicality, I ended up doing it that way. 

Something else that was really important to me in the novel was being able to see the movements of, not only this family, these people, but of the movements through the generations of ideas, emotions, of trauma, of memory, all of that making their way through the earliest generation into the final generation in Toronto. The challenges that the first generation was grappling with—when they experienced rupture, when they faced being a part of this colonial construct and attempting to secure a place for themselves while also living true to themselves, while also taking care of their families—those continue through the other generations.

The youngest generation around the time of the protests in the ‘90s in Toronto are also still struggling with those same things and still struggling with how to live on this land and in community, and how to take care of one another and live with intention, and also survive. I could see this thread sort of moving through the generations, through the different times, through the different movements, whether it was independence in Uganda in the ‘60s or what we were just talking about in Toronto in the ‘90s. 

RBG: Has writing about social protest movements over the last hundred years informed your thinking around social movements today or your responses to them? Are contemporary social movements something that you’re interested in writing about in the future? 

JO: They’re certainly something I’m interested in writing more about. It’s so different today with the internet and social media. Social movements are organized and constructed through these new platforms. Of course, it allows for accessibility and reach, and also brings up new challenges of, like, actually engaging. We see so much performativity in politics. So I think writing about current events, whether in fiction or nonfiction, would be an entirely different kind of challenge, but it was definitely something I was holding in my mind as I wrote A History of Burning. 

RBG: This story spans a large amount of time—1898 to 1991—and four different generations. It has a prismic quality to it; we learn something new with each character. Why was an intergenerational narrative crucial to the telling of this story?

Janika Oza For me, the root of that is in my own family history and coming to this novel knowing very little about my family history. Three generations of my family lived in East Africa and then were expelled under Idi Amin’s dictatorship. It was not talked about very much. As I grew older, I became very interested in the fact that we didn’t talk about it. I realized somewhere along the way that I couldn’t write this novel if I wasn’t speaking to my family and my community about it. 

When we think of a burning, it’s something destructive. But a burning can also be purposeful or regenerative, like a controlled burning of a forest to encourage new growth.

A lot of the research process for this novel was through conversation and interview. I would speak to people who were in my generation, like me, descendants of this history. Mostly I was speaking to people who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s or even older who had real memories of this time and. It felt really important for me to honor that intergenerational exchange that I was able to engage in in writing this book and to put some of that into the novel itself. There was a lot of love in that research process.

 It also felt very important for me to explore the ways that, despite the breadth of time and place, that these characters our continually grappling with these same questions, and also to show the ways that, from one generation to the next, certain experiences, manifest in each generation, even if they’re not spoken about, even if a character has no idea what one or two generations before them went through. It is still somehow a part of their own lived experience. 

RBG: This research seems to be a reclamation of the Western understanding of archive.

JO: In my research I soon realized that there was very little written about this branch of history. This was yet another example of the erasure and the rewriting of a community’s history. That is when I realized that I would have to do the hard, scary thing and talk to my family and talk to my community. So I asked for help.

 My family connected me with more family who connected me with friends who connected me with temples. It was this chain that spread all across the world and all the places that our people scattered. There were a lot of WhatsApp conversations and Zoom and Skype calls. Going into the research, I would have a few larger points I would want to come towards but I would mostly allow the conversations to go where they did, knowing that it’s a very sensitive history, one that has not been spoken about very much. Sometimes it would take several conversations.

What was so special and beautiful about that process was that it really was this collective remembering and sharing. I still have some descendants of the Expulsion of Asians in Uganda, people of my generation, who will text me and say, my family just sat down and had this conversation and told these stories that we’ve never heard before. So there was this sense of an opening. I think there is a lot of freedom and power in being asked to share your story and to tell it the way that you remember it. 

RBG: In the first third of the novel, when Rajni tends to her child while also grieving, she decides that she is “whole enough to go on.” That struck me as a throughline in the book—characters who persevere, survive, and root out joy within their kinship again and again. Can you speak to this orbital resilience?

JO: I think the question of resilience is something that is tricky because ideally we shouldn’t have to be resilient. While resilience can be made to sound like something that is active, it’s actually reactive. It’s in response to repeated pain or suffering.

But it’s also undeniable that the characters in this book have experienced over time fractures and upheavals and are doing the only thing that they know how to do in those situations, which is persist. 

For many of the characters, there’s an imperative to go on for the people we love. There are times in the book where this comes at a cost. To the characters themselves, to those in positions of caretaking, like the moment you were just mentioning with Rajni. I think there are times when characters are called on to be selfless or self-sacrificing. 

RBG: How did your graduate work and professional background inform your writing? 

JO: Yes, definitely. I worked as a refugee settlement counselor and then a school settlement counselor, working with immigrant refugee families and navigating the settlement process, from housing to jobs to everything in between. Much of the time that I was writing this book, I was working in those environments. I was thinking a lot about my own position as someone who was born and raised in Canada, but whose family has come from elsewhere. I was really thinking about what can change over the course of one to three generations. I was thinking a lot about support. I was in a role that was attempting to offer some kind of support to people who are in those very precarious situations. I was thinking about, in the ’70s, when my family and community were going through this, what kinds of supports were and weren’t there, and also all the ways that this is not an equal terrain. Everyone does not receive the same supports or possibilities. The work opened my eyes to the bureaucracy and the actual gritty truth of migrating. I had me thinking a lot about the structures that make community possible, the necessity of that as the most. Integral support when a person has had to leave the place that they know, they often are leaving family and all their networks behind. 

RBG: In that same SmokeLong Quarterly interview, you asked, “Who am I fighting for on the page? What language do I need to do that justice?” What were your answers to those questions for A History of Burning?

JO: When I think about language, I think about literally what languages and I using to tell this story. And of course, it’s a book that I wrote in English. But it felt very important for me to also have lines and phrases be Swahili and Gujarati and to not give away a distinction between these languages, because the way that I learned them was very mixed. It comes out in daily life. To this day, there are words that we say at home that I don’t know if they are Swahili or Gujarati. It’s a testament to the places that my family comes from and the ways that our communities integrated and moved. So it felt necessary for me to honor that hybrid language throughout the book. 

The other place my mind goes when we talk about language to do this story justice is related to time. It took a long time for me to write this book. I was learning to write a book as I was writing this book, but I was also learning to listen to the stories of my family and my people. I was learning to sit with these histories that were often difficult to hear. I was learning to sit with the discomfort of learning things about my family or the places we’ve come from that I had never known. And all the complexity of being a migrant community in another colonized place. I think I had to give myself a lot of time to distill all of that and to really think about what I wanted to share, w pieces of family history, community history felt necessary to put into this book, what stories I wanted to keep close to my chest, and allowing for there to be purposeful silence. Allowing for it to be an actual choice, what I was writing and what I was not.

I’m a Transgender Scientist and I See Myself in “Frankenstein”

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but a vigilant and insomniac rationality”—Deleuze and Guattari

The fly’s head is rendered in microscopic detail: its bulging compound eyes set above a fleshy proboscis, cradled between its mouthparts. There is, however, something more unusual about this intimate portrait. A pair of finely bristled, jointed appendages protrude from the front of its head. Even to the untrained eye, it is unmistakable: legs are growing from where its antennae should be. It is grotesque. It is uncanny. It is so obviously made wrong.

I learned that this fly was created through the mutation of a single gene. This type of mutation is called a homeotic transformation, when one discrete part of the body is transformed into a completely different one. The animating spark that first drew me to biology was encapsulated by this little mutant. I was captivated by the pliability of the living body, and with it, the promise and possibility of transformation.

I have researched and studied developmental biology for almost a decade now, first as an undergraduate assistant, and now as a graduate researcher. My work often elicits comparisons to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s not completely unfounded—I study organisms in their becoming: how cells become tissue and how tissues become flesh. Many of the early classical experiments in the field evoke a similar sense of grotesque alchemy as Shelley’s descriptions of monster-making, with disparate flesh grafted together and tissues rendered into biochemical essences. The results of this experimentation resembled the eponymous monster as well—the mutant, leg-headed fly just one of a menagerie of lab-made monstrosities: two-headed, Janus-faced tadpoles fused along their shared spine, chimeric embryos formed with the cells of two different animals.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that my thoughts returned to these experiments when I first began transitioning. While a second head wasn’t among the changes I was expecting, I recognized myself in these laboratory creations. I wanted to believe that science would have no trouble accommodating me, that in its strangeness and infinite possibility I could build a space for my existence no matter how repellant it might seem to anyone else. Like every patchwork hybrid and mutant creature of science, I was visibly constructed and obviously made—and to a young scientist, that felt dizzyingly powerful.

Frankenstein proved more relevant to my experience than I’d anticipated. In some ways, this was unsurprising—I am hardly the first trans person to relate to monstrosity. In her 1994 monologue My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix, the historian Susan Stryker explicitly articulates this struggle, positioning herself, a transgender woman, as the monster that society seeks to materially exclude and marginalize:

“Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.”

Stryker’s monologue is an unambiguous reclamation of monstrosity, a celebration and assertion of monstrous sentience and autonomy. Her rage and defiance shone through with total clarity. But it wasn’t the clarity that I felt. I felt as if I occupied the position of both doctor and monster— I didn’t just want to have autonomy. I wanted to be recognized as a scientific agent in my own transition. If I could express the changes that I saw in myself in the language of physiology, of anatomy and of endocrinology, why shouldn’t I be able to? I wanted to think of myself as capable of generating new knowledge, and capable of conveying it in a manner acceptable to the scientific community I’d been part of for almost a decade. I’d first approached transness specifically through the lens of scientific possibility—an expression more in the vein of Victor Frankenstein declaring that he would “unfold the world to the deepest mysteries of creation”, rather than the monster’s desire to simply exist. Yes, it was hubris, but wasn’t that a kind of rallying defiance too? Somehow, the desire for acceptance on these two fronts felt conflicted, but I didn’t understand why. Was it really so impossible to be both doctor and monster at once?

While a second head wasn’t among the changes I was expecting, I recognized myself in these laboratory creations.

But trying to see myself as both proved more fraught than I’d anticipated. In my excitement, I overlooked the nature of experimentation itself. Experiments are carried out by a scientist, on a subject of experimentation. This is not a relationship free of hierarchies. A scientist is not a medium through which the facts of nature simply flow through unimpeded. Experiments are designed and outcomes are interpreted. Ambiguity and uncertainty are resolved, or at least their parameters articulated. Specifically, the scientist (or the scientific establishment more broadly) is responsible for these processes and how they occur. In a scientific culture that is inextricable from, and often an active participant in, maintaining existing societal power dynamics, scientists often act in the service of maintaining hierarchies rather than dismantling them. The laboratory is not a site of liberatory transformation. It is a site of control.

Frankenstein is about science. Not only in its subject matter, but the process of doing modern science— its motivations, its ideals and the specifics of how it should be done. Victor isn’t just a scientist—he is a gentleman of science living in 18th century England. He performs experimental science, a mode of understanding and doing science that was only established about a century before his time. It is in this context specifically that the novel explores the power dynamics of experimentation. Frankenstein is commonly said to be about “transgressive” or “unrestrained” science, but the social context in which it takes place is important in defining what it is transgressing against—the qualities that define “transgression” were not created in a vacuum. Funnily enough, however, it might be said that they were created by one.

In the mid-17th century, the chemist Robert Boyle invented the air pump. Boyle was a prominent member of England’s Royal Society, and would go on to be highly influential in defining the way modern experimental science is conducted. The air pump was a large glass dome, perched on top of a brass base. It had an attachment for a pump, allowing the air inside the dome to be systematically siphoned away, forming a vacuum. The air pump would allow him to make the fundamental discovery that he is remembered for today— Boyle’s Law, the thermodynamically-determined relationship between a gas’s pressure and volume. Boyle saw the air pump as a means to control natural phenomena, to standardize observations and measurements by enabling experimental conditions to be replicated consistently. If the protocols for operating the air pump were judiciously followed, one could expect that its results would be the same during every scientific demonstration. The experimenter then became a messenger for the machine, a purveyor of instrumental readings rather than self-interested opinion. By factoring out human influence and agency, or as Boyle put it, “the morals and politicks of corporeal nature”, experimenters could produce results distilled purely from the laws of nature. 

The laboratory is not a site of liberatory transformation. It is a site of control.

Unfortunately, as we see in Frankenstein, “corporeal nature” is not so easily extricable. To me, this is the anxiety that makes Frankenstein a scientist’s horror story—the inadvertent contamination of our observations, the creeping realization that we’ve allowed our objectivity to be compromised. Just as the air pump removes all traces of air from the dome, we are expected to remove all traces of ourselves from our research. There is a special horror, then, in not only recognizing yourself in your experiment, but having your experiment attest to your presence: just as Victor Frankenstein calls the Monster “my own vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave”, the Monster reaffirms its form as “a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance”. It follows that if the most ideal scientific process is one that can completely separate experiment from experimenter, the most transgressive is one that enmeshes them completely.

I found myself charged with this grievous transgression about two years ago, when I’d only been publicly out for around six months. A professor at my graduate school was posting his views online about the reality of binary biological sex in humans— a discussion that was not the good-faith engagement with biological taxonomy one might have hoped it was. One opinion was particularly derisive:

“Question for scientists who do not believe that humans have two distinct binary sexes: How many legs does a dog have?”

My first impulse was to form a scientific rebuttal. There are many potential approaches to discuss the complexity of sex and gender in biology—the complexity of the human endocrinological system, the inaccuracy (and insensitivity) of calling intersex phenotypes “mistakes”—I might even choose to debate the taxonomical and anatomical definition of “leg”. But I saw the likely futility of engaging. The implied equivalence had already been made: determining sex in humans is as simple as determining the number of legs on a dog. It is an easily-made, individual determination that can be made by sight alone. Any scientist who cannot do so possesses woefully compromised judgment. And, of course, anyone with such compromised judgment cannot possibly be a good scientist.

And therein lies the rub: my desire to be seen as a scientific agent—in my own transition, as a transgender scientist—is at best, according to Boyle’s experimental philosophy, poor experimental design. By this logic, like Frankenstein and his monster, every observation I make, by design, attests to my inextricable presence.

Put simply, I am a bad scientist.

That is the crux of this type of bigotry—it isn’t about empirical truth or falsehood at all. Underlying this complacent declaration of equivalence is an invisible arbiter, the unseen, “good” scientist who is able and entitled to design the terms of discussion due to their neutrality and impartiality. Ultimately, it functions not as an assertion of truth, but an assertion of epistemological control: I decide who is a reliable arbiter of their own experiences.

If my first mistake was failing to live in such an unmarked body, my second was actively calling attention to it.

With the invention of the air pump, Boyle also advocated for a very specific code of conduct for scientists. To confer upon their results a sense of reliability and validity, Boyle proposed that experimenters should always employ restraint and modesty in the presentation of their results. Experimental descriptions were to be minutely detailed, judgments should err on the side of reasonable doubt, and confident assertions should only be used to convey academic consensus. It was humble to the point of self-effacing, refusing to unduly speculate on the theoretical causes of its observations. The resulting academic voice became characteristic of 17th and 18th century scientific correspondences of the Royal Society, codified into institutional and professional etiquette. Through this deliberately constructed image of propriety, Boyle created the ideal of the “modest witness”—a persona that the philosopher Donna Haraway defines as “the inhabitant of a potent unmarked category”. The modest witness was a civic man of reason, able to transcend biasing cultural polemic or political squabbles. In return for this performance, he was given the power to distill objective truth from subjective reality. The voice of a modest witness was the voice of objectivity itself, speaking what appeared to be perfect reproductions of the natural world into existence. 

If my first mistake was failing to live in such an unmarked body, my second was actively calling attention to it. After the flurry of biological-sex based opinions had passed, a number of my peers and myself decided to quietly bring the professor’s comments to the attention of another senior professor with some oversight in the department, presenting it as an issue of potential discrimination. The senior professor attentively listened to our concerns. He paused, and looked genuinely thoughtful. Then he spoke.

“I understand, but it’s a divisive subject. It’s like…say, open carry-“

He sounded so earnest. He sounded so painfully earnest. 

I cut him off before I could stop myself. I couldn’t bear to let him finish that comparison.
“Professor, I am not a gun.”

The meeting went silent. The senior professor looked a little taken aback, awkward and apologetic. It was obvious that he hadn’t known I was trans, or that a trans person would be present at all in this discussion. I quickly launched into a formal spiel about institutional policy and workplace protections. This was my first experience making myself deliberately visible in my role as a graduate student, and all I wanted to do was take it back and disappear again. In the end we were met with expressions of sympathy, but little in the way of action. I did not speak again, nor did I follow up with the complaint. If my desire to exist freely was comparable to an instrument built for violence, what kind of justification could I ever provide for myself? What explanation could possibly suffice? I had received a tiny insight into how others—especially well-established scientists—might perceive transness. At the time, I thought I was the only trans person in my department. Newly out and still grappling with how it might impact my future prospects, even that awareness was enough to decide that being seen was a mistake. I didn’t want to see how I would be reflected back at myself, and I flinched. I am not a gun. I am not a gun.

I gave up on coming out publicly while I was still in academia.

When the Monster reads Victor’s journals, it internalizes Victor’s bitterness and resentment towards it as a deep sense of self-loathing. “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me what a wretched outcast I was,” it says, resenting that its deeply human desire to seek knowledge only leads to greater pain and misery. The tragedy is that the Monster first sees itself in relation to the world through its creator’s guilty eyes—a guilt that Victor projects onto the Monster due to his transgression of scientific and social norms. When I turned the scientific gaze on myself, I assumed that it was mine. I saw it as an exercise of autonomy: I was using my scientific knowledge to understand myself. But the surveilling gaze of science has historically been used as a project of control, seeking to make monstrosity legible through the language of taxonomy, and all too often, pathology. I was trying to see myself through a kaleidoscopic lens, each facet interconnected with innumerable others, the multitudinous inherited eyes of witnesses past. So many of those eyes are responsible for making monsters from the bodies of those too visible for the carefully guarded boundaries of polite society. Subjecting yourself to that gaze, if you are monstrous in any way, is risky—all you might see is the indelible, wretched stain of your ascribed subjectivity.

After the complaint led to little resolution, I removed all mention of transness from most of my public platforms. I deleted the pronouns from my email signature. I put off plans to medically transition. I gave up on coming out publicly while I was still in academia. This incident occurred during what collectively was my lowest and most precarious point in graduate school, and everything seemed to reinforce how thinly my presence was tolerated. An insidious mix of paranoia and shame bled into every interaction, and I began to withdraw entirely, working at strange hours and behind closed doors as much as possible. I envied peers who could so easily disappear into their arguments, who could move through academic spaces without friction. To achieve the same effect I excised whatever I could from my self, deftly performing the bloody surgery of dissecting accumulated feelings of rejection, anger and futility. I was going to be free of the baggage of an embodied existence, free of the corrupted viscera that only caused me distress. I spoke with a voice that I barely recognized. I imagined it as a ghastly hand puppet, a disembodied set of vocal cords that I manipulated by pulling on each tendinous strand. Here is a citation. Here is a scientific graph. Here is all of my heart processed into data, into statistics, into the only way you can bear to see me.

In all my cringing anxiety, I’d made the mistake of operating within the same logical bind laid out in the first professor’s derisive question. An institution that seeks to make monsters is never going to unconditionally welcome one into its midst. Stryker’s monologue is performed with this understanding in mind—it was inspired by a protest held at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Stryker recognized that institutional science saw transness as a project of control, an attempt to stabilize ambiguity and subjectivity, and exert total mastery over the products of its creation. Tellingly, another of the first professor’s posts claimed that this exact project was the agenda of trans and gender-nonconforming people:

“[On the use of gender-neutral pronouns] Those claims are about wielding power over others…He/him and she/her are all that are necessary.”

It seemed so ridiculous at the time. What threatening power did I, a single graduate student, have within my institution, or even my department? I’d forgotten, after so long of being afraid, that monsters are typically the ones who are feared. In experimental science, the purpose of an experiment is to demonstrate empirical truth. The Latin root of “demonstration” is monstrare, which means “to show” or “to make visible”. It shares an etymological root with monster— both derive from the verb monere, or “to warn”. My claim to agency, or even my very presence alone, is perceived as a threat by those who are used to their own claims to autonomy and authority being uncontested. The power and promise of unquestioned neutrality is haunted by the specter of monstrosity, as it threatens to upend the clearly defined and neatly categorizable.  And in this spirit Stryker closes her monologue with a monstrous warning:

 “I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”

So much of queer and trans memoir is devoted to the idea of the multiplicity and fluidity of selfhood…

As I had long recognized for myself, Frankenstein captures the scientist’s horror in seeing themselves in their work, and with it, their own constructed nature. But I underestimated how terrifying Stryker’s charge is to those only made aware of their “seams and sutures” through the inconvenient presence of sentient (and opinionated) monsters. This anxiety seems to follow even the most vaunted men of science—on one of the buildings on the Caltech campus (where I am pursuing my graduate degree), there is a relief based on Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Instead of Jesus and his disciples, the great men of modern science—Newton, Darwin, Copernicus, Franklin and the like— gather around a singular figure. That figure is Richard Feynman, the charismatic physicist who rose to prominence during his tenure at Caltech in the 1950s to the 1980s, winning the Nobel prize in physics for his contributions to quantum field theory in 1965. If any one person could be considered an institutional hero at Caltech, it would almost certainly be him. In a quantum physics textbook that he authored, he describes an intriguingly-framed observation about electrons:

“Instead of going directly from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and suddenly emits a photon; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon. Perhaps there’s something ‘immoral’ about that, but the electron does it!” 

Again—that moment of monstrous recognition as the electron interacts with itself. That instinctive cognitive and moral recoil from it. The intended meaning of the observation was likely to be a flippant joke about masturbation, but jokes aside, the anxieties are similar: to touch yourself intimately/to be so intimately aware of your own presence is a deeply forbidden thing. For the visibly-constructed, with our obvious cultural ties, our specific relationships with history, the non-normativity of our existence—this isn’t a new consideration. So much of queer and trans memoir is devoted to the idea of the multiplicity and fluidity of selfhood, of the careful attention to how moving through times and spaces changes us as people. But for those whose entire understanding of self is staked on the immovable pillar of presupposed neutrality, the idea that you too are a creature of context—that your perspective, your experiences, the way you understand yourself and others are a product of interactions with the world—can be overwhelming, to say the least. 

But selfhood isn’t the only construction threatened by monstrosity. Much institutional power derives in part from its invisibility: the unquestioned ability to judge, stratify, categorize, to enact your will without being seen. Haraway describes how, in Boyle’s time, the modest witness was a composite of social mores prized by contemporary English institutional power— the politesse of gentlemanly conversation, the asceticism and self-renunciation of the Protestant clergy, and the high-status ideals of ethical restraint and discipline. Monstrosity threatens to make these systemic constructions visible, revealing that Doctors are as constructed as Monsters are—but in ways that reinforce the social relations and hierarchies of power of the day, rather than threaten them. It is no wonder, then, that confronting monstrosity provokes such discomfort. Standing above the village of Chamounix, finally face to face with the creation he has restlessly pursued, Victor attempts to rebuke the Monster’s request to listen to its story in an oddly distant manner: “Cursed (although I curse myself) be the hands that formed you”. As with Feynman’s fleeting brush with monstrosity, Victor’s moment of recognition is also pointedly contained in an aside. Finally confronted with the Monster, he can barely look it in the eye. 

When I first pitched this piece, I half-heartedly returned to the first professor’s posts, to see if he’d at least deleted them. He hadn’t, but there was a curious addition to his bio: the letters X and Y. They were the very first thing there, ahead of his institution or faculty title. It took me a while to register that they were meant to be a declaration of sex chromosomes in the place of pronouns. On a professional level, this was disappointing. But on a personal level, this gesture fascinated me. If my pronouns were, as he’d put earlier, some sort of epistemological power grab, then this must be a rebuttal, inevitably revealing something of his own beliefs. The scientific legibility of chromosomes seemed to be symbolically elevated to a statement about truth— an insistence that chromosomal sex revealed something essential, or perhaps even metaphysical about people. That no matter what, chromosomes would remain the consistent guiding light, allowing you to navigate the treacherous unknown waters of gender to the safe ontological harbor of chromosomal sex determination. Their presence was almost totemic, as if brandishing them publicly would ward off the nasty unscientific ambiguity of gender identity. As the sole bearer of they/them pronouns in the biology department to my knowledge, I remain very amused that apparently, I specifically, am the hellish vampiric specter that this genomic talisman is meant to ward off. I am sure that this professor would say that this gesture was satirical, that it was simply meant to parody and ridicule irrational flights of gender fancy like mine. And maybe it was, but my accursed sentience leaves me free to find it funny from my own monstrous little perspective as well. Mostly, I was left with one thought: I can’t believe I was afraid of this chromosome-wielder for so long. 

I do not think I can explain my transness in a “purely scientific” way, not in the way I imagined that being trained as a scientist would allow me to. I no longer think of this as a failure on my part, because science itself cannot be explained in a purely scientific way. There will be those who feel that same instinctive recoil to this sentiment, who are discomforted by our shared humanity, who would dismiss or ridicule what they do not understand at first sight. But monsters are never truly banished, only deferred. Like the specter of the reanimated dead, our autonomy, our collective wisdom and experience, our personhood already looms in the corner of your eye. Our gaze will meet yours, and the inescapable realization will finally dawn on you—“It’s Alive!”

9 Novels About Characters Looking to Be Transformed by Sex or Love

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Novels about intense romances are compelling because of the window of specificity it offers into something that from the outside might not make sense, but from the dizzying inside becomes intimately relatable.

In this reading list, characters are desperate to be filled up and satiated. They look for meaning in their partners, and hope that sex or love is going to transform their lives. Their obsessions—which aren’t always for love, but also for friends, or dreams, a particular type of body, a different life altogether—reveal their innermost vulnerabilities and insecurities. We see the loneliness and the pain they experience—and begin to understand the things that ordinary people will do to escape these overwhelming emotions.

My second novel I Could Live Here Forever is about a relationship between Leah, a young woman yearning for love, and Charlie, a recovering heroin addict—a couple doomed from the start.

Below are nine novels about infatuations that are all consuming. In some of these novels, the relationships skew more towards obsession or toxicity, while others skew more towards love. 

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

In The Pisces, Lucy is severely depressed and has just broken up with her boyfriend. She can’t finish her dissertation on Sappho, so she camps out in her sister’s empty beach house in order to reset. There she goes on a series of disappointing Tinder dates. When she does fall in love, it’s electric—and it’s with a merman, named Theo (from the ocean, not from Tinder.) The sex scenes between Lucy and Theo are  hot and weird and very specific. Lucy abandons all her other responsibilities, friendships, and the group therapy that she’s committed to, so that she can throw herself fully into her relationship. No one describes obsessive desire like Broder—with brutal and hilarious candidness—and what I loved so much about this book is that Lucy, so many times, actually gets what she wants. But then when Lucy is left wanting—when Theo pulls away, or when Lucy really messes up and has to sit with herself, by herself, I felt that ache viscerally. 

Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej

The unnamed narrator, referred to as C, in Little Rabbit dives head first into a relationship with a man who she doesn’t like very much the first time she meets him. He is arrogant and domineering. He is also older than her, has more money, and is farther along in his artistic career than she is in her career as a writer. In bed, he dominates her in ways she’s never experienced, and this thrills her. When they begin an all-consuming relationship, many people in her life have questions and doubts. C’s roommate, Annie, questions the relationship more than anyone. Annie wonders what her queer friend is doing, upending her life for a man who leaves bruises on her body after sex. I was swept up by this relationship, both stunned and softened by the ending. 

Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson

The protagonist of Johnson’s remarkable Post-Traumatic, is Vivian: she is a Black Latinx lawyer living in New York City. She is a fierce advocate for her clients, patients at the city’s psychiatric hospital, but she is floundering in her own life. Post-Traumatic is, like the title suggests, about trauma, but the novel is not composed of flashbacks to Vivian’s own childhood trauma, but her experience of what it feels like to go on living, trapped in a traumatized mind. Vivian’s modes of survival include disordered eating, obsessive fantasizing, hanging out with her friend, Jane, and eventually, cutting off all communication with her family. Desperate for relief, Vivian is convinced that if one of the boys who takes her out on their (mediocre) dates, chooses her back, it will “change her life.” This novel gutted me. 

Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom

In Aesthetica, Anna Wey, an ex-Instagram model, has elected to undergo a risky surgery to undo every cosmetic procedure she’s had in her life up until this point. Anna got her first major plastic surgery at age 19, when her older boyfriend and social media manager Jake insisted and paid for her to get breast implants. Now, at age 35, Anna and Jake are no longer involved, but she stalks his Instagram. The novel has dual timelines, and we experience Anna as a teenager immersed in the world of social media and influencing, and in the present day, as she prepares for her reversal surgery. Anna longs to see herself now, more clearly, as a 35-year-old woman—grieving, in pain, and getting older. This novel is about so many different kinds of obsessions. The obsession of being seen and wanted and valued; of natural and manufactured beauty. But it’s also about a deeper, more private kind of love. A kind of love that can’t be captured on camera or quantified. 

Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan

The relationship in Acts of Desperation is toxic—increasingly and scarily so as the book goes on—but it’s the way Nolan describes love that took me aback. How true the narrator’s desire for love feels; love as a consolation, or a religion, as a way to be a real and productive person in the world.  The protagonist is obsessed with Ciaran, who is beautiful, cruel and withholding. The narrator will do anything to maintain the relationship, and she performs these acts of self-sacrifice with enormous and self-aware intention. It’s because of Nolan’s remorseless writing, that we understand why. 

Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress

In Sirens & Muses, Louisa transfers to Wrynn College of Art as a scholarship student from South Louisiana. At the new elite private art school, her work is mostly dismissed as “Southern Gothic Lite” by her classmates. Lonely and adrift, she eventually falls into a relationship with her wealthy and talented roommate, Karina. Karina, however, is also romantically involved with a senior, named Preston, who makes art (or rather content) for his popular Instagram account. When Preston starts a controversial feud with a professor named Roger and gets kicked out of school, Louisa, Karina and Roger end up leaving school, too, catapulting all four characters into the art world—and the real world. Here they have to forge identities as artists and figure out their relationships with one another, no longer in the safe bubble of school. Angress writes stunningly about love, art, money and class, and how all these things intersect in unavoidable and fascinating ways. 

Luster by Raven Leilani

In Luster, Edie is the 23-year-old narrator, working in the publishing industry, wanting to do her art but mostly not. She’s broke, depressed, yearning, and a wry observer of the people around her. When she gets involved in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with a man named Eric, who is in an open relationship with his wife, Edie gets tangled up with this older couple in disturbing ways. It’s Eric’s wife, Rebecca, who invites Edie to come live with them in their house. Rebecca’s main motive is that she hopes that Edie, who is Black, might take their adopted daughter, Akila, under her wing. Akila is one of the only Black kids in their mostly white suburb. This is when the truly complex relationships emerge in the book—those between Edie and Rebecca, and Edie and Akila. I was totally gripped by these characters and Leilani’s exquisite writing. 

A Novel Obsession by Caitlin Barasch

In A Novel Obsession, bookseller Naomi has great aspirations of writing a novel, but she doesn’t think she has interesting enough material. For inspiration, she begins to stalk her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, Rosemary Pierce. The more she learns about Rosemary, the hungrier she becomes for access to Rosemary—and the further she pushes, until she is totally enmeshed in Rosemary’s life. Naomi’s obsession with Rosemary grows huge and unmanageable, invasive, and quietly erotic. Barasch reminds us of all the ways we do so many of the very same things—compare, fixate and keep tabs. She is an honest and funny writer and this book was unputdownable. 

 Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin

In Another Marvelous Thing, Frank and Billie fall into an affair, while they’re both married to other people. Their love story is chronicled through eight interlinking stories, each told through a different point of view. Even though Frank and Billie are unfaithful, their current marriages aren’t loveless. But the relationship they find with each other—Frank is much older and more traditional than Billie—is tender, undeniable, and unusual. Frank says about Billy: “She is an absolute fact of my life…I conduct a mental life with her when we are apart. Thinking about her is like entering a secret room to which only I have access.” Laurie Colwin, who died in 1992, writes beautifully about people falling in love. One thing I love about this story is how gently it ends. Not all obsession leads to a crash. Sometimes people are just finding their way. 

All My Multitudes Will Eat You Alive

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Editors’ Note: The Commuter is moving to Wednesdays! Diverting flash fiction, poetry, and graphic narratives will now be your mid-week pick-me-up. Recommended Reading is moving to Mondays; other than that, everything else will remain the same.

we dream of something, here

hide my kids. Lady, don't eat me alive. 
i reek, and i live with myself. all 
company gym-clothes, sweat stains, 
the time it takes to scarf an orange
peel— no flesh. hairball, creativity-free zone. 

Who I Am. i am wet like the dead sea. 
never read Crying in H Mart and never will. Where 
I Am From. nowhere, at least, nowhere you'd 
vacation. not even worth the to-recycle-
or-not-to-recycle dilemma. as free 

as whatever you pay me. You see?
if i stuffed myself into a time machine, 
i would return here. my belly bulges like a private 
jet cockpit. i suffer from the worst jellybeans of anxiety. 
(vomit, earthworm, grass, toothpaste)

i am no fun to squish.
no lanternfly wings, only pantsuits
and 0 crunchy sound effects. 
your soles would grow me-sized holes,
socks slick with salty, greasy tears.

curse of myself

i.
did you know     i know?     had dinner     with foreign 
heads tonight     picked leaves from their teeth     spilled
century     porridge into our laps     played along 
     yanked ghost hair— your hair     i knotted strands
about neck     until i calloused     let my ancestors     rob 
your ancestors’ shrine     commit
grave     spiritual sin     relearn mother tongue
to curse in mother tongue     beat you senseless
with heirloom     my fortune cookie said 	    
               best adventures  
          the ones you don’t seek                      i gift 
a grandfather clock     to you     to the writer of this fortune
to every consumer     of panda express     to me              
to couples feeding each other     on depraved lawns
     to birds     that won’t shut up—     we all 
look the same     anyway 


ii.
in this life     i am many lives
chess grandmaster     mahjong mistress who pushes 
walls     until dawn     lucky snow among     infinite
lucky  snows
       dumbly fractaled     i am sweet     annie i am 
evil kate                    i am army of square-faced
warlords coming          to consume          your tap-access		                          
                         your pipes     your concert tickets    
your charcuterie board          your english
your wife          your takeout          my multitudes 
will blizzard          ruin your crop          make you so bald
your lungs become          bald your children     become bald

Being an Honorary White Person Doesn’t Make Us More Powerful

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In the years since the summer of Crazy Rich Asians, Asian American representation in mainstream entertainment has experienced a triumphant swell, producing positive, sympathetic portrayals where there were once only unflattering, stereotype-driven clichés. So long, Long Duk Dong! Hello, Shang-Chi and the Eight Abs! 

Now, during Asian American Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month each May, we are spoiled for choices in works that celebrate and uplift our strength and beauty. This surfeit of wholesomeness can even feel a little monotonous at times, but who’s complaining?

Then along came Netflix’s Beef, an Asian American show with a full Asian American cast and Asian American creatives at the helm that eschewed of the familiar beats of intergenerational weepies and straightforward racist conflicts in favor of a darkly satirical dramedy about the inescapable cycle of misplaced hopes, bad decisions, and misunderstood misery. Beef’s creator says the series is not about race, and while this is technically true, there is no question that distinctly American white supremacist racial dynamics are a constant specter tormenting main characters Danny (Steven Yeun) and Amy (Ali Wong) as they blame each other for everything that goes wrong in their own lives.

There is no question that distinctly American white supremacist racial dynamics are a constant specter.

While many works led by people of color portray white supremacy in its more simplistic and hateful form, in Beef it is much more embedded in the characters’ mindsets, driving logical fallacies and foolishness in ways that hold an uncomfortable mirror to viewers, showing us that sometimes, we too, let white supremacy get into our heads.

Throughout the series, Amy frantically maneuvers to sell her plant business, Kōyōhaus, to Jordan Forster (Maria Bello), CEO of a big-box chain and casually obnoxious Asia-phile. Through Jordan and Amy’s various interactions, it is apparent that Jordan sees Amy as an Asian plaything to be acquired alongside her business—from the constant stream of racially-inflected quips, to overly-familiar touching. But on Amy’s part, she seems to have constructed both her business and personal brand for maximum appeal to the kind of white person that carries an orientalist appetite.

The brand identity of Kōyōhaus seems wholly constructed to represent Amy’s determination to gain white acceptance, with its Japanese-ish name (despite Amy being of Chinese and Vietnamese heritage) to communicate craft and a Germanic “haus” tacked on for added European premiumness. It doesn’t escape me that Japanese culture has long been fetishized in the West as being the upper echelon of Asian refinement. Kōyōhaus is Asianesque without cultural substance, engineered to let consumers feel cultured simply through a purchase, not unlike Jordan herself, who is willing to pay $150,000 to buy a chair from Amy called “tamago” (Japanese for “egg”) without even bothering to learn how to pronounce it correctly. 

Amy makes bank from successfully courting white desire.

Amy herself is packaged in a similar fashion, clad in neutral, flowy outfits. She connotes zen, a gracious, solicitous smile pasted on her face for anyone she needs to approach with her model minority charms. It is entirely possible that Amy doesn’t realize her zen posturing is catnip for Jordan’s racist fetish because when she commiserates with her Japanese American husband about the acquisition deal, she never once brings up Jordan’s creepy racism. Acknowledging Jordan’s racism out loud would mean acknowledging the existence of systemic inequalities that work against—and in—her favor as an East Asian, and how she doesn’t have as much control regarding how her life turns out as she needs to believe.

Many viewers of color would be quick to recognize—with resignation—the need to play to stereotypes in order to usher through a positive transaction, or maintain a pleasant atmosphere in mixed company. So often, we have to put survival above dignity; we  swim upstream even if the waters are unclean, tainting us the longer we linger. The Kōyōhaus storyline is a pitch-perfect critique of what happens when a person of color internalizes the necessity for self-tokenization without acknowledging the toxicity and wrongness of the whole process. In selling Kōyōhaus, Amy makes bank from successfully courting white desire, attaining perks of white adjacency in the process. Yet she is miserable, humiliated at every turn and unable to express it for fear of disrupting her carefully maintained Asianesque composure at the expense of her business interests. 

In a series full of hard lessons, I recognized this one to be about the limits of finding true happiness through white adjacency. Ironic given what has transpired in the real world concerning the show, its producers, and one of its stars.

A week after the release of the show, investigative reporter Aura Bogado shared a video clip recorded in 2014 from Beef supporting actor David Choe’s podcast DVDASA in which he relates, in disturbing detail, an act of sexual assault he committed against a Black female massage therapist, and referred to himself as a “successful rapist”.

Previously, in both 2014, and later in 2017, Choe was met with backlash, and responded with statements that identified the story as fabricated for shock value, and emphasized that no real person was harmed by him. During the week after the clip resurfaced, Beef creators Lee Sung Jin, executive producers Ali Wong, and Steven Yeun, as well as Netflix and production company A24 remained silent while David Choe filed DMCA complaints to have the clip taken down from Bogado and cultural strategist Meecham Whitson Meriweather’s Twitter accounts. These actions drew a surge of criticism led by Black and Asian women, and grew to a degree that has come to overshadow the glowing critical response the series initially garnered.

Bringing up someone’s mental illness to explain their bigotry is a time-honored public relations tactic.

On Friday, April 21st, the Beef creators finally broke their silence, and in a short statement, condemned Choe’s original podcast as “undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing” but also maintained that they believe Choe has “put in the work to get the mental health support he needed over the [past] decade to better himself and learn from his mistakes.” 

I was among those who was disappointed by this response, which dismisses Choe’s glorification of rape and his blatant anti-Blackness and misogyny (misogynoir) as a mental health issue that was dealt with through treatment. Bringing up someone’s mental illness to explain their bigotry is a time-honored public relations tactic, despite experts pointing out repeatedly that mental health has no bearing on individual beliefs, and this rhetoric stigmatizes people with mental health issues as dangerous when they are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators. 

In pathologizing Choe’s words and emphasizing their lack of veracity (and presumed lack of a “real victim”), Beef’s creators deny the harm caused by his so-called jokes, and also fails to acknowledge the potent societal forces that compelled him to publicly share such a vile tale in the first place—a bid to build his hypermasculine public image.

You see, the active participation of Asian Americans in anti-Blackness has everything to do with attaining status and success in the entertainment industry, be it through perpetuating negative stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality as Choe did, or appropriating Black vernacular as actor Awkwafina has done, or engaging in colorism by casting light-skinned performers in a movie about an Afro-Latino neighborhood as director Jon Chu did, to name a few recent examples. 

Aside from mining Black culture for coolness, Asians Americans upholding anti-Blackness also indicates their willingness to buy into the systemic inequality this country is built on, and to grow within it rather than challenge and dismantle it in favor of a system that’s more equitable for everyone. This validates a “model minority” existence, forgoing solidarity with other POCs in favor of the perks of white adjacency. To do so reveals a key misunderstanding of white supremacy itself.

Watching Beef, the series’ creators seem very much aware of this toxic dynamic, and pulls no punches in taking sharp jabs at Asian Americans who seek whiteness, not only through Amy’s chronic unhappiness of keeping up her “model minority” veneer, but also the visceral embarrassment of Danny’s secret yearning for white women when he masturbates to AMWF (Asian Male White Female) porn despite insisting to his brother that he prefers Asian women. Beef is clear about the humiliating hollowness of white adjacency for Asian Americans, and how attaining it comes at the expense of the freedom of being oneself. After all, it’s white supremacy, only white people are the real winners within it. Being an honorary white person is not a real status with any guarantee for power or safety.

You wouldn’t know that the people behind such a powerful, progressive message are the same people who have handled the Choe incident thus far. As I said, ironic.

It almost feels as if Beef is a show within a show, so darkly comical are Choe, Lee, Wong, and Yeun’s doomed bad decisions as they desperately try to protect Beef’s mainstream success as a vehicle for representation while ignoring their critics, many of whom belong to the groups they seek to represent. 

They may very well consider the good-faith criticism they have received as a form of sabotage

There are those who believe that mainstream crossover success of celebrities of color among Hollywood circles eventually trickles down to better the lives of the rest of us. However, that doesn’t account for the collateral damage that comes with the trickle down. In the case of Choe’s rape stories, regardless of their veracity, downplaying their harm—specifically toward Black women—tells us that shielding a member of the Beef team from accountability is more important. They may very well consider the good-faith criticism they have received as a form of sabotage, muddying their media campaign, killing the positive buzz they had going. Some who believe in the power of representation even plead for the public to continue supporting Beef and not let their disdain for Choe ruin the show’s chances at prestige. 

I say, whatever damage the series sustains, they have it coming. 

In his recent comedy special, Chris Rock said that his parents taught him an important lesson growing up: “Don’t fight in front of white people.” It seems that Beef’s creators buy into the same stale respectability politics, this belief that publicly acknowledging your mistakes weakens your standing and diminishes your power. 

But what truly diminishes the power of Beef is not the critics that refuse to let Choe’s ugly past go, but the hypocrisy of its creators, who cautioned us to the futility of chasing white adjacency for the sake of our own advancement.

The Magic of the Gay Male Ensemble Performance

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Nothing seems to rally theatre fans quite like a play starring, and about, attractive, complicated gay men. In London, The Inheritance, Angels in America, and A Little Life are among the most important cultural events of the last decade. But beneath the erotically charged marketing campaigns featuring solemn, turtleneck-clad or partially nude actors draped over one another, it’s worth considering why, time and again, we turn to a collective group of gay peers to tell our stories in theatre. When I think about the canon of important modern theatre, the most prominent gay representation comes in the form of shows with an ensemble of gay characters: those I mentioned above, as well as The Boys in the Band and Love! Valour! Compassion! being notable examples. This has led me to wonder: is a choral cast structure necessary for an authentic representation of gay lives and stories—or is it mere coincidence? 

So far in the canon of theatre, it appears that gay men are most truthfully represented when gayness is the default, rather than a token, an exception, or a novelty to be exploited for plot. It can feel like a trope, one existing in parallel to famous scripts about groups of women (e.g., Sex and the City, Little Women, Girls, Golden or otherwise), in which the absence of male protagonists is intrinsic to the story’s DNA. It’s fitting, however, that queer people have taken to the stage (rather than the screen) to hold court. Theatre is where, for centuries, characters have raged and grown and pushed against the boundaries of human experience through emotional expression. This is best—and perhaps exclusively—true for gay men. Of course, stories in which we are the comfortable majority, aren’t reflective of most contexts in daily life (a shame, really)—but is that not the power of theatre? To wield suspended disbelief for effect? Theatre allows us to manufacture the optimal conditions for emotional journeys in profound, entertaining, and transformative ways, which, for a multitude of reasons, have not always been afforded to queer people in real life. 

So what is the root motivation driving this trend? Is an isolated gay character’s emotional depth more limited than when several gay men go through something together? Or is it just a convenient marketing tool—instead of trying to appeal to both straight and gay audiences, these plays go all-in on the reliable audience of gay male theatre fans by filling billboards with only gay faces? I believe the most compelling argument for the group of gay men phenomenon, which characterizes theatre’s enduring gay stories, is this: for many gay men, historically, it is with our friends and peers (chosen family, if you like) that we achieve the fullest emotional development. There is strength in numbers, and there is strength in the shared experiences of pain and joy. It follows that dramatic catharsis is therefore most present in the ensemble gay play.

It’s possible that, after watching a show like The Boys in the Band or Angels in America, audiences will want to see one protagonist’s arc teased out to its full multifaceted potential, separate and apart from the chorus of other characters. Yet, often in these stories, the queer lead is forced into conflict with straight people (or other antagonists) who act as obstacles to their biggest struggle, which is gayness. Frankly, it’s not that interesting to watch; conflict with straight people based on our sexual differences is such a small part of day-to-day gay life, and yet it is weirdly overrepresented in media. Certainly, our most dynamic cultural portrayals are in the spars and passions within a queer group dynamic. Gayness ceases to function as a weapon or a demon because it describes all of our protagonists. We become layered individuals informed by gayness, rather than narratively defined by it.

Queer people frequently have stunted, fraught, and dishonest relationships with their families, but one environment in which we can fully (and theatrically!) express the complicated truth of our inner lives is among our peers. Playwrights like Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, and Terrence McNally recognize and harness this. The tensions in plays like The Boys in the Band reminds me of explosive family plays; finally we get to play out what heterosexual characters play out in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf or August Osage County. In plays with majority straight characters, it is too tempting to use a gay character’s closeted status as fodder for conflict, thereby limiting the potential for that character to grow on their own terms.

A Little Life, currently playing in London’s West End, complicates the trend. Of the titles mentioned, this is the one with the least cathartic climax, and least generous portrayal of complex queer characters. For Jude, the arguably “main” character, devastation reigns regardless of the community he finds himself in. I suspect it comes down to the writer. Hanya Yanagihara, while an exceptional storyteller, doesn’t have the same personal stake in her narrative as the writers of other plays in this model. She is not depicting her own community, and the homogeneity portrayed in The Inheritance or Love! Valour! Compassion! is disrupted in A Little Life, with a messier sweep of queer identities commanding the stage. I want to be very clear: this approach is neither better nor worse; Yanagihara’s is just a different project with a different impact on the ongoing history of queer theatre (and I will be interested to see how it holds up in terms of longevity).

The group cast structure, however, gets us close to some sense of a collective wider experience.

Perhaps what has kept plays like Love! Valour! Compassion! and The Boys in the Band so alive in the cultural conversation, and in people’s hearts, is that they move beyond stereotyping (the enemy of authentic representation). The burden is lifted from one single character to represent the universal queer experience, with all our virtues and vices. I see this all the time in plays with one queer character—it’s a ludicrous paradox because there isn’t a universal queer experience. A token simply cannot be a character. The group cast structure, however, gets us close to some sense of a collective wider experience. For example, if we look at Love! Valour! Compassion!, most of the characters are actually really annoying and the idea of spending not one, but three summer weekends with them is frankly horrifying, except for the fact that they are all so beautifully and tenderly nuanced. They love and hate and have relatable, textured personalities. Plays like these reflect the truth that we are not a homogenous monolith; fixed types or preconceived notions of queerness disappear because we see a spectrum of gender presentation, of sexual promiscuity, of emotional maturity. These characters are allowed to be angry at something other than coming out or homophobic abuse. Those struggles are real but—shock! horror!—are not all we think about. When a queer storyline is transparently inserted, audiences can all but picture the writer thinking: “this will make it all a bit more interesting, a bit different, look at me ticking the inclusive box.” But when queerness is central to a group, there is an element of neutrality that lets more original thinking and tension take hold.

A lot of modern plays centering queer men focus on the coming out conflict or the crisis of hookup culture in our communities, which is interesting and relevant and can be a fruitful site for drama. But these stories also miss much of the reality of our lives. This essay is not a call to arms. I am not asking playwrights to shoehorn an abundance of gay characters into their work, nor am I dismissing theatre featuring very few or no gay characters. I would rather see zero gay characters on stage than one-dimensional ones superficially included in the name of diversity. Community is such a central pillar of the queer struggle, and it is in staging and presenting a very explicit sense of community (no matter how fraught) that we can present ourselves as a valid force made up of variegated voices and bodies and lives.

To me, the magic of the gay male ensemble show is that queerness becomes arbitrary, which happens so rarely in public life, where queerness is almost always a signifier. Our goal should not necessarily be for arbitrary queerness to be the norm. That said, it is clear that it is a model that has connected with audiences, gay and straight alike, for decades. When queerness is not a transgression on stage, it is allowed to be the beautiful identity and experience that it is in real life.

The Last Days of a Dying Mall in Upstate New York

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Karin Lin-Greenberg’s novel You Are Here places a dying mall in upstate New York at its center; its diverse cast of characters swirl in and around and through the mall, wrapped up in their various issues. Rotating between five different voices, this debut is an acute portrait of contemporary suburban America. At first glance, the characters’ lives and hopes seem mundane: Tina, the mall’s hair stylist, watches YouTube art tutorials on the side. Her young son, Jackson, dreams of being a famous magician. Jackson enlists Maria, a teenage cashier at the mall, to help him with his magic routines—while Maria harbors hopes of her own to become an actress. Across the mall, Kevin is dragging out his English PhD dissertation as he works at a bookshop. Ro, Kevin’s judgmental neighbor, has been going for a mall walk and getting her hair cut by Tina for years. 

But with Lin-Greenberg’s in-depth character development, You Are Here shows both the unexpected connections between strangers and the unshakeable assumptions we have about one another. Lin-Greenberg mines the spectacular within everyday life, whether that is a moment of public violence or intense beauty. Similarly, she highlights how mall culture functions simultaneously as a dying part of suburbia, a symbol of lost dreams, and—perhaps surprisingly—a form of controlled community.

I chatted with Karin Lin-Greenberg about suburbia culture, the uniquely American phenomenon of desensitizing gun violence, and (on a lighter note) her favorite mall food. 

Jaeyeon Yoo: I’m curious what drew you to write about malls, and what you think they depict about today’s United States. 

Karin Lin-Greenberg: Obviously, the dying malls tell us a lot about commerce, about where we’re shopping. But also, malls—when I was growing up—were a place where people would go hang out, especially high school kids. I pay attention to my local mall, and it seems to be much less a place for shopping than a place you go to for entertainment. There are now these two escape rooms, indoor mini golf, an entertainment center where you could go on rides, movie theater—that seems to be what people are going to this space for, instead of for shopping. I think this is an interesting shift; maybe it just has to do with the pandemic, but as a writer, I was particularly drawn to the space. 

I think it’s interesting to take people who would not run into each other in their everyday lives, then put them in a space where they’re forced to interact. A character like Ro, who would never really interact with people like Tina and Jackson in real life, comes to Tina’s salon for service and then realizes, “Oh, I really like these people. I feel really connected to somebody that I’m just coming to for haircuts from, but I wish I could have a deeper relationship with.” I think the mall is a sort of a place that puts together people who are not related, who might not otherwise encounter each other, and then sees what happens.

JY: I love that idea of forced interaction you highlighted. Do you think the malls becoming these places of entertainment would change the type of attractions that these characters have?

The mall is a place that puts together people who are not related, who might not otherwise encounter each other.

KLG: I think so, because you would go with your friends or your family, whether it’s the escape room or mini golf. I don’t think we would now necessarily go to [the mall to] meet people. You’re going to have less of those random encounters with people that are just there—because when you go somewhere with people you know, you’re focused on the people that you’re there with. 

JY: Right, and it reflects American cultural life right now—everyone’s been talking about how we’re getting more and more into our bubbles, these political echo chambers. Speaking of America, your exploration of the dying mall was threaded through with gun violence, which I think is also deeply integral to U.S. society today. Could you talk a bit more about your decisions to intertwine these topics?

KLG: The gun culture question came from real life. As I was writing, there was a shooting at the local mall. The mall is so ordinary and it seems so sanitized and so—just nothing, you know? It just seems like a place you can go buy sneakers and eat your French fries in the food court. The shooting was just shocking and unexpected, but then, as you now think about it, it’s not. These public spaces that we think of as part of our everyday lives have been invaded by violence. When I was growing up, it would have never even crossed my mind that anything like this could happen at a mall—the mall was just where you went to hang out. But I remember some of my students were at the mall, at the shooting, and told me, “I can’t do my work right now. I was here for this, and it was the most frightening thing in my life.” This [type of violence] can creep into the most ordinary situations and you have to be aware of it now. I think about the last year—a supermarket, or these places you go to get the things that you need to live have been invaded in this way. From when I was writing the first draft in 2018, it’s just getting worse and worse. 

JY: I’m struck by how you were drawn to the mall as a site of extreme mundanity, but simultaneously the site of very extreme violence—the violence of shootings itself has become ordinary. Which is something pretty uniquely American, I would say.

KLG: Right, schools too. Again, when I was growing up, I would have never thought that there could be a mass shooting in a school. That just wasn’t within my frame of reference. And now, kids are going through these drills, and it’s something that, unfortunately, a lot of kids have experienced or been close to in some way. These public places that you would have never had to think twice about in the past. Now anytime there’s a big group gathering anywhere in these public places—ones you would have never had to think twice about in the past—I think a thought flashes through a lot of people’s minds, “What could possibly happen here?”  

JY: This question resonates nicely with your title, You Are Here. What led you to it?

You Are Here is a story about characters who don’t really understand how to connect. They keep making these mistakes that keep them apart from people, keep them lonely.

KLG: I have to say I can’t take credit for it; my agent came up with it. My original title was Those Days at the Mall, which is a character’s line in the very last chapter. Obviously, the mall map says “You Are Here.” But it’s also so much about place and where people spend their time. So, the question behind the title was thinking about where we spend our days. 

JY: In contrast to the present moment we’ve been discussing, what did the mall mean to you as a teenager? 

KLG: When I was a teenager, the thing that was really exciting to me about the mall was that it was a place to drive for. I grew up in New Jersey. Malls have huge parking lots, and when you’re bad at driving and parking, you can park at the top of the parking complex far away from other people. I was able to drive myself, park the car—my mom’s car—and not worry about coming home with a dent in the door. It was a place to walk around. I didn’t buy things, usually, but it was just a place to go to. 

JY: The thrill of having a destination!

KLG: Right, and being able to drive yourself without an adult. This was suburbia, before Uber or Lyft. That was the most exciting thing. 

JY: Most cultural depictions of malls I’ve seen focus on teenagers (usually as consumers), so I appreciated how You Are Here tackled what the mall means for a variety of people—the workers, the lurkers, and everyone in between. How did you decide on the polyphonic narration style?  

KLG: I was very interested in showing people who are all different from one another, so I sat down and brainstormed a bunch of different people, who might be working at the mall or go to the mall. I wanted these people to be those whose lives would not otherwise intersect with one another. I also thought about conflict and tension; I have these characters who are extremely set in their ways and believe one thing so strongly. When you put them in scenes with each other, you can see what might happen. It’s also about questioning: are they going to stay static, or is there room for growth? If there is room, how much would feel realistic? With the multiple narrators, I enjoyed being able to get into each of their perspectives. A character might seem a certain way and be really frustrating in one chapter, when viewed through someone else’s thought process. In a later chapter, you might get their own thought process—they might still be frustrating, but you could at least understand why they believe the things that they believe. 

JY: I feel like the form of the book plays out the mall’s forced interaction you were talking about, because we’re forced to interact with the characters’ thoughts—whether we want to engage or not from their perspective. Sometimes, the interactions lead to these glimmering connections in You Are Here; could you talk more about these relationships that surface? 

KLG: This is a story, I hope, that makes people think a little bit more about their daily interactions. In real life, we don’t set out to find the people we encounter, but they affect us in some way. I think we generally want to connect, but it’s just hard to do that. I think You Are Here is a story about characters who, for the most part, don’t really understand how to connect. They keep making these mistakes that keep them apart from people, keep them lonely. But sometimes, random encounters can be incredibly positive—even if they’re really small or significant to just one person. For example, one character, Ro, has this intense connection with Maria [another character, a cashier]. This is the first time Ro has ever put money in a tip jar. But for Maria, it’s just ordinary chatting, the way she would talk to any other customer. It was interesting to explore connections that are potentially one-sided, or connections that emerge because they’ve gone through the same traumatic event. It was fun to be in each of their minds, so that we could see how something that meant a lot to somebody might not, to another character. I was thinking about the different ways that characters could connect, but also about different ways of disconnection. 

JY: Yes, as your book demonstrates, “intimate” interactions can be uneven but still feel real. Before we end: do you have a favorite mall food? Mine are pretzels, hands down.

KLG: I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard they blow the scent of the pretzels out into the mall. There’s some fan—this is probably not true and is an internet legend—but they have pretzel-scented spray to blow out. I would say the pretzel is also the thing I would buy at the mall. You can walk around eating it! That, combined with the smell of Cinnabon, are “classic mall” for me. 

JY: Exactly. It’s funny, we think of malls as being very ordinary—and they are—but they’re also sources of urban legends and intense collective memory for many Americans. 

KLG: Yes, most people have a mall story!