tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-145875382024-03-08T03:34:11.332-08:00Adora's BlogAdora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.comBlogger379125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-77456001454809999462021-08-19T16:25:00.003-07:002021-08-20T09:49:02.854-07:00Friends from College<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ep/original/DT4626.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="642" data-original-width="800" height="642" src="https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ep/original/DT4626.jpg" width="800" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p>Image is "Two men contemplating the moon," Caspar David Friedrich. Public domain. <br />Both names changed. Thanks to Agnes Enkhtamir for inspiration on the public epistolary format!<br /><br /><br /><div><b>DEAR RICARDO</b><br /><br />Dear Ricardo,<br /><br />Your name isn’t Ricardo. This is the name you picked out when I had your face in the palm of my hand, the glass of my phone. You said, Maybe you should write a blog post, it’ll be therapeutic for you. Maybe so. The truth is I haven’t written a post in ages because I am not sure of what I believe, or at least less sure than 7 years ago around the time the two of us met, and much much less sure than 11 years ago, when I gave the speech that comes up when you Google my name. I think you know what you believe. In college once, junior or senior year, we ate dinner at Musashi — the little Japanese joint near my old place on Haste. I asked you where you saw yourself living after we graduated. You said you’d like to go back to Seattle, and you’re there now, although I’m not sure it’s making you happy. <br /><br />You said you don’t like drifting. You make at least 3.5x as much as my grad stipend and you haven’t taken vacation in 18 months because you’re up for promotion review, while I’ve quit my job and gone on road trips and moved across the country for a summer of bacchanals, dive bars at last call, stumbling Brooklyn blocks home blurry with my contacts out after sleeping in other people’s homes. I joke a lot about doing things “for the narrative,” but I’ve realized it’s actually very hard to make a story cohere out of disparate events propelled by no internal logic. I’m used to telling stories that follow an arc: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, denouement. I don’t know what the arc of this summer was or what the next few years will be. I could drift if I wanted; technically I have no attachments but school. You’re a landlord with a townhouse by the zoo and a mortgage now.<br /><br />I don’t know if you find it disquieting to be addressed quasi-publicly. Secretly, like I said to you on the phone, I think you like it. I can be an inconstant friend sometimes. This summer when I was in the passenger seat of your silver car, you said things are different in a friendship after an 8-month silence. Especially when we used to grab lunch every week. (Remember bowls of poke, bowls of ramen, Super Duper burgers.) I’d like to think that I make some of it up with my words, even if they’re poor substitutes for a long hug, a shared laugh, sitting on a wooden pier at the edge of Greenlake watching the mallards iridescent in the sun. We’re such different people, Ricardo. You stay the course; I barely know how to get home. <br /><br />Do you remember how in school you let me come over for dinner. I would barely help while you adeptly put chopped vegetables into the plastic trays you saved for prep dishes, mixed corn starch and water into a white slurry in a glass jar. I went grocery shopping yesterday and felt so unmoored. How do you know what to cook and when to cook it and how do you make yourself do it instead of microwaving a Hot Pocket. For my life to work, I’ll have to think a little more like you. I’ll make real food, maybe, instead of subsisting on $5 lattes and toast. I’ll do the things that need to be done. I’ll finally fill out the direct deposit and payroll deduction paperwork the university wanted me to do days ago. <br /><br />In the blue folder from my department where I keep all my important documents, like my vaccination card and my glasses prescription, I have a bunch of photographs from California. Do you know, I have that one of us from your company’s holiday party photo booth where I threw on a feather boa and we leaned against each other smoking fake cigarettes. Our faces are red and shiny and split open with laughter. A rare precious moment when we wanted the same things, when we had everything we wanted.<br /><br />Love,<br />Adora<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>DEAR ELLA</b><br /><br />Dear Ella,<br /><br />When you told me that most of my stories and essays are for, about, men in my life, that it made you frustrated or insecure about your own position or both, I felt awful. I was on a train or at least I think I was. You asked me, Do you feel more unadulterated around men? and I never quite answered that question.<span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /></p></span>My friend H. who you’ve met feels disloyal writing about people close to her, says it feels like using people. Fiction or poem or essay, I write almost <i>only</i> about the people close to me. Or maybe it’s not about closeness exactly. There are some people I trust less than you but write about more, simply because they’re on my mind with the inescapability of an occupying force. With them I have frisson — from the French for “a shiver or a thrill.” <br /><br />Speaking of a shiver, not the good kind: on the way to the coffeeshop where I’m writing you this, a man rolled down his car window at a stoplight and said, “I saw you yesterday! Man, beautiful!” As I often do reflexively in these situations, I laughed mildly and said, Thank you. Then I felt embarrassed, wondered if anyone else on the avenue had seen this exchange. A high school friend I loved a little for her brassiness, the un-apology of her desire, once told me that she liked it when men catcalled and whistled at her on the street, that it made her feel sexy and empowered. I think the men who do this are exerting power over space and over me. Some would say they're also reifying my gender. There’s this passage from the novel <i>Detransition, Baby,</i> in which Reese is the trans woman protagonist:</div><div><span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">“…the slap was a form of pageantry. Beneath it lay Reese’s own sense of womanhood…Reese wanted…to get hit in a way that would affirm, once and for all, what she wanted to feel about her womanhood: her delicacy, her helplessness…Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the Lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard. Or just watch your local heterosexuals drinking in a bar. Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and center…The quiet dignity of saying ow anytime a man gets a little rough—asserting that you are a woman and thus delicate and capable of sustaining harm…She didn’t make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them…So yeah…Hit Reese. Show her what it means to be a lady.”</div></blockquote><div><span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>When the man in the car made his remark to me I messaged my sister, who then told me about a man who had harassed her in a racially and sexually derogatory way on the subway. Sometimes I think that’s what womanhood is — sitting in a room and talking about what’s been done to us. The Netflix show <i>Sex Education</i> makes a heartwarming episode of this: after one character suffers an assault on the bus, other girls rally around her. The woman who rejects the notion of having suffered harm because of her gender, or who has little to say about it, is stepping out on a kind of sacred bond, an outstretched hand.<br /><br />I value the hand, I really do, but its grip can also be viselike. In groups of women sharing mundane horrors, I sometimes feel like an ass considering the luck of my own life. I haven’t suffered terribly. My periods are bearable and infrequent. My worst sexual encounter ‘rape-adjacent’ (Brodsky’s <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">paper</a> on nonconsensual condom removal). I don’t talk about wanting to lose weight, nor think it too often. My relationship to my body is never obsessive or dysphoric, more that of an affectionate if occasionally deadbeat roommate — we share space, do the metaphorical dishes more or less on time. And then there’s this: men have approached me on the street, even in the middle of the night, and I haven’t always felt scared. Brooklyn at 2 AM on the Fourth of July (well, I guess the 5th), a jovial Park Slope man named Maxwell got out of his still-running SUV to tell me I looked like a fashion model, asked what I studied, gave me his number. I felt — what, bemused? Entertained? Can I say this to you? Or does this scene make me look like a gross Ayn Rand-esque character, a woman so invested in shedding the image of fragility that I ignore the reality of my own peril? When you wanted someone to escort you from the Downtown Berkeley station up to Northside, I had the passing thought that I would make the same walk at all hours of the night alone. Last Thursday night I paced outside the Delancey-Essex subway station in lower Manhattan at 3 in the morning, past alleys rank with urine and men sleeping rough under the awnings of fast food restaurants closed for the night. I was watchful but not anxious. There were enough eyes on the street. Am I breaking the rules, Ella? <br /><br />In a park at night in Beijing the summer of 2017, some girlfriends and I were sitting when a man on a hoverboard approached us and spoke insistently to us in mixed Chinese and English, wanting to know our names, where we were from, if we would add him on WeChat and help him practice his English. My default then was to assume others wouldn’t want to talk to a strange man, especially one who seemed so pushy. The other girls weren’t doing anything to put an end to the situation, so I thought they might be scared or tongue-tied. I was blunt and terse in my responses, eventually admonishing that it wasn’t polite to approach us in a park so late at night. When he left, one of the other girls almost burst into tears. Why were you so rude, she said, that made me really uncomfortable. <br /><br />I realized it had been audacious and wrong-headed for me to try and protect anyone but myself. I had no way of knowing what they really wanted. (What would you have wanted?) Maybe I didn’t even know what I did. <br /><br />Probably I could have gone either way. Either way because I’m often unsure of how people should treat each other, aside from agreeing with the greatest-hit commandments. You locate and defend your own boundaries with conviction; message our group chats with questions about the best terminology to use for a heritage month, the difference of one letter; and post announcements on your Instagram stories about activist causes, what to know and where to donate. You’re always trying to do the Most Right Thing; I’m not sure that it exists. I think I like living in the moral grout, the sticky space between the bricks, being labile and forgiving and forgiven. <br /><br />Maybe why I haven’t written about you like this before, even though you’re often on my mind, is because you’ve never felt dangerous or elemental to me, like the pull of gravity or a riptide. My feelings about you are complicated in a different way. I was riding in the back of a friend’s car a month ago; my friend’s friend, a curly-haired recent grad with a geographically inexplicable surfer’s drawl, lit a joint in the passenger seat. One of the other women in the backseat looked at him and opened her red-lipped mouth to declare amusedly, “You’re such a boy!” <i>You’re such a boy!</i> that condescension and delight. My feelings about you are complicated by the worry I might be a better friend to you if I were less of a boy: less scatological, less argumentative, less drawn to feral traipsing in the middle of the night. These things shouldn’t be the domain of any gender of course. Just as I think one of the moments I felt closest to you happened just because of who you are, your deep warmth and capacity for love: when I got out of the shower that day in May you were staying with us and my worn white towel had fallen to my waist and I was blasting, outlandishly, the J.Lo and Pitbull song “On the Floor.” <i>From London to Af-reeeeeka.</i> I’d thought it would rouse me from my feelings but there I was still sobbing uncontrollably about the impending dissolution of my life. You came and gathered me up in your arms and didn’t let me go until we were both quaking with laughter. Maybe that’s the most unadulterated I’ve ever been.<br /><br />Love,<br />Adora<span><br /></span></div>Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-49561133815630408522020-10-05T15:34:00.001-07:002020-10-05T15:34:53.461-07:00Misplaced CivilityLately my Twitter feed seems divided between two camps: those who wish President Trump well in his fight against COVID-19 and those who are gleeful about the karmic retribution of a man who has systematically downplayed the seriousness of this virus being struck with it himself. I’m less interested in what camp any individual falls into than in the power dynamics reflected by calls for “civility.” Why is it acceptable to call for policies that guarantee the deaths of many people but not to express an ill thought about a powerful individual?<br /><br />The late Anthony Bourdain had this to say about Henry Kissinger: <br /><br /><blockquote>“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”</blockquote><br />John Yoo authored a set of memoranda known as the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos">Torture Memos</a>” presenting an argument for the permissibility of the euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques” (mental and physical torment, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation). He now enjoys a position at UC Berkeley’s law school, though numerous courts and legal experts have argued he should be indicted for war crimes. There is something very peculiar about a society where war crimes do not keep you from six-figure teaching positions (in 2015, John Yoo made $406,385.00) but a felony conviction for marijuana possession could keep you from getting a minimum-wage job (depending on the state in which you live). This society is OK with the rich and the educated doing terrible things to other people, if they do it in abstractions. It is permissible here to torture and to kill so long as you do it with the stroke of a pen.<br /><br />Mr. Kissinger or Mr. Yoo can speak at conferences and hobnob with billionaires who disagree with them. Later some reporter will write glowingly about how beautiful it is that people can have friendships despite their differences, that a figure so polarizing can actually get along with everyone! <div><br /></div><div>In our fetishization of everyone getting along we have forgotten that the “everyone” in DC or any hall of power does not reflect the “everyone” outside. Wealthy and credentialed people are able to get along with each other regardless of whatever odious policy they might have enacted because they are removed from the most marginalized in our society. Would you demand that someone attend dinner parties with, and send Christmas cards to, someone who regularly spat in his sister’s face? Probably not. But we do not expect our public figures to see the huddled masses as their brethren.<br /><br />I hope that no human is completely irredeemable, so my personal wish is for the president’s illness to be a scientific and moral education for him; maybe having COVID-19 will make him more willing to listen to experts and more empathetic to the families of the 200,000 dead. But I’d hardly admonish (especially given his apparent lack of personal growth thus far) those who have expressed more colorful desires.<br /><br />Kanye West shocked some Americans in 2005 when he said, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” I wonder if we could have more productive governance, ultimately, if everyone was more willing to level with our past and present without the niceties. George Bush told Matt Lauer later, “ ‘He called me a racist. And I didn’t appreciate it then. I don’t appreciate it now. It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘This man’s a racist.’ I resent it, it’s not true.” This response shows a misreading of West’s statement. West spoke in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so he was hardly making a statement about Bush’s interpersonal relationships with Black people, or saying that Bush necessarily had an explicit desire to cause them harm. Instead, the statement gestured at the evidence of New Orleans, the wreckage in predominantly Black neighborhoods and police officers and National Guard who seemed more concerned with preventing “looting” than allowing people to survive. George Bush implied a distinction between someone who is racist (i.e., discriminates against Black people in face-to-face encounters) and someone who “handles his business” in a way that exacerbates racial disparities. It is that luxury of absolution via distance — killing is okay if by the stroke of a pen — that we only afford to the powerful.<br /><br />I don’t think the left needs to speak in hushed voices about these wrongs. I love Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, AOC and the Squad, and many others precisely because they are angry about injustice and they don’t hide it. I used to be very frightened about coming across as “angry.” (I am still polite, even when I volunteer to text voters in North Carolina and get a Trump fan who tells me I am an “idiot CLOWN” with twenty clown emojis 🤡, but I don’t think this makes me a good person.) Trump’s temperament is especially grotesque, so I understand the desire to return to some semblance of “normalcy” in which people treat each other graciously regardless of political alignment. But it is important to remember that the greatest scandal of our body politic is not the temperament of individuals. It’s the dispossession of the masses. <i>Children go hungry in the richest country on earth. </i>Solving that, I believe, takes truth dispensed without apology.</div>Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-18439569451331988752020-09-12T21:27:00.003-07:002020-09-12T21:43:45.629-07:00Cuties<p>I watched <i>Cuties </i>tonight. For those of you who don't fill the yawning chasm of pandemic time by doomscrolling on Twitter, <i>Cuties </i>is a movie about French pre-teens in a dance quartet, focusing on an 11-year-old French-Senegalese protagonist from a traditional Muslim family who turns to dance as an outlet amidst family crisis and the general misery of adolescence. Their dance style, heavily influenced by music videos, is suggestive in a way that belies their youth. Netflix used an unwise picture from the movie, in which the girls are scantily clad, heavily made up, and twerking, and this subsequently sparked an online furor about the sexualization of children.</p><p>I've written previously about the topic of young girls being sexualized, like in a Huffington Post piece 9 years ago about pushup bras being marketed to teens. So it may surprise you that I am not particularly outraged about <i>Cuties</i>. I found it to be a thoughtful movie that engaged with the difficulty of coming of age in a world that teaches you sexiness is your only form of worth and also that actually <i>having</i> sex, or wanting it, makes you worthless. It shined particularly where it depicted the capriciousness and tenderness of friendship: two girls braiding their hair into each other's, the four of them racing gleefully through the street wearing newly purchased bras and underwear over their clothes, crowding around a laptop to flirt via text with a man on the internet. Perhaps it is the latter kind of moment, along with the actual dancing, that creates the most unease for viewers, some of whom went so far as to title the movie "child porn" (US Representative Tulsi Gabbard).</p><p>If you think that <i>Cuties </i>is child porn, then you think my adolescence was too, and probably millions of girls'. Okay, I wasn't in a twerking dance troupe, but growing up in the halcyon days of early YouTube, when you could make an account and upload a grainy webcam video (as long as it was under 10 minutes!) my sister and I entertained ourselves on countless long afternoons by glossing our lips, singing and sashaying along to "Apologize" by OneRepublic and the Numa Numa song (actually "Dragostea din Tei" for anyone who's fact-checking) -- remember that earworm of "Mai-a-heeee / Mai-a-huuuu?" And then, of course, there were such kid-friendly standards as "Hit Me Baby One More Time." I tied my shirt up like Britney, but maybe I think it was actually our friend Katie who taught me how to do it, when we were playing in the backyard. Kids do things like that. And they go on chatrooms for no reason and pretend to be older than they really are and talk to strangers. Girls I knew would go on Chatroulette for kicks with their friends during sleepovers. There's probably a 15-year-old girl somewhere this minute (well, not <i>this </i>minute -- let's say the pre-COVID era) on Tinder trying to get a rando to buy her and her best friend McDonald's, and when he does they will show up, take the food, and run, laughing the whole way.</p><p>Of course this is a little terrifying. And I felt that portions of <i>Cuties </i>were a little terrifying. There are so many moments where you want to ask these girls to stop feeling like they have to act like grown-up women, with their innocent simulacra of expressions they learn from music videos. But of course children have mimicked what they see adults doing for ages, especially those adults portrayed as especially glamorous and successful. The real terror, more than twerking 11-year-olds, is that some people take a girl dancing like Shakira or Beyonce or Britney as an invitation to harm them. That is 100% on those people and not on those girls. In <i>Cuties, </i>a boy in the protagonist's class slaps her butt as she walks past and when she yells at him, he says "You're the one who's been posting nude photos of yourself online." She grabs a pencil and slams it down into his hand. I was glad to see that anger depicted, her refusal to accept the shame he so clearly thought was owed.</p><p>Shame is never protective. Let me be clear: it's worth discussing what drives the specific forms of <a href="https://literariness.org/2016/10/18/the-concept-of-self-fashioning-by-stephen-greenblatt/" target="_blank">self-fashioning</a> young women feel attracted to, why they are so often appearance- or sexuality-based, and how we can amplify a broader range of role models so a middle schooler doesn't feel like she has to be a TikTok star. But that conversation needs to be supportive, not punitive. I think that's the conversation this movie was intended to start. And especially after seeing that scene when the protagonist snaps back at her classmate, I realized if I had a daughter growing up in this crazy, burning world, I would want for her less fear and more audacity.</p><p>I deleted the YouTube dancing videos a long time ago. In later adolescence they were just embarrassing to see. But I hold the memories quite fondly from that time when we weren't quite young women yet, reenacting movements whose etymology we couldn't understand, jumping in and out of frame. Our flying hair, our unadulterated glee.</p>Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-64858391763714760352020-05-27T17:14:00.003-07:002020-05-27T17:15:40.769-07:00Dear Neighbor<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhxUj0mLkY7Ui-ask3B85UPWOjKthqRXfs4AZu02DGtdkfoMetrTc4rBfoG6kajHGzsx2SkfUDPtiAFoNfcp88tSpPyVmZOdn32dVydjy6UMqEerv82_OQySdf_yYXFAKXpRwM3gKU6p8nWu4cF4oJvx1oABn74DtyUcPdi6CkeBARv-Vs=s2048" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="1919" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhxUj0mLkY7Ui-ask3B85UPWOjKthqRXfs4AZu02DGtdkfoMetrTc4rBfoG6kajHGzsx2SkfUDPtiAFoNfcp88tSpPyVmZOdn32dVydjy6UMqEerv82_OQySdf_yYXFAKXpRwM3gKU6p8nWu4cF4oJvx1oABn74DtyUcPdi6CkeBARv-Vs=w640-h480" width="640" /></a></div><i><br /></i></div><i><div><i><br /></i></div>I wrote this in response to the Day 32 prompt, "Dear Neighbor," from Suleika Jaouad's "<a href="https://www.suleikajaouad.com/the-isolation-journals" target="_blank">Isolation Journals</a>" project. </i><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>No neighbors were harmed in the making of this (unsent) letter.</i><div><br />Dear Neighbor,<div><br /></div><div>I'm not sure what it means to be a neighbor. The "rootless cosmopolitan" is made straw man of God knows how many NIMBY groups -- the untethered, probably highly-educated, clad head-to-toe in direct-to-consumer startup threads, upwardly mobile and geographically promiscuous person who moves in next door for a few months, maybe more, and never introduces themselves. That's me, I guess, although I did want to; I thought about baking cookies, in fact, but then considered that someone might be vegan, or gluten-free, or have some allergy more nefarious than I could divine. So I never did, and we remain strangers. I know some of your names, only by the packages you order: Melissa, Sergei, Jeanne. I've heard the thumping upstairs -- jumping jacks? -- and the vacuum. Proximity produces this strange intimacy that is also anonymous, like a gloryhole. Probably people don't talk about gloryholes with their neighbors. Whoops.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first neighbors I really remember were the boys next door, Daniel and Nicholas, and their parents who sometimes let us watch TV (they had channels that we didn't) and eat snacks from giant Costco tubs. Licorice, animal crackers. We played so frequently with Daniel and Nicholas that they sometimes just popped over to our house and banged on the living room window to beckon us outside. After my family moved to Redmond, we hung out with the preacher's kids across the street in their palatial treehouse, or the girl a few houses down with lustrous straight golden hair. Sometimes, grudgingly, we spent time with two younger girls who we described as -- forgive our language, these were the days before Sheryl Sandberg's book -- "bossy." The only kid who we didn't really play with was Sam, whose backyard bordered on our own, but his family had the fanciest house and the nicest things: a blow-up outdoor movie screen, TVs in every room. They threw the block parties and movie nights.</div><div><br /></div><div>I realized my family was not quite like all of our neighbors, or at least most of them, when the Bush yard signs went up in '04, and McCain in '08. All the same, I didn't feel alienated too badly or unsafe there. Maybe things would have been different if I had been out as bi then, or if I had been a different race, or if it were 2016. But as it was, our street -- awfully white, awfully conservative -- was still a nice place to be.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which brings me back to you, neighbor. I'm not sure if the point of neighbors is to throw block parties, as Sam's family did, or to find playmates, like Daniel and Nicholas. Perhaps it's more this: on really windy nights, when the power would go out, my family would congregate around the dark living room window and look at the street to confirm it was out for all, down to the red house on the corner of 89th. Then we would open the door and go outside, and all the adults would chatter about whether the utility company had been called, if they were on their way. And then we'd go back into our houses, feeling comforted by the unlit windows of others. In such times it is good to have neighbors.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yours,</div><div>Adora</div></div></div>Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-22657851707823488812020-03-31T20:19:00.000-07:002020-03-31T20:26:23.723-07:00Before / After<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
After, we sing "Happy Birthday" like a dirge. I hear it in my head with Dr. Bronner's castile soap frothing up between my fingers. Returning from the outside, an obstacle course of high-touch surfaces, I wash my hands and Clorox my phone.<br />
<br />
What I miss from before: touching my eyes, which was always bad to do but brought so much satisfaction. That moment of rubbing away the film of sleep from the eyelids, like the lifting of a veil.<br />
<br />
Also, the library on university campus I haunted like a ghost, the alum overenthusiastic about her library card. I went there to check out the maximum number of books before six Bay Area counties announced shelter-in-place restrictions and the library shut its doors. The jovial young student working behind the tall wooden desk wore a sweatshirt printed with a sprawling image of Kim Jong-Un. We talked briefly about how he wasn't sure yet if he'd have to keep working or if he could go home to L.A., and then I remarked, "Interesting shirt."<br />
<br />
"Yeah, you know, I tell people, my grandpa fought in the war, I still got family in the North that I've never met because of it, so, like, my oppression beats yours," he said, <span style="background-color: white;">with the particular bravado of young Asian-American men whose path to social capital in high school was being funny, pulling comedic fodder from parents and grandparents' ethnic idiosyncrasies. In college for maybe the first time boys like him had to defend that MO -- all the joking, no sacred cows. </span>That was why, I thought, there'd been a slight edge to his response.<br />
<br />
"Gotcha," I said. I'd grown up with boys like him, their own permutations of dictator sweatshirts. Sometimes it annoyed me but here, the familiarity was comforting.<br />
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I miss a coffeeshop in North Berkeley, warm and buzzy and filled with light. One Saturday I came here to nurse a latte and read Hardt and Negri's book <i>Commonwealth</i>. I sat in place for about six hours, flipping pages as the color of the sky outside changed. Next to me two men in their 60s talked at great volume about politics with some companionable aggression in the timeless way I imagined there were other men in their 60s talking about politics in coffeeshops around the world. Every so often, a new entrant to the cafe would forget to close the stuck door behind them and cold drafts rushed in. Each time, the two men complained volubly until one would grudgingly rise to close the door. The third time I decided to go myself. I shot them a comradely smile on the way back, looking down at my book before seeing if the smile was acknowledged or returned. I like to be on the periphery of people, sometimes.<br />
<br />
What I miss is also not being on the periphery of people. Hugging and being in the same room with less space than 6 feet between us. The last time I shook a hand was the first week of March, a Shabbat dinner filled mostly with kindly people who I didn't know. I felt conflicted about the shaking but fastidiously washed my hands, and didn't touch my face, and ate white jackfruit wedges from a bowl. Scanning everyone's face around the long table I tried not to think about if anyone had COVID-19. My chest felt tight, as it had before at work in meetings sometimes, a feeling I ascribed to bad posture, sitting too rigidly on a backless chair; the feeling made me fidget uncontrollably, trying to configure my body into a more comfortable position. I felt warm and ungainly and wished I'd taken off my sweater, wondered if it was possible to slide off my black fold-out chair and onto the floor.<br />
<br />
Before: not thinking so much about breathing. After: bounding up steps at the end of runs with the thought pounding my temples that <i>This is a gift. </i>Gratitude is good, I know, but not its cousin in my head: <i>If my lungs turned to ground-glass opacity I couldn't walk across a room. </i><br />
<br />
Before: going to the doctor, casually, as good preventive medicine. After: risky exposure. That tightness in my chest didn't go away. A day or two after the Shabbat dinner, I was folding laundry in my bedroom. The sense that my lungs were being gripped and squeezed shut became so strong that I drifted into the kitchen and sat on the wooden bench at our dining table with my knees clutched to my chest. Thankfully, I had no cough or fever. There was no field on WebMD to put in the other symptoms: late-night doomscrolling on Twitter, my puffy eyes bathing in white-blue light, jerking awake with guilt about not messaging my grandparents on WeChat more, regarding texts from my mom -- always about COVID-19 -- with abject dread.<br />
<br />
To the symptoms I could enter -- the chest tightness, the feeling of not being able to take a deep-enough breath -- the internet told me (famous last words) that it could be anxiety or an aneurysm or an angina or a host of other things, on webpages that all ended with "See your doctor."<br />
<br />
I saw my doctor. She looked at me with busy sympathetic eyes and said, "Your oxygenation's 99%, that's pretty good, no one really gets 100%," and pressed the stethoscope against my skin. She spoke vaguely about trying yoga and meditation and prescribed a frightening pill, saying, "This isn't a solution for anxiety, it's more to see, you know, if it helps make the physical part go away. Take maybe half a tab -- a quarter, even -- because these are really strong." At home when I took the medication out of the wrinkled paper pharmacy bag, I marveled at how tiny the pills were, resting like breadcrumbs at the bottom of the orange prescription canister. I called my sister in a celebratory tone: I wasn't going to die. I pushed the breadcrumb pills into the bathroom cabinet, stacked alongside all the other things I've never used. Like a month's supply of ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic they give you in case you get the runs while you're jaunting around abroad. The first-aid kit from Costco that was a Christmas present from my parents (pragmatic souls), still shrink-wrapped.<br />
<br />
I miss not inventorying the medical supplies in that bathroom cabinet to evaluate readiness for potentially recovering from a respiratory disease at home. But what I miss most about before is probably every other "before" I missed then: once, roaming the hills at night with whatever walking companion that heady year had delivered; once, tossing back mojitos in expat bars in Beijing with girlfriends from a language program; once, tearing around a friend's opulent house fueled by goat cheese on oven-toasted baguettes, making movies and binge-watching MacGyver; once, lying on Capitola Beach with summer camp friends licking a single ice cream cone, gleaming and turning sticky in our hands. Orpheus, in looking back, loses Eurydice a second time.</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-53906531525454827042019-10-21T22:26:00.001-07:002019-10-21T22:34:12.435-07:00Staying in place<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The provincial joy of a sunset sky, Berkeley, CA</td></tr>
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<br />
I read <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ahr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ahr/rhz938/5585915?guestAccessKey=11e968a0-0d94-4012-a1ff-4577d0c26d59&fbclid=IwAR3KMTKrJNqxKRwUaJayQaeZxeEJh4g_bGpxo7cq8gU45Xf7r3S5rsK3vZ8">an article about acknowledgements</a> in academic papers. Through the lens of the acknowledgement the article illustrates, and critiques, the kind of person held up as the ideal scholar (at least, in the social sciences) -- mobile, cosmopolitan and rootless.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
When I go see an old professor I admire to ask for advice on maybe applying to graduate school, he tells me, Go live somewhere else for a year. Move to Afghanistan and learn Dari or something. Or Indonesia. Have you ever been to Indonesia?<br />
<br />
No-oo, I say, feeling the failure of it hot in my veins.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
In high school I travel a lot to give speeches at distant conferences, missing 53 days of class in senior year of high school. I like a line from the movie "Up in the Air," in which George Clooney plays the frequent flyer protagonist: "Tonight most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day, and tonight they'll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over."<br />
<br />
The point of the movie is that the character is unhappy, but I try to use it for my senior quote in the yearbook anyway.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I resent the traveling, like when I miss school dances, and other times I appreciate it, like when nobody asks me to the dance, or I can't work up the courage to ask someone. Why didn't you go to Tolo? I was in Denver. I was in New York. I was in --<br />
<br />
It wreaks havoc on my AP Bio grades, but not being around means I don't have to do the work of being a person my age around others my age, which is both harder and more joyful than the speeches.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
My friend flies in from New York to stay with us unexpectedly for a couple of days because of a memorial service for a schoolmate, whose passing has put us all in a morose and reflective mood on the subject of friendship and staying in touch.<br />
<br />
The New York friend left the Bay for a plum job after college. He does a good job of Getting Out and meeting people but when I tell him about the acknowledgements article and the characterization of the ideal scholar, he says vehemently, That sounds depressing as hell.<br />
<br />
Standing in the sylvan light filtering through the branches framing the kitchen window, musing on our respective locations, I think both of us wonder if we have made the right moves: his, to leave, mine, to stay.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Sometimes, I want to leave home for someplace far and difficult to reach to make people miss me, a petty desire. In truth I know people respond to people leaving the way quicksand does to perturbations: closing ranks, filling the space.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Do I know less because I've stayed in the same city for almost six years?<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
The old professor and I talk about how I don't really know what I want to research but would certainly depart from the subject of my undergraduate thesis because its research question interrogated something too -- I fish for the word for a moment -- proximate. Close to me.<br />
<br />
Exactly, he says, and he jolts forward in his chair. You don't want to do proximate.<br />
<br />
Proximate is clinical, euphemistic really. The word that haunts our conversation, my insecurities and his enthusiastic directives, is another 'P' one: provincial.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Why is it worse to study nearby things?<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
I wonder if it's a strange American predilection to dismiss what's proximate.<br />
<br />
In the dimly lit Belgrade hostel den, a Canadian in John Lennon glasses and an Australian with her blonde hair pulled into a sporty ponytail talk about going to uni near where they'd grown up.<br />
<br />
In the States you travel for school, don't you? they say, and I say yes, at first, but then disclaim that actually, the majority of people actually stay close to home, but there is a culture of applying to far away places in the upper socioeconomic strata, and among more competitive students...<br />
<br />
I struggle with description here, not wanting to describe myself as a member of the privileged class while also facing the fact that I went to school states away from my childhood home, that I almost went to school on an opposite coast.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Without travel, how can we know that our own is not the only way to live?<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
The Mosuo minority people in China live in a matrilineal society and practice a form of polyandry known as the "walking marriage," in which men visit women's houses at night (at the women's invitation) and children are raised communally.<br />
<br />
I learned this from a book or maybe an article I read online.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
The Chinese girl from the hostel asks if she can join my morning of aggressively touring museums (two down by noon, followed by the sprawling National Museum). In the middle of the Ethnographic Museum, she asks Is your mother a military? which confuses me until she clarifies in Chinese, <i>shaoshu minzu</i>, and I say, A minority? Oh, no.<br />
<br />
Because of the length of time we've spent together talking about our families, slogging through halls of paintings, and even painstakingly piecing together a puzzle of a vase of flowers in the National Museum, I think it appropriate to give her a hug goodbye. She seems nonchalant when we part. I realize later I never got her name.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The completed puzzle</td></tr>
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<br />
I spend hours sitting around a wooden table with the others at the hostel, drinking cheap beer and lightly rebuffing the persistent offers of strong <i>rakija, </i>fruit brandy, from a beanie-wearing man with reddened eyes. Was he on something? the girls around the table ask after he's left.<br />
<br />
When people start peeling off from the table one by one to go to sleep, I marvel at how nobody reacts by attempting to tether onto any means of connection that might outlast our conversation. There is no exchange of contact information on WhatsApp or WeChat or Facebook Messenger, no blithe "Come and visit me when you're in [city]!" only that kindly "Well, I'm going to bed. Have a good night!" I think, any of us could be gone as soon as the next morning (thank either geography or mortality). So be it: we live in the present. Whatever community we form that night is ephemeral.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
"And what should they know of England who only England know?"<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We resist provincialism to resist self-indulgence, self-obsession, self-centeredness. So much resistance against the imposition of the self.<br />
<br />
But during that best performance of rootlessness and mobility -- travel -- I am hyper-conscious of my body, the placement of my limbs, the space I take up in a security line, the smell of my denuded feet as I step gingerly into the towering full body scanner, my belongings. At the gate I slouch into a protective huddle over my backpack, sitting on a hard black chair. Walking briskly over the paving near Republic Square fallen into disrepair I keep one hand close to my wallet.<br />
<br />
At home, where I embrace friends and on some days loll around in easy communion with the grass, the trees, the stars, then those borders between my self and everything else begin to feel less solid.<br />
<br />
There is no glamorous fellowship named after a rapacious colonialist or robber baron or wealthy technologist for staying where you are, for organizing groups of people to meet over snacks purloined from the work kitchen to talk about books together, for practicing what the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing called in her book <i>The Mushroom at the End of the World </i>"the arts of noticing" as you walk down the wending path to your morning train, for stumbling through the woods of a nearby park and seeing for the first time what they look like in the dark.<br />
<br />
All the same, can't that be a kind of intellectual journey, too?</div>
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-80661625638039237032019-05-15T17:53:00.002-07:002019-05-15T17:53:30.070-07:00Alex<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I thought about him on the subway. The things he liked--that bright yellow book he left on our kitchen table, <i>Watchmen</i>, that I read and half-understood. Running, his face contorted with effort and hair blown back by the wind. The Beach Boys. Adrianna and I both expressed horror at that one, but eventually the notes of "Good Vibrations" came seeping out from under her bedroom door. <br /><br />Before we left Redmond for good he invited us to hang out, joining a bunch of other teenagers made shiftless by those summer nights to sit on camp chairs around a fire in the woods. How she perched on his lap and looked so happy in the flickering light, and after, when we were stowing liquor bottles back in the trunk of his car, I made a motion as if to swig from one. My sister shook her head disdainfully. He tossed me an egging-on grin. Said something like, Let her have a drink. <div>
<br /></div>
<div>
At the end of high school I was just his girlfriend's kid sister. Now I am older than he was then. <br /><br />As grown-ups we revisit places from childhood that seemed enormous and feel discomfited by their real scale. What happens when the place is gone? Then it's just stuck, towering in your head, not quite right. In my head he is old and I am small, but really I'm swaying on the subway coming home from work, sort of an adult, bills to pay and my name on a lease, almost 2 years older than he was when he died, this unfixable discrepancy that will never quite stop twisting my heart around, in the remembering.</div>
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-36455969335523902222019-05-09T03:00:00.000-07:002019-05-09T03:12:03.139-07:00Georgia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
The news of the <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/hb-481-georgia-law-criminalizes-abortion-subjects-women-to-life-in-prison.html">"heartbeat" abortion bill in Georgia</a> filled me with a peculiar sense of rage. Peculiar because it felt more like sadness. Sometimes it's easier to shiver in the cold than keep a fire going. I don't know if there's a point to writing another abortion essay. Others have done it more skillfully and with more personal stories, yet here I am, remembering something a high school teacher said once, that "some issues, like abortion, are so personal and contentious you'll never change anybody's mind."<br />
<br />
If you're reading this, you probably agree with me. I'm writing anyway because to demand an ear for my feelings as an adult woman feels like a small way to resist the notion that these feelings are trivial, secondary to serious, manly, discuss-over-steak-and-cigars-type issues, like The Economy.<br />
<br />
Fuck the economy. I know people's fates rise and fall on those green lines shooting across CNBC screens like EKGs, but but there will always be another day for writing a hot take on finance capital. Focusing solely on economic issues at the cost of reproductive justice is a smoke and mirrors show that distracts from the denial of bodily autonomy as a threat to our equality. That's why it bothers me so much when progressive men dismiss abortion as a "women's issue," or say the problem with the Democratic Party is that we've failed to widen our tent by sticking to our guns on reproductive justice.<br />
<br />
Next time someone says that I will ask, <i>Do you think I'm a person? </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I'm one of the lucky ones. I haven't ever needed an abortion, and I've had access to inexpensive contraception. In college I got a <a href="https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/iud">small piece of plastic</a> shoved into my uterus in an outpatient procedure <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/6323/if-men-had-to-get-iuds-theyd-get-epidurals-and-a-hospital-stay?zd=1&zi=o3hbbft4">widely described</a> as "blindingly painful." They told me to take two ibuprofen pills. I lay back stiffly on crinkled paper, gripped my partner's hand, stared at the white light above my head, and took jagged breaths. It was searing for three seconds, my whole body transfixed with the wrongness of having something pushed in that place, and then it was done. The nurse practitioner left me with a maxi-pad and a juicebox. The second time, I was about to graduate and keen, after Trump's election, to get an IUD that would last 5 years. Bracing for it made it hurt less; later I nursed a crust of bread while curled up on the carpet groaning, and then I played a bad game of squash. It didn't matter; I felt victorious. The IUD has a 99% effectiveness rate. It is the gold standard of contraception. It could have hurt worse and I would have done it again. This was worth it to avoid pregnancy.<br />
<br />
I asked for an IUD because of the effectiveness rate, but also because I wanted this physical investiture of my reproductive self-determination somewhere nobody could touch it. It provides me some comfort when I think about rape. I think about rape every day. That sounds terrible but feels ordinary. There were all those crime report printouts in my freshman year dorm lobby: "Sexual Assault at Fraternity," "Sexual Assault at Dormitory," "Groping At Student Union." The specter of latent violence has perched on my shoulder since I was three, when my mother taught me both my address if I got lost and to scream if someone tried to kidnap me. Later: "Let them rape you if they'll kill you otherwise, because the only thing you can't undo is death." There is no undoing rape, either, but our society is very good at letting silence masquerade as reversal. Better to be raped and alive than un-raped and dead. Women have thrown themselves into wells en masse over a different equation being drummed into their heads. It's about to be Mother's Day; should I tell my mom that this is the advice she's given me for which I am most grateful?<br />
<br />
The hypothetical rapes play in my head, briefly and matter-of-factly, like natural disaster drills. Just as I don't vividly imagine the earthquake or the fire, only the before and the after, I mostly think about who to call after getting to the hospital and medical care (e.g., a rape kit that will <a href="https://www.rainn.org/articles/addressing-rape-kit-backlog">probably go untested</a>, prophylaxis against HIV). I wonder if it would be someone I know (<a href="https://www.rainn.org/statistics/perpetrators-sexual-violence">3 out of 4 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim</a>), and if so, if I would report. I worry much, much less about pregnancy, because of the IUD.<br />
<br />
In this sense, I am lucky: I get to think about rape separate from pregnancy. It may be the closest I will ever get to feeling like a man. I wonder what it must be like to have your identity forged outside of constant reminders of your own violability. To walk down a dark street and think, maybe, about someone mugging you but not someone hurting you inside of yourself. I think of both things when a car drives too slowly beside me on the street. There's not much I can say about that except that it makes me feel small.<br />
<br />
I was 15 when I started having sex. Too young to buy Plan B when a condom broke: where I lived, you needed a prescription if you were under 17. It would have been an awkward conversation with liberal parents (even then, I would have been luckier than most) and a last-minute doctor's appointment, but my then-partner was old enough. What a classic high school scene: a dark bend in a rural road, a backseat cacophony of "Wait, shit, shit, <i>shit</i>," driving in silence to a pharmacy and waiting in the passenger seat. Hands folded in my lap, I watched him out the window, Nikes tap-tapping on the asphalt of the parking lot until he was a drop of ink between automatic doors that slid open and let light pour out like water. When he came back I took the pill, and then I thanked him for not charging me.<br />
<br />
So much could have gone wrong. I could have been with someone abusive; women are less likely to use contraception in violent relationships (<a href="https://psmag.com/health-and-behavior/the-connection-between-domestic-abuse-and-condom-use">Pacific Standard</a>), often because their partners see reproductive health as an arena to exert control. I could have had parents who stigmatized sexuality, threatened punishment, and blocked my access to healthcare. I could have thrown up after taking the pills, too soon for them to take effect. Instead, I got a period that lasted two weeks. I went to the farmer's market and wrestling practice and stared down my AP Psych teacher's inspirational poster of Steve Prefontaine in a last-ditch effort to try not to fall asleep in class. Every one of those mundane moments a gift.<br />
<br />
That's what choice is about: having the reins of your life in your hands. But I didn't. I was just lucky. And luck is not good enough when we live in a country where it's unevenly distributed. Not everyone has the means to fly to another state for an abortion (and <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/hb-481-georgia-law-criminalizes-abortion-subjects-women-to-life-in-prison.html">if that's prosecuted</a>, even rich folks are screwed). We talk about rape when we talk about abortion, comforting ourselves with the idea that maybe the restrictions are not <i>so</i> horrible: "Exceptions in case of rape or incest." But we know even that line is a movable one. Remember Missouri's Todd Akin: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." With the intense stigma surrounding coming forward about sexual assault, plus behavior by police that can further victimize survivors, many people may not have their assaults documented as "legitimate." Subsequently, they'd be denied access to abortions.<br />
<br />
We cannot pass laws that make every person with a uterus as helpless as that 15-year-old girl I once was, waiting at the window for him to come running with a pill.<br />
<br />
It's not an accident that I'm thinking back to 15 now in such clarity. Restrictions on reproductive choice anywhere make me feel small. To the politicians who seek to control us: know that I am already scared enough. Know that living under the cloud of the constant possibility of sexual violence is like having a low-grade fever you can never cure. We give up so much, trying to wend routes around this shifting threat we can't contain: staying in at night, developing elaborate sets of precautions, leaning on safety in numbers at the cost of time spent blissfully alone.<br />
<br />
Forced pregnancy is yet another violation of bodily autonomy that sows terror and limits our lives.<br />
<br />
If you would protest in the streets about state-sponsored violence in the form of bullets, protest state-sponsored violence that seizes a person's womb and locks their hands behind their back. Across the United States, there are <a href="https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/abortion-policy-absence-roe">legislative proposals to effectively ban abortions</a>. It's on all of us to fight for a day when this is the "land of the free and the home of the brave" for people with uteruses, too, liberated from the shadow of fear that our bodies are not our own.<br />
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<i><b>Resources:</b></i><br />
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<i><a href="https://www.guttmacher.org/">Guttmacher Institute</a></i><br />
<i><a href="https://www.prochoiceamerica.org/">NARAL</a></i><br />
<i><a href="https://www.plannedparenthood.org/">Planned Parenthood</a></i><br />
<i>More listed on Wikipedia: "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pro-choice_organizations_in_the_United_States">Pro-choice organizations in the United States</a>"</i><br />
<i>If you're at Berkeley: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SURJBerkeley/">Students United for Reproductive Justice</a></i></div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-45112614379235177172019-01-01T23:06:00.001-08:002019-01-01T23:38:33.239-08:00French Polynesia and some thoughts on travel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I capped off 2018 with a spontaneous solo trip to French Polynesia (which you may know as "Tahiti" or "the islands of Tahiti," though Tahiti is the name of one of many islands that make up the country). It's a land I first encountered in the pages of my high school AP Art History textbook and the paintings of French artist (and all-around sordid dude) Paul Gauguin.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/L48oRN8-hPK6ggY3Iypw19I7Nt4=/960x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-153049593-56e7230e5f9b5854a9f95d25.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="800" height="488" src="https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/L48oRN8-hPK6ggY3Iypw19I7Nt4=/960x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-153049593-56e7230e5f9b5854a9f95d25.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tahitian women on beach, 1891 - Paul Gauguin</td></tr>
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Many friends know that I have a complicated relationship with traveling. I did a lot of it, especially as a kid, for speaking engagements at conferences. Airplanes to sleepless nights before speeches, spent in gleaming hotels. I used to love the hotels and remember the name of each one until there were too many and then I didn't anymore. They started to blend together: the same smell (Eau d'Generic Clean Room), the same sounds. Sometimes there'd be a woman's voice when I walked in the room. I'd realize it was the hotel channel on the TV. Have a pleasant stay, on an endless loop. I'd write my speech last-minute, fly out the next day, and try to get what I could out of the city I was in from the ride to the airport. A backseat window view of the world: that was how I saw Newport News, Green Bay, Wichita, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, and some other places I'd have to search in my Google Calendar to recall.<br />
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Given all that, maybe it didn't make sense that I decided I would go somewhere by myself for fun--I clearly didn't have the best track record. But travel is cast as introspection and self-discovery and liberation in so many narratives. <i>Wild</i>;<i> Eat, Pray, Love</i>; every Instagram post in a foreign destination by some well-traveled friend. Meanwhile, I religiously maintained a moratorium on going out of town during major holidays. Spending time at home seemed like peak relaxation. Seeing all these people who really liked to travel made me wonder if some mechanism in me was broken.<br />
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I reflected on this in fiction and poetry. In 2016, shortly after I got back from spending two months in India doing an internship in corporate social responsibility, I wrote a monologue for a "Creating Character Through Dialogue" workshop. It was from the point of view of a young Asian-American woman complaining about a travel companion named Elli. After a stream of invective, she says,<br />
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"<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">OK, I know you think I’m overreacting, but there’s this part of me that just cringes every time she acts like </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">THAT</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> American. You know the type, right? Drinks PSLs, cheer in high school, hundreds of dollars in Lululemon apparel. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They make up for their lack of personality with copious drugs and trips to poor-ass countries where they can take pictures of everything and rack up the social media likes while they marvel at how </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">exotic</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">mystical </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">everything is. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frankly, I can’t do that. I’ve read my Edward Said and the canon of thinkpieces about How to Not be a Basic Bitch in the Third World. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But mostly I can’t be Elli because she actually…well, she actually </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">likes</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to travel. She finds something genuinely magical—no matter how problematic the language she uses to describe it—about everywhere she goes. And like, I dunno, I kind of wish I had that. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> don’t think I ever have.</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Growing up I joked about going to visit relatives in China the same way all our other Asian friends did. Going was not a treat. It was the sort of thing you were condemned to do until you went to college and got to decide where you went during your summers. We didn't get "exotic" and "mystical"; we got p</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ollution, no Facebook or Wikipedia, taxi drivers filling their cars with cigarette smoke, endless diarrhea. Relatives complaining about corruption, how they’d have to pay bribes to get a doctor to do some uncle’s open-heart surgery."</span></blockquote>
No place is experienced in the same way by every person who visits. The subject position of the traveler--age, gender, class, race, nationality, linguistic ability, disability, sexual orientation, and much more--may all affect the experience, something I thought a great deal about in one of my favorite seminars in college. In "Travels to the Lands of the Indians," we read writing by visitors to South Asia (as well as Indians traveling abroad, as in the case of Amitav Ghosh's <i>In An Antique Land</i>). I remember European writers who marveled at flora and fauna and foreign peoples, writing with a sense of magisterial authority about things they had only just encountered. Those early Orientalists, trying to document, categorize, and catalogue everything they saw, put knowledge production in the service of empire.<br />
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The narratives that European armchair adventurers eagerly sought out had in common protagonists who were paragons of normative masculinity—strong, adventurous, and bulwarks of Empire. Men who could, in the Kipling vein, keep their heads, “meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.” These men gallivanted around the subcontinent getting into scrapes and emerging unharmed. It's harder to sell books where narrators speak from a place of permanent vulnerability, easier to promote male heroics and a promontory gaze that makes the narrator “the monarch-of-all-I-survey” (Mary Pratt in <i>Imperial Eyes</i>). Pratt goes on to write that many female travelers “do not spend a lot of time on promontories. Nor are they entitled to. The masculine heroic discourse of discovery is not readily available to women." Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali, writing about her time in India, begins her first letter with a disclaimer: “I must entreat your kind indulgence to the weaknesses of a female pen.”<br />
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When I've traveled alone, various people have inadvertently made me aware of "the weaknesses of a female pen." In Atlanta one night I ate at a hotel restaurant with my orange journal in my lap instead of my phone and the waiter said with a half-patronizing, half-pitying expression, glancing at the unused place setting opposite me, "Writing the next great American novel?" In other countries I have heard phrases like "be careful!" and "stay safe" and "don't go out after dark" more than any of my male compatriots, and I am sure that abiding by those well-meaning imperatives means that I am losing out on some stories to tell. The truth is that I don't, and probably never will, gallivant around continents <i>veni, vidi, vici</i>-ing; I am a little woman, no one's stock photo idea of what an American looks like, certainly not a Hemingway or a Gauguin. (Given the former's famous misogyny and the latter's penchant for marrying underage girls, I think that's a good thing; art be damned.)</div>
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All the same, traveling by myself helped me realize that I was stronger in ways I didn't know, that I could be really scrappy when I needed to be, and that things would work themselves out. My first day in the country I jumped off the plane and onto a ferry, walked about 15 miles on the island of Mo'orea in my sandals, accepted rides from kindly women who screeched to a halt by the side of the road when they saw me, and accidentally swam with stonefish (the beach had a sign with a warning, but I figured whatever stonefish were, they couldn't be too bad if local families were swimming with their kids. Then Google told me I could die if I stepped on one). Back on Tahiti I accepted a ride on the handlebars of someone's bike and then had to extricate myself from an extremely uncomfortable situation when he persistently hit on me. It was scary and I found myself wondering if this whole going-to-Tahiti-by-myself idea had been a bit stupid, but then I learned how to say "Je veux être seule," or "I want to be alone"; the next morning when he wheeled up beside me, I looked him in the eyes and said it out loud. </div>
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I learned that traveling alone doesn't have to mean traveling lonely. I met two guys at my hostel who grilled up swordfish filets and made salad and lent me a biography (of Paul Gauguin, whose ghost really followed me around this whole trip) to read by the pool as the day grew dark. On my last day in French Polynesia I tagged along with two Nebraskans who let me join them in a rental car adventure around Tahiti Nui and Iti. We blasted Polynesian tunes from the radio of a jank little Fiat and shared taro chips and caramel M&Ms. We took a boat out into the Pacific and watched surfers catch waves, then watched the sunset from a black sand beach. </div>
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Like the blind men with the elephant I piece together impressions of a place in fragments. Here are a few: people blasting music from boomboxes on the street and dancing by food trucks in downtown Pape'ete. A tour guide mentioning as we jounced along in his Jeep that the country had a high unemployment rate. Brightly painted murals on buildings in the capital, the gleaming windows of the National Assembly, pineapples looking prim and fully-formed sitting on their plants. My favorite image: seeing land crabs scuttling into their holes, the way moles do here. The sand coming alive with claws that disappeared in an instant, quick as a wink. These dueling twins of ripeness and rot--mangoes sunset orange and soft to the touch, little crabs' translucent shells smashed by the side of the road, verdancy spilling out over mountaintops, piers rusting into the ocean. </div>
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As I was leaving Tahiti, I saw an exhibit of Polynesian art in the airport. I stopped to look. Under all but one of the approximately seven figurines displayed were notes like "Original at the British Museum" or "Original at Museé d'Orsay" or "Original in Wellington, NZ." It made me recall how I first saw French Polynesia through the paintings of Paul Gauguin, and how so often the first--sometimes only--view that we get of a far-flung place and its people is refracted through a colonial prism. Travel and travel literature by Westerners have often done little to challenge those views. I hope to get better at it--undoubtedly, a work in progress. I'm grateful that I had the means to visit Tahiti and Mo'orea, meet incredibly kind people, eat tropical fruits and bask in the shallow waters of the Pacific in the middle of winter. Most of all, I'm glad that Gauguin didn't get the last word on what I thought the islands might be like. There are wonders out there, both near and far, that beggar illustration. May we all have chances to get closer to them in this new year.</div>
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-47314546359886468152018-10-23T21:46:00.000-07:002018-10-23T22:02:17.910-07:00Teach your kids to be more than just "nice"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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My friend J., a scion of that kind of enlightened Berkeley family with beautiful décor in the living room and magic mushrooms in the freezer, told me that his mom had taught him in no uncertain terms not to rape. Oh, like to be careful, I wondered? <br />
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Not just that, J. explained. She had literally sat him down and talked about consent. No Means No. I was impressed—California universities moving toward a “yes means yes” affirmative consent standard notwithstanding—because I hadn’t met any other guys who had told me about receiving such a direct, pull-no-punches lesson. <br />
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I’ve been thinking about that lesson a lot more now in the wake of the whole horrible Kavanaugh situation and the allegations of serious sexual assault that took place in high school and college. Some have responded by claiming that young men, or drunk men, can’t be held responsible for their actions, even though our society regularly chastises women for drinking too much or acting “provocatively” as if they are to be considered more agentive in the violations of their bodies than their violators.<br />
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The Kavanaugh assaults hid in plain sight, in carefree high school and college parties largely thrown by and for the benefit of privileged white boys. We’ve seen the yearbooks, the smiling faces, the prestigious names of their expensive prep schools. If we’ve learned anything from this cesspool of elites, it’s that becoming an ethical person is not as easy as looking like one. Your good name is not enough. Your good school is not enough. Your scouting badges and your volunteering and your church on Sunday—if all this “goodness” is just smoke and mirrors, a show to distract from entitlement and rapacity and avarice, fuck your goodness. Stop telling your kids to just "be nice" if that quality is so vague and general it elides the very real differences in power that affect all relationships. <br />
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Here’s what I mean: one generic piece of advice we frequently tell kids is “Be a good friend.” What if they’re the guy (or girl) in the room when their friend jumps on another person and tries to claw their clothes off? Loyalty might dictate silence: that was certainly Mark Judge’s take. “Bros before hos.”</div>
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Eschew the simple story. Teach your children that there are values more important than loyalty to friends and its attendant code of silence: compassion for the vulnerable, rejection of physical force to compel the submission of others. Tell them, early, that sometimes your friends will do things that are wrong. Sometimes it will fall on your shoulders to call them out (or call them in), sometimes to intervene and stop it. This is a harder conversation to have. But it’s a necessary one.<br />
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This conversation, or ones like J.'s "Don't rape" talk, are all too rare right now. When we talk with and about children, I think we want to imagine that they're in this realm of innocence immune to our grown-up problems of racism and classism and sexism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kids can say horrible, bigoted things to each other, and imposing silence in the name of innocence just makes it harder for children to come forward and confide in parents about their experiences. What would it mean if parents looked at their children differently: not just as potential victims but as potential aggressors? </div>
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There are so many different meanings of “the Talk,” depending on which parents you ask. For some, this hardest conversation of all is explaining the mechanics of sex. “Where do babies come from?” For others, it’s a dispiriting conversation with children of color, particularly black children, about how to interact with police. In all its stripes, we are used to seeing “the Talk” as a conversation we have with the ones we love to keep them safe. It’s time to see it as something more: the conversation we have to make sure they keep others safe, too.</div>
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-65896761132690113952018-09-20T00:59:00.002-07:002018-10-23T21:07:10.813-07:00Friendship now<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Omnibus; Anders Zorn 1892</i></td></tr>
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The other night coming home on BART I reflected that I did not want to write, or read, or do much of anything really. I imagined the tantalizing possibility of unintellectual pursuits. Maybe I could watch something on Netflix. Netflix! It had been ages. I had a running list in the Notes app of things to watch when I had time. It had never been true that I didn’t have the time, just that other things had seemed more important. <br />
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Now, facing down this gaping expanse of time that belonged to me and not my ambitions, I realized that I wanted to spend it with someone else. Two friends who I might have asked automatically lived across the Bay now. Others had partners who they’d be curled up with; mine would, in two hours, be asleep. There were friends still in school, but I remembered how my weeknights had been not so long ago: frantically finishing assignments, collapsing into bed. <br />
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Who, if I reached out to them, wouldn’t see it as an imposition? Who did it feel effortless to spend time with, like our time together demanded no performance?<br />
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It was the kind of space that in the weeks of late June, with so many school friends gone, I might have filled with N—. Tempted curiosity turned force of habit. A 9pm muscle memory. Opening Facebook Messenger on my phone and sending something insouciant, the kind of language you use when you’re aspiring to an attitude like Melania Trump’s Zara coat: “I don’t really care, do u?” The therapist listened patiently when I mentioned hanging out frequently with N— and then remarked that it sounded like I needed to push myself to reach out more, or get better at being alone. In the moment I felt a twinge of resentment at this advice, but then time passed. N— became more familiar and less shiny. If once I’d wanted to see them because it had been uncomfortable in a thrilling way, now I wanted to see them because I felt lazy and un-daring. Because I wanted to ask somebody to do nothing in particular with me, and this smallest of requests seemed most intimate of all.<br />
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When you're little, you can run across the street to knock on someone's house and demand they play with you. Suddenly puberty happens. The ask becomes "Do you want to hang?" The ask becomes nerve-wracking. </div>
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It was only when I was sixteen, on the cusp of leaving my hometown permanently, that I was daring enough to ask people I didn’t know well to spend time with me for the sake of it—no pretense, like a meal, a concert, or a movie. In the face of impending departure, I thought every night spent alone was a missed opportunity. One night I thumbed through contacts in my phone. I saw the name of a classmate I’d nursed a minor crush on for months. M— liked Camus and came tardy to our first-period class so many times he’d racked up enough absences for administration to warn him he might not graduate. I’d always wanted to talk to him more. Impulsively, I called him. </div>
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After a couple rings, he picked up. “Hey?” A question. <br />
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“Do you wanna go on a walk?” I blurted. <br />
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M— sounded surprised. He said yes and then messaged an hour later saying that something had come up, could I take a rain check? I haven’t seen him in five years, but I like the memory. Later I called a different boy, who came and sat with me on the roof of my house as the stars came out. Calling people to hang out with no prior planning—it feels quaint, like it belongs to another time. Something out of an 80s high school movie where a girl with crimped hair in a high ponytail reaches for the pink telephone on her bedside table. </div>
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Moments that come to pass with no preparation: these are the ones I remember most fondly, more than the meticulously planned trips or the group hang organized by some long-suffering friend who has to coordinate everyone's schedule with Doodle. Maybe my gratitude for spontaneity reveals its rarity. I'll cop to being clumsy at some of the mechanics of friendship, the kinds of little things that other people I know both intuit and take for granted. At a concert, listening to a folk singer, the friend I went with asked if she could hold my hand--a sort of novelty to me, but maybe not to her. We interlaced our fingers. When the song ended and we clapped, I realized that I missed the warmth of her palm, that the simple touch had been a balm to something I hadn't realized before was raw. There was a friend who delightedly threw his arm around me when I was ridiculously using a straw to forklift whipped cream from a Starbucks drink into my mouth, said something outsized for that moment like "I love you." After speech and debate in high school I got a ride sometimes with a friend to his house, and we'd look for something to do--play Halo on his massive TV, eat dosas and sambar his mom made. My mom would call. I'd decline, wanting to extend my stay in this place where time didn't seem to matter. There was the all-night hackathon where my friends and I didn't do much (any) coding but snuck out to a skate park at midnight to play Truth or Dare; later, we walked up to our high school track, sitting on the ice-cold bleachers as the metal shone orange in the rising sun. One New Year’s Day I lounged on a friend’s couch, sunlight dripping in like maple syrup through the living room window. I half-disbelieved that this idleness, this glorious lack of motion, could be allowed. When I think hard many more cherished moments come tumbling forth, most the fruits of spontaneity, not planning--premeditation, I think, would almost stop such things from happening at all.</div>
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And there I was on BART, wondering who might want to be my accomplice in killing time and coming up empty. I guess that's part of growing up, this slow contraction of the circle of friends who you spend time with doing nothing. God knows my parents, responsible adults, didn't have people over to our suburban house to just aimlessly watch episodes of Bob's Burgers and lie on the floor in the dark, looking at glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on the ceiling and talking about mortality. If losing these long stretches of unplanned time with friends is the price we pay for adulthood, I have begun to clear my debts. I set dates with friends over Facebook Messenger. We plop appointments two weeks ahead for brunches and coffees and dinners after work into our Google Calendars. Everything is planned because nobody has any time, except, of course, when we do, and in these years those moments still catch us by surprise: standing with strangers on BART, watching the still necks of cranes in the Oakland harbor through blemished glass, drifting back to the wooden embrace of our silent homes.</div>
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-65848027087680494532018-08-22T18:15:00.000-07:002018-10-23T21:07:17.524-07:00Time, y'know<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A friend tells me the next thing I write should just be called "Time, Y'Know." He says, the entirety of the body will be "<i>duuuude</i>." <br />
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It's a well-deserved ribbing: we're messaging about a picture Facebook reminds me we took exactly 4 years ago. Looking at our young faces, our bodies propped up insouciantly on the rail between us and the Hudson River, I can't decide if it feels like it's been longer than 4 years or shorter. <br />
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How does one make sense of time? <br />
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Senior year of high school: I get into a verdant liberal arts college in the Northeast. I know I won't go, but I like the free pennant they send me and the heft of their brochure, glossy and pregnant with deep black ink. White letters announce that college promises to be the best four years of my life. This frightens me. If this--youth, what Fitzgerald called a "chemical madness"--is supposed to be the pinnacle of life, what remains in the six-some decades left over? <br />
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Are we to measure the pace of time in spirits: innocence, debauchery, responsibility, senility? <br />
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Or is crisis the natural benchmark of time? <br />
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It's 7 minutes until my clothes are dry. At the laundromat, I announce to my boyfriend's brother that I read an article about Quarter-Life Crises. The Quarter-Life Crisis being a phenomenon established enough to merit its own piece in Lifehacker by some underpaid freelancer makes me feel better about my own uncertainties. He is unimpressed by the terminology. Why do people arbitrarily split time up into these neat stages of crisis, he wonders. Quarter-life, mid-life. Aren't there crises happening all the time? <br />
<br />
But if there's no happy, stable, crisis-less future to work towards, I cry out, what's the point? <br />
<br />
Of course there's no point, he says. <br />
<br />
* <br />
<br />
Then there's keeping time with people. The Etruscans, Nathan Heller <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/06/private-dreams-and-public-ideals-in-san-francisco">writes</a>, kept time with a saeculum: spanning "from a given moment until the last people who lived through that moment had died." <br />
<br />
Time for small children begins and ends with their own existence. At an age when you think people disappear when they duck behind a couch, it's difficult to conceive of a world without yourself in it. <br />
<br />
Mommy says keeping journals is a gift to your future children. In a bile-yellow journal from Big Lots! with thin paper and spiral binding, I start entries with "Dear Dairy." <br />
<br />
I don't question why my future children would have this voyeuristic interest in my past self. I know it to be true because I am deeply interested in my parents' childhoods. When my granddad shows me a box filled with sheafs of yellowing papers, old quizzes and tests from my dad's elementary school days, I marvel over them. It's an exotic kind of object permanence, realizing that your parents existed before you. And that you might exist after them. <br />
<br />
* <br />
<br />
People choose odd ways and places to try to freeze themselves in time. <br />
<br />
Camping on an ugly mountain with a pretty view, I go to a bathroom, sticky and airless, lit by a dusty skylight. I notice "A+N 2016" carved into the toilet paper holder. <br />
<br />
What kind of romantic puts their initials in a bathroom? There's something I admire about the cynicism: as if long after the bridges and redwoods and geological formations that other fools in love mark up have broken, burned, and crumbled, this piece of shit-stained black plastic snagged on concrete will announce A+N's undying love to a dying sun.<br />
<div>
<br />
* <br />
<br />
Maybe my own method to preserve the essence of this moment in time is less well-thought-out than A+N's. I'm not even preserving the essence of one moment, but two: one in a tea shop playing 80s electropop, sitting on a wooden bench that keeps shifting jerkily under the moving haunches of my neighbors, and one in a dry office where the windows are so thick you can't hear the street. <br />
<br />
When you're there alone, as I am, the silence creates an environment that I imagine is similar to floating in a sensory deprivation tank, except with light and air instead of darkness and water. Like a transparent womb, floating in the sky. <br />
<br />
* </div>
<div>
<br />
What do we do with all our time? <br />
<br />
Some people keep meticulous 'time journals' to better understand how they actually use all their time. The results frequently reveal they have more time for leisure than they think they do; it's just wasted on tiny chunks of browsing Facebook, usually. <br />
<br />
Maybe one of the reasons that time is so strange, that looking back on it feels trippy, is because we actually don't think about it most of the time. It'd be petrifying to, I think--like thinking too hard about chewing or breathing. So a lot of it passes unbeknownst to us. <br />
<br />
For me, there are all these spaces where it feels like time is hardly real: on BART, in the shower, my bedroom late at night. In these places time slips through my fingers while I am doing nothing in particular: like standing in a line at Costco staring into space until the Nigerian man behind me says, not unkindly, "Excuse me, are you going to leave your things in the cart?" and then I am suddenly jerked back into the present, putting a creaking plastic clamshell of organic strawberries and two baguettes in a paper bag and a glass bottle of vodka (heavy enough to club a man in the head and kill him) onto the black conveyor belt that whirs, onward, ceaselessly, until it slips under. <br />
<br />
<br />
* <br />
<br />
<i>Duuuude.</i></div>
</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-55242500944724724962018-07-24T22:46:00.002-07:002018-07-24T22:49:30.257-07:00Young people doing cool things who you should follow<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
Since I was a kid, I've had opportunities to travel around the world and give talks at conferences (sometimes very much in my wheelhouse, like education, youth, and literacy events, and sometimes very much not--shoutout to the lovely folks at the property market MIPIM, or the Association of Energy Services Professionals).<br />
<br />
I'd be an asshole if I thought I actually deserved all these opportunities. <a href="http://adorasv.blogspot.com/2014/03/merit.html">I don't really believe in merit</a>, and I know no one advances in life on their own; as Barack Obama said more poetically, "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that">you didn't build that.</a>" I've been lucky, and I know a lot of peers with more drive and grit than me have not. Given that I believe strongly in equality of opportunity and other fine democratic ideals, I often wonder: how do lucky people live ethically?<br />
<br />
Answering that is an ongoing process, but one idea I'm trying to work on is amplifying the voices of other folks who are doing interesting work. In advance of this talk I'm about to give at this year's <a href="https://www.canvaslms.com/news/instructurecon/">InstructureCon </a>in Colorado, here's a list of young people doing cool things who you should follow that I'm going to announce during my talk and invite the 2500 attendees to check out! List is certainly incomplete -- reflects biases in my own communities and who I've met personally. (If I know you, you do cool things, and you're not on the list, I think you're awesome but the sleep deprivation and 9000' elevation in Keystone, CO got to me. Will try to update this when it's not midnight MST.)<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/eva_shang">Eva Shang</a>, <a href="http://legalist.com/">Legalist</a> and her sister <a href="http://www.melissashang.com/">Melissa Shang</a>, disability rights activist and author of <i>Mia Lee is Wheeling Through High School</i></li>
<li>Zoya Jiwa, <a href="https://aswearestyle.com/">As We Are Style</a>, "a style website for people who are facing health challenges" to alleviate pain and build community</li>
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/nikhilgoya_l">Nikhil Goyal </a>(education activism)</li>
<li><a href="http://stuvoice.org/">Student Voice</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/zakmal">Zak Malamed</a></li>
<li>Irene Jiang: Fulbright in Morocco doing documentary filmmaking on a theatre troupe and <a href="https://murderwithasideofrice.wordpress.com/">posting a serial Cascadian murder mystery online</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/Diplateevo">Daniel Kao</a>, NYTimes and <a href="https://www.syndicator.io/">Syndicator</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/eriklaes">Erik Martin</a> (one of the nicest people I've ever met!) formerly of Dept of Ed and White House and now <a href="https://www.syndicator.io/">Syndicator</a> and grad school adventures</li>
<li><a href="http://srnd.org/">StudentRND</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/tylermenezes">Tyler Menezes</a></li>
<li><a href="https://hackclub.com/">Hack Club</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/zachlatta">Zach Latta</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/sagareejain">Sagaree Jain</a>, poet and researcher about to be a Global Health Corps fellow, also a Berkeley alum</li>
<li><a href="http://joininteract.com/">Interact Retreat</a> for social good-oriented technologists and affiliated community</li>
</ul>
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School protesting gun violence by organizing <a href="https://marchforourlives.com/">March for Our Lives</a> </li>
<li>Filmmaker <a href="http://twitter.com/azzacohen">Azza Cohen</a></li>
<li>Comedian, writer and feminist <a href="http://twitter.com/rubykarp">Ruby Karp</a></li>
<li>Cal alum <a href="https://rigelrobinson.com/">Rigel Robinson</a> is running for Berkeley City Council and another alum, <a href="https://caitlinforpetaluma.wordpress.com/2018/07/05/aboutcaitlin/">Caitlin Quinn</a>, is running for Petaluma School Board</li>
<li><a href="https://www.facebook.com/SURJBerkeley/">Students United for Reproductive Justice</a> at Berkeley; their work is a master class in how to make s**t happen (they helped <a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2018/01/25/uc-berkeley-students-pen-bill-requiring-ca-public-colleges-provide-medical-abortion-services/">pass a bill </a>ensuring access to medication abortion on campus), and I regret not being more active in the movement, although I did show up to one meeting and eat pizza.</li>
<li>Poet <a href="http://www.theadroitjournal.org/masthead-editor-in-chief">Peter LaBerge</a> literally started a full-fledged literary magazine, <a href="http://www.theadroitjournal.org/about/">The Adroit Journal,</a> when he was in high school</li>
<li><a href="http://www.rebeccadharmapalan.com/">Rebecca Dharmapalan</a> - filmmaking, speaking out against human trafficking</li>
<li>(My housemate for three years in college) <a href="https://twitter.com/ayoonhendricks">Alex Yoon-Hendricks</a>, writing for the NYTimes</li>
<li>(Freshman year roommate!) <a href="https://twitter.com/camfassett">Camille Fassett</a> reporting for the Freedom of Press Foundation</li>
<li>The young people organizing TEDx events all around the country, including my favorites at <a href="http://tedxredmond.com/">TEDxYouth@Redmond</a>!</li>
</ul>
There are so many other people and I can't write a little blurb for each person but follow them on Twitter, amplify their work on your networks, and invite them to give a talk at your next conference!</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-89097532757264554992018-01-17T02:52:00.000-08:002018-01-17T02:56:58.182-08:00On Aziz Ansari, and Talking to Men<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<br />
In a recent conversation in the wake of the <a href="https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355">story about Aziz Ansari</a> I found myself trying to explain to a man that <i>thing</i> that many women do around men. If this were a circus, it could be something sensational and cute: the Magic Shrinking Act, the Play-Doh Woman, the Mansplainer Charmer. But it's not a circus, just daily life.<br />
<br />
By way of explaining, here are some stories.<br />
<br />
There's T., a guy I know. We were at a social event together once when some other guy provoked him--maybe with some comment about T.'s purported romantic prowess or lack thereof. T. responded by loudly declaring something to the effect of "just wait until I show them my [tech company] pay stub, which is bigger than yours." I made a joke about that, at which his expression darkened. Knowing that he could be quick to anger, I hurriedly said, "Sorry!" Another time, he gave a couple friends and me a ride. He swore at almost every other driver on the road. I laughed nervously and tried to keep the mood light, feeling somehow guilty for the perturbed air between us. I knew he liked classic rock, so I queued up seven songs, just for him, to play on the car speakers. <i>I'm on the highway to hell / Highway to hell...</i><br />
<br />
I'm not myself when I'm around T.<br />
<br />
S. is a friend who I've known since I was fifteen. Our conversations alternate between analytical discussions of the article links we send each other and sarcastic banter. He sent me the Aziz Ansari article and the NYTimes response, "Aziz Ansari is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind-Reader." What did I think, he wondered. He must have seen my ellipsis flicker onto his screen and then off a couple times then. I typed and backspaced and backspaced some more, all those tender-looking machinations of steeling myself. I was trying to prepare the right sort of response. A calm, certain, and measured one. I thought that Ansari had behaved badly, that any instigator of sexual activity needs to consider their partner's interiority. I said this. But there would be the concessions, the disclaimers: what he did was not criminal, and certainly not Weinstein-level.<br />
<br />
I was able to type up all the things I thought. Why was it so hard to write what I felt?<br />
<br />
Perhaps it was wise not to delve into pathos and personal experience. After all, S. said later, after he said that he agreed with me, that he thought the tone of the story was an issue. I agreed that it could have been improved, but felt hesitant when he remarked it should have been written "professionally" rather than "hysterically."<br />
<br />
It was a revealing choice of words, if accidentally so. The word "hysteria" comes from the Greek, hysterikos, "of the womb, suffering in the womb." The word became a catch-all phrase for a variety of female afflictions and irritations thought to be caused by a "wandering womb." The advances of medical science have thankfully disabused us of any notion of a uterus magically traveling around the female body (side note--I'd love to see someone make an animated GIF of that), but we continue to use the word disproportionately to refer to women. Hysterical: the classy way to say "bitches be crazy." I wonder if S. knows this.<br />
<br />
Either way, I didn't want to be a crazy bitch, or an angry one. And oh, I am. I am angry at Aziz Ansari for repeatedly sticking his fingers in a woman's mouth (how can you assume she's into that without asking, "Yo, are you into fingers in your mouth?" That's a pretty non-standard part of your sexual repertoire, my dude). I am angry at him for making a move on her after he had suggested "just chilling on the couch." I am angry at him for his utter oblivion, the "I had a great time!" text after she went home crying in an Uber.<br />
<br />
I would be angry if it was my sister.<br />
<br />
I would be angry if it was my friend.<br />
<br />
Wouldn't you?<br />
<br />
But if it were me? I don't know if I would know how to be angry. Maybe I would just be numb.<br />
<br />
I hooked up once with a frat guy. He muttered that he'd had too much beer and smoked too much weed before I came over, so he was having a hard time getting it up. I wasn't really looking down there, just kind of sitting and waiting. Apparently he sobered up, because he gave me a kind of look and then it was happening. I lay there and crossed my fingers that it wouldn't hurt and felt quietly relieved when it didn't, much. Then I realized he wasn't wearing a condom and felt, suddenly, terrified. Like I'd entered an elevator in freefall. What did that feeling do? Make me slap him, like Caitlin Flanagan nostalgically hearkens back to in her <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-humiliation-of-aziz-ansari/550541/">Atlantic article</a>? ("They [1970s magazines] told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight.") I did not. I felt scared and small. I said, very nervously, "Um--are you not wearing a condom?"<br />
<br />
"Don't worry, I'm clean," he said. <br />
<br />
"Uh--but I'm not on birth control or anything..."<br />
<br />
He said he would put one on later. <br />
<br />
"Could you please put it on now?" I asked timidly. When it was over I walked very quickly back to the takeout sushi I'd ordered to a friend's dorm and ate it and laughed when one of my floor-mates jokingly called me a slut. Later I took a battery of STI tests. <br />
<br />
"And then everything was negative, so it's fine," I told a female friend over pizza. I related the story the same way I told stories about my floormates' drunken escapades--can you believe the buffoonery of these harmless people? I did not mention the copay for the tests, or that first twinge of terror, and feeling small.<br />
<br />
Even so, she was horrified. "He didn't have your consent to do that. That's sexual assault."<br />
<br />
I reeled. "I mean, no, it's OK, I'm just not going to see that dude again."<br />
<br />
It was painful to see my night through her prism, even if it made logical sense: my consent was predicated on a condition that was violated. That was enough to send a man in Switzerland who removed a condom without his partner's consent to jail; the Federal Supreme Court there decided <a href="https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mbqa83/man-convicted-of-rape-after-removing-condom-during-sex-without-consent">such actions constitute rape</a>. But I wasn't raped, I thought. I had a bad hookup.<br />
<br />
Noted scholar Catharine MacKinnon writes in her paper "<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2381437?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Pleasure Under Patriarchy</a>,"<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Immense energy goes into defending sexuality as just fine and getting better all the time, and into trying to make sexuality feel all right, like it is supposed to feel. Women who are compromised, cajoled, pressured, tricked, blackmailed, or outright forced into sex (or pornography) often respond to the unspeakable humiliation, coupled with the sense of having lost some irreplaceable integrity, by claiming that sexuality as their own. Faced with no alternatives, the strategy to acquire self-respect and pride is: I chose it. […] The mind fuck of all of this makes the complicitous collapse into “I chose it” feel like a strategy for sanity. It certainly makes a woman at one with the world.”</blockquote>
<br />
Caitlin Flanagan would tell me, you didn't slap him, you didn't start wailing, you went down without a fight. There's a strange comfort in her pernicious logic--one that equates inaction with consent, timidity with choice. Because then you can think, <i>I chose it</i>. And suddenly you're not hysterical anymore.<br />
<br />
When S. asked me what I thought about the Aziz Ansari story the first place my mind went to was that frat guy and freshman year. But something made me hesitant to bring it up.<br />
<br />
I guess that I am not fully myself around S., either, even though I like him a great deal.<br />
<br />
I hesitated because it was a story about the complicated nature of how we narrativize our own lives. In reminding me that my consent had been violated, my female friend shook my narrative. Today, I can say honestly that that night was a scary moment that I have thought little of since. But I am thankful that my friend responded more zealously than I did: her anger reminded me, in a moment when my grip on it felt tenuous, that my consent was important, that my body was my own.<br />
<br />
The story about that frat guy was never just about a condom. It was about my feelings. I was unsure if S. wanted to hear those, because it seems like many detractors of the Ansari article are unhappy the woman in question shared hers. Let's remember that in the article on <i>babe</i>, no criminal charges are announced, no financial reparations are sought, no boycott is announced. Yet there are opinion writers everywhere acting like Ansari's defense attorneys, responding with screeds about women needing to be more proactive. Some demonstrate an eagle-eyed attention to physical or quantifiable details--she waited <i>that</i> long to put her clothes back on? This myopic focus means a failure to respect the emotional details of the story. A girl's tears in her Uber home aren't blood and semen in a rape kit, but our society's sexual standard should not be to get as close to the criminal edge of harm as possible before drawing back. That means respecting sex as an emotional process, not just a physical one.<br />
<br />
This is also where things get complicated, because it goes back to talking to men. The way that I talk to many guys constitutes dancing around a wall, trying not to challenge some nebulous masculinity. Listening patiently when they explain something I already know about, or smiling even while telling them off for saying blatantly offensive shit because I don't want to seem mad, or apologizing too much. Saturday Night Live's Aidy Bryant even did a <a href="http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/weekend-update-aidy-bryant/3650367?snl=1">sketch</a> on Weekend Update, playing herself:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
AIDY BRYANT [rolls out on office chair]: I’m sorry I rolled out here kinda weird, did I ruin it? [...] I just do that [apologize]…it’s kind of my natural state because I, like most girls have been taught to be accommodating and be polite…I understand the impulse to be accommodating…everyone’s talking about how women should negotiate harder and ask for more money and that’s true, but I feel like maybe, just maybe, men could be just like, this much more dece? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
COLIN JOST: 'Dece'? Like 'decent'?<br />
<br />
AIDY BRYANT: I wanna say decent but I’m trying to keep it cool and chill so I don’t come off like a shrew! [...] Equal pay is the goal but at this point I’d be happy to just even gain like a couple of yards, and that’s a straight-up sports reference for da boys! All I’m saying is that if I’m going to be more like Mark Wahlberg, maybe Mark can take a trip through my brain, which is just a tornado of ‘is he ok?’ ‘Is she ok?’</blockquote>
The sketch is meant to be exaggerated but it rang true--trying to keep it "cool and chill," the cringeworthy "sports reference for da boys." And that tornado which Aidy later describes as a "prison of the mind" is one that comes with silver linings: on balance, I've encountered more emotional perception and disclosure when I talk with girls. Yes, I may dance around other girls' feelings too, but it's not around an entire wall, an entire system, the way I try not to challenge masculinity. I've never had the feeling of "oh shit, I can't challenge a girl's femininity" because it's laughable to even imagine--what would be construed as an affront? This is one of the advances of feminism--that there is a wide selection of ways in which to be a woman, and as Gloria Steinem said, "We have begun to raise daughters more like sons," with all the riches of the world spread out for our grabbing.<br />
<br />
But the second part of Steinem's quote, "few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters," with that Aidy-Bryant-tornado-in-the-mind, is still too true. Andrew Reiner writes in the New York Times,<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father’s voice. “I’ll hold your hand, O.K.?” Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: “Don’t cry!… Aw, big boy! High five, high five! Say you’re a man: ‘I’m a man!’ ” The video ends with the whimpering toddler screwing up his face in anger and pounding his chest. “I’m a man!” he barks through tears and gritted teeth.The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger."</blockquote>
<br />
Reiner goes on to say that we socialize vulnerability out of young boys, and this argument is borne out by research showing men are less likely to visit physicians and more likely to engage in risky behaviors. All this to say that inculcating boys with a narrow kind of masculinity, one that denies them an emotional vocabulary, has deeply negative consequences for the men they grow up to be.<br />
<br />
It also makes life harder for the women (or more emotionally communicative men) who talk to them. My dad often mentions being in high school and feeling alienated by his male peers, who always just seemed to want to talk about cars. Sometimes I find myself standing in his shoes, perplexed by the conversations I hear groups of boys having. How is it possible to talk for so long, at such volume, about mutual funds or poker? I like your jokes and your volubility, I want to say, but I wish I knew the answers to different questions (and that you sometimes asked them): how do you know when you're falling in love? What keeps you awake at night? When was the last time you cried?<br />
<br />
A guy I don't know very well, who I'll call N., was sitting across from me at a party one night. He wore neat, preppy sweaters, like he'd walked off the cover of a J.Crew catalogue, but seemed earnest and not douchey. During a drunken game where we all asked each other exceedingly personal questions someone asked N., who we'd already established had a girlfriend who he liked very much, "Have you ever cried after sex?"<br />
<br />
He looked shocked for a second that it was even a question.<br />
<br />
"Of course, yeah," he said, like it was obvious.<br />
<br />
Some guys around the table expressed mock horror.<br />
<br />
"It happens," he said calmly. I think he said something about things being "emotionally intense."<br />
<br />
I don't know why that moment made me respect him so much. I suppose it was because we were sitting in a room with so many men whose vulnerabilities I had danced around like tripwire. In contrast, his nonchalant answer felt like a rare communion. I was looking across the table and picturing him curled up next to someone he loves and weeping into her shoulder. It was a fragility which I suppose he could not have known registered to me as strength.<style type="text/css">
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-80921309941916550642017-12-25T17:20:00.002-08:002017-12-25T17:20:46.257-08:00Tidying Up<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
I recently spotted Marie Kondo's <i>The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: the Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing </i>on sale for $2. <i>Tidying</i> is a self-help staple. What Dr. Spock was to nervous new mothers in the 50s and 60s, I imagine Marie Kondo is to millennial women trying to get the #minimalist #aesthetic for the 'gram.<br />
<br />
I've read the book before, but $2 was hard to beat. I snatched it up to bring to my parents' over Winter Break.<br />
<br />
Kondo's book advocates aggressively removing any items from your home that do not "spark joy," in the pursuit of creating a more fulfilling, functional, and minimalist living space. Grown out of those clothes ten years ago? Sell them. Don't know why you own twenty-eight dysfunctional pens? Throw them out. Finish reading a book and think you won't read it again? Give it away.<br />
<br />
"I'm going to start consolidating around the house. I bought <i>The Life-Changing Magic</i>-whatever book on sale," I announced at dinner.<br />
<br />
"You already had that book," my mom said.<br />
<br />
I didn't let the ironic origins of my cleaning mania stop me from attacking an old bureau, opening drawers to complain loudly about odds and ends being in the wrong places. There was a mysterious key. A bubble mailer just filled with nails. Behind this year's Christmas cards and some of the stars of our family's inexplicable collection of owl statues (actually explicable: inherited from a great-grandmother) were two fluorescent tubes.<br />
<br />
"Yo Dad, do these work?"<br />
<br />
He shrugged. "It's not the kind of thing you can just throw out. You'd have to take that to a toxic waste facility or something."<br />
<br />
I moved on to easier targets, sorting books no one wanted to read into boxes.<br />
<br />
"Isn't <i>1984</i> a classic?" my mom asked.<br />
<br />
"Yeah, but we have two copies. And this one's font is too small."<br />
<br />
Decluttering felt good. There was something cathartic about putting books that had gathered dust for ages into a clear plastic bin, for new lives at used bookstores or the <a href="http://www.prisonlit.org/">Prisoners Literature Project</a>, a Berkeley-based non-profit that sends books to inmates in California jails. Even more fulfilling was recycling: mounds of old receipts, Post-It notes with scribbled reminders from years past, brochures and guides for places we didn't want to go.<br />
<br />
"Are you doing all this cleaning so you don't have to when we die?" my mom said suspiciously.<br />
<br />
"No!" I protested. "I'm doing it so that you have a better quality of <i>life</i>."<br />
<br />
In the middle of all the cleaning, I went to the backyard patio to check on some line-drying laundry. The landscape that day was picturesque--the sun shone over the distant hills and illuminated the dry leaves fluttering around my feet. Everything looks prettier bathed in sunlight. Even all the random odds and ends lying around gained a bucolic Kinkade painting quality. There was the half-broken table that had practically come apart when my grandfather and I tried to move it, some vase shards, too many cast-off wooden planks to count.<br />
<br />
Chief of all the odds and ends was one woven together: what looked like an old bedsheet or maybe something of a stiffer constitution, like a curtain, strung up into a shape approximating a hammock. It hung from the patio roof beams by a sort of composite rope. It was several old lanyards and pieces of yarn, tied to one another.<br />
<br />
Growing up, my sister and I played in a backyard littered with the ambitious skeletons of house repairs and landscaping projects that never were: broken bricks and rusting nails and dried-out paint pans. We ground things up and made bad sculptures with Found Materials before we knew that was a thing some fancy artists in museums did. There is a Life-Changing Magic to Making Random Things Out of All That Shit Lying Around, too. There's clearly a line to be drawn between having some bric-a-brac and being featured on A&E's "Hoarders," and in general I agree with the principle of getting rid of stuff you don't need. But part of me also wonders what happens to the kids who grow up in immaculate homes with tame grass-lawn backyards. What happens when you live in a Marie Kondo-ized house?<br />
<br />
On my quest to throw away all the random things lying around the house that no one could describe as functional or "sparking joy," I realized that I would have thrown away the old lanyards that made up the improvised chain link holding up the hammock, and probably the half-falling-apart wooden table and bag of rusty nails, too, all banished off to some land across the sea where our unwanted things go.<br />
<br />
And I couldn't tell, then, if I missed them.<br />
<br />
I stared at the hammock for a long time. Then I went back inside, and I kept on tidying.</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-10033450286976277882017-12-18T20:51:00.000-08:002017-12-18T20:51:05.942-08:00An ode to BART<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I recently met an SF resident, a friend of a relative, who I'll call Trina. She said blithely that she had never taken BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, our local subway system).<br />
<br />
"I just Uber everywhere," she said, shrugging.<br />
<br />
To well-heeled Bay Area tech workers, the cost of Ubers everywhere might be chump change. But it's actually incredibly costly in terms of its effects on governance and society. Folks like Trina choosing to never step foot on a BART train has detrimental consequences for the system's maintenance and further development--as Keith Barry writes in Wired, <a href="https://www.wired.com/2013/12/brt-middle-class/">public transit is underfunded because the wealthy don't rely on it</a>.<br />
<br />
On another level, there's something about public transit that teaches you about how to <i>be</i> in the world, how to sit with people who look and talk and think differently from you. After high school and college, where people from different kinds of family backgrounds get squished together in lunch periods and dorm rooms, there aren't a whole lot of opportunities to meet people who are different. (Side note: educational systems aren't exactly always shining paragons of diversity, either.) Place of worship? Millennials are <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2010/02/17/religion-among-the-millennials/">less likely to attend religious services</a> than older generations. Relationships? Modern folks are increasingly likely to <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0ahUKEwj2hOj4mZXYAhUK6WMKHU4lB-IQFgg8MAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F02%2F23%2Fupshot%2Frise-in-marriages-of-equals-and-in-division-by-class.html&usg=AOvVaw3HIv1EmmnD1Yv2u080qstN">marry someone of the same education level</a>.<br />
<br />
But then there's public transit. Riding BART, I've heard couples fighting and tech bros talking about weddings in Napa. Smelled tobacco and vomit and bergamot perfume. Seen shirtless street performers and hipsters in orange Patagonia puffers leaning on their bikes, kids in polka-dotted strollers and weathered old men with belongings in plastic bags. I've rested my head on the window and considered my reflection, swimming in the scratched-up glass next to the towering container cranes of the Port of Oakland.<br />
<br />
In Ubers or Lyfts, I squirm on leather seats and charge my phone. Sometimes I talk to the driver, if they're game, if I'm not too tired. The last time I took a Lyft, back to my apartment from a pre-birthday dinner with my sister, our driver started with "You're my first passengers--ever! I just started driving!"<br />
<br />
"Congratulations," I said, "uh, welcome to Lyft, I guess?"<br />
<br />
As we went the wrong way and our driver pulled over to do a U-turn, she commented again, "Sorry, this is my first time, thanks for being so patient." She apologized a couple more times, asked us if the music was too quiet or too loud or if we wanted to listen to anything else in particular and if she should turn the heat up.<br />
<br />
Drivers for Uber famously <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-mysterious-way-uber-bans-drivers">can get kicked off the service for getting less than around a 4.7 rating</a>; I'm not sure about Lyft. It made me feel icky about our driver's solicitousness. It felt like it was something out of that Black Mirror episode "Nosedive"--in a dystopian, pastel-colored land of seemingly perfect people, everyone rates each other on their phone after every interaction, and your rating, much like a credit score, determines the class of goods and services you can access. It's certainly not quite Black Mirror, but Uber and Lyft link your behavior to access, too.<br />
<br />
On BART, you have to think about what we owe to each other when it isn't mediated by ratings and money. How to share space and give directions to a lost tourist and when to stand up and offer your seat to someone else. You can't pay a premium to get a roomier train car or skip stops or quiet the train's metal-on-metal scream on the tracks in the tunnel under the Bay. When there's no more space for hands on the center pole, you'll learn how to stand upright in a crowd. And when you're grumbling in your head about all the strangers around you, you'll realize that it's those strangers who will catch you if you fall.<br />
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-66585963063067641242017-08-22T17:48:00.000-07:002017-11-27T23:01:44.577-08:00Half a Motherland Part 3: Vote<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>“The faceless, sexless, raceless proletariat. The faceless, raceless, classless category of “all women.” Both creations of white Western self-centeredness.” - Adrienne Rich</i></div>
<br />
In spring semester, campaigns for elected student government positions at my school are in full swing, and I’m reminded constantly of the identities we prioritize with every candidate's Facebook post. Someone promises to represent the South Asian community at Berkeley, posting Instagram photos from Holi and a “Dosas and Mimosas” night hosted by the South Indian students’ group. A frat guy I've never met, poised to uphold the interests of the ROTC and International Relations communities. I’m kind of shocked that IR even counts as a “community”; when I think back to my last Development Studies class, I remember looking around at a group comprised of profoundly disparate elements: a few international students who rarely spoke up in class, a lot of white girls in athleisure leggings and Birkenstocks who sipped iced chai lattes out of mason jars. <br />
<br />
One year a professional co-ed association hosts a raucous blacklight party for Halloween. Everywhere are transnational elites in training--there are Asian products of American schools in Middle Eastern expat compounds, people whose neutral-sounding English exists on a geographically unplaceable plane of its own. They grind on each other and down Jell-O shots, sold 4 for a dollar. <br />
<br />
I look around this room of Cheshire cats--our grinning teeth gleam purplish white in the blacklight--and muse, <i>Is this my community?</i> <br />
<br />
Before I’m even done asking the question, I’m shaking my head.<br />
<br />
If my academic interest can’t define my identity group, then what should? Ethnicity? That doesn’t work either. There are some Asians who are scions of industrialists made rich by post-market reform prosperity in their home countries. These kids pay enough tuition to sustain the rest of us. I see them walking in big groups sometimes, swathed in Burberry trenches and wearing Nike Flyknits. Their rapidfire chatter is familiar and yet, their skin color and language render them no more “my people” than bushmen in a NatGeo issue. <br />
<br />
Then there are the Asian-American students who remind me of old friends and high school classmates. They discuss carrying the weight of the “model minority” and the expectations of eager parents on their shoulders. These are expectations that I can’t fully relate to...partially since I think the “model minority” is a myth that engenders continued racial oppression of other people of color, but mostly because my parents never toed the Tiger Mom line with me. (I got a C in a class once and they congratulated me on passing.) The most burdensome expectation they had for me? That I would challenge traditional hierarchies and oppressive norms. But if I sought to build community based on that expectation, I’d be left high and dry. Despite that whole Communist Revolution thing, “resisting hierarchy” is not an experience that I find widely relatable among Asian-American friends in describing their families and upbringing. Rather, a sort of apolitical inoffensiveness rules the day. <br />
<br />
One girl running for student government at Berkeley even says in her campaign literature, “Growing up in a traditional Asian family, I’ve been taught to always care about others and respect others’ backgrounds.” <br />
<br />
After all, Confucius say: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” <br />
<br />
Jokes aside, this student government election is a microcosm of broader tendencies in American politics. It is frequently cast as the Holy Land of left-wing politics in the United States, but it’s less liberal than you might think. While some college Republican groups across the country (e.g., Harvard’s) broke with the national party to disavow Donald Trump’s candidacy during the election, the Berkeley College Republicans supported Donald Trump. In the wake of protests surrounding right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous’s visit to Berkeley, the campus magazine where I’m an editor hosted a debate between the Cal Democrats and Berkeley College Republicans on the subject of free speech. The Cal Dem representative was a white guy, while the spokesperson for the BCR was an Indian student (from India, not Indian-American).<br />
<br />
During the audience Q&A portion, I asked a question that many were probably thinking as they looked at these debaters: had President Trump done enough, quickly enough, to respond to hate crimes in the wake of his election? I alluded to hate crimes against Asian-Americans, including the killing of Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Kansas, or Harnish Patel’s murder outside of his home in South Carolina. <br />
<br />
The BCR debater took the microphone and said that Mr. Trump should have acted more quickly, but that people should not be so quick to blame Trump for all the actions carried out by his followers. An Indian-American friend and I exchanged a glance. She rolled her eyes, and in a look, a sentiment passed between us: <i>how can he be a Republican? After all that has happened?</i> Conservative journalist Michelle Malkin has said, “Minority conservatives hold a special place of gutter contempt in the minds of unhinged liberals, who can never accept the radical concept of a person of color rejecting identity politics.” I guess that in that moment, we were those unhinged liberals.<br />
<br />
Once upon a time, to try to be a Republican politician and the member of a racial minority at the same time meant purposefully denuding yourself of anything that reeked of the “ethnic.” Bobby Jindal changed his name from Piyush to Bobby, converted to Christianity, gave a speech in which he said that he was tired of “hyphenated Americans,” and commissioned a gubernatorial portrait widely mocked on social media for its skin tone, far whiter than Jindal is in reality. Although these actions elicited scrutiny and derision from many in the Indian-American community, they were good politics in Louisiana: Jindal served two terms as governor. <br />
<br />
Today, perhaps you can be a player in Republican politics without needing to disavow or minimize your racial identity in the same way as Jindal. For some Asian-Americans, supporting Trump made sense not in spite of identity alignment, but because of it. During the 2016 election, some Indian-Americans with ties to Hindu nationalist groups saw Trump as a natural ally due to his rhetoric on Muslims, securing the borders, and tough talk that evoked comparison to India’s right-wing prime minister, Narendra Modi. Trump appeared in an advertisement where he said, in Hindi unintelligible to native speakers (as Jimmy Kimmel would document in one of his show’s man-on-the-street segments), “Ab ki baar Trump sarkaar,” or “This time, Trump government”--a nod to a famous Modi campaign slogan.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
Relying on minority groups to uniformly be good Democrats had lulled me into false security. I was shocked every time I learned that an Asian-American friend’s parents were supporting Trump. Trump’s rhetoric may have stoked the flames of white supremacist indignation, but this was not frightening enough for highly-educated men and women with college-aged children begging them to vote for Clinton; they chose instead to vote for the man with the bad hair, three marriages, and infamous lines on pussy grabbing.<br />
<br />
Then there are people for whom race doesn’t register as an important identity category that affects daily life. <br />
<br />
At the invitation of a friend I went to a meeting of a campus group called South Asians for Social Justice once. The meeting was at her house. In its cozy, carpeted living room, we sat around on couches and ladled hot chai tea out of a massive pot. Despite the welcoming environment of the SASJ meeting, I felt like a bit of an intruder as a non-South Asian. I messaged my boyfriend and his roommate (both Indian-American) for backup. I didn't expect them to come, but they messaged back, shockingly: “On our way.”<br />
<br />
The group had started a silent writing session about the prompt “Write about a time when you felt brown/racialized” (i.e., a time some external impetus had made you aware of your difference, your non-whiteness). We were all quietly scribbling things down on pieces of paper when the door creaked open and my boyfriend and his roommate bounded in. The roommate was wearing a giant Seahawks jersey and high-top shoes; in the midst of this quiet living room, he seemed like an especially loud interloper. As my friend re-explained the prompt and they shot each other blank glances, I started wondering if inviting them had maybe been a mistake.<br />
<br />
We finished up writing and people began to share their moments. Listening, I sat aghast. Some had been the only brown kids at school. They had had classmates who called them curry-eaters, “sand niggas,” and terrorists.<br />
<br />
Neither my boyfriend nor his roommate described an incident from their own lives.<br />
<br />
We all walked out of the house after the meeting was over, and it didn’t take long for them to begin talking.<br />
<br />
“These kids are...like, way different,” the roommate said. <br />
<br />
My boyfriend nodded. For them, he explained, it was difficult to write about the “moment they’d felt brown” because they’d grown up in an area where they were part of a sizable, and empowered, Asian-American population. <br />
<br />
In the Seattle area, the Asian-American community is well-developed and prosperous. When racism and Redmond come up in the same conversation, it relates to anti-blackness: the Seahawks player Kam Chancellor had the police called on him for “suspicious activity” after he looked through the windows of a gym, and a black-owned business received a KKK uniform in the mail. These incidents highlight the dark underbelly of a community where kids ride their bikes around wide suburban streets and people come out every summer to cheer on parade floats and eat cotton candy at the Derby Days festival. But these incidents also highlight the extent to which the Asian-American community in Redmond has been immune; no one would tell me to “go back to China,” or make comments about the shape of my eyes, if I were sitting at a bus stop in Redmond. <br />
<br />
We went to high schools where there were countless classmates who looked like us. If the guy calling you a curry-eater or a chink looks like you, it’s not an expression of racial superiority as much as an expression of in-group-ness--the girlfriend-to-girlfriend “sup bitches” of racial groups. After high school we’d landed at Berkeley--where the freshman population in 2016 was 42.3% Asian.<br />
<br />
But I’d spent a lot of time outside of Redmond and Berkeley--and I had white family members, so my understanding of myself as a person of color had happened early. It was a revelation to me, that my boyfriend and his roommate had never had some moment of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves as racialized subjects, thinking, “Society sees me differently from someone white,” thinking “this is something that could harm me.” <br />
<br />
I wonder if Srinivas Kuchibhotla or Harnish Patel had.<br />
<br />
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___</div>
<br />
Trump’s win highlighted the extensive mobilization of white nationalists, with the rise of the “alt-right” in public consciousness and the growing normalization of many of its main figures. For participants in these movements, non-white people pose a spectral threat to the integrity of a nation figured as necessarily white. Steve Bannon, Trump’s controversial political aide, has made repeated references to the racist French novel <i>The Camp of the Saints</i> in speeches about his political ideology. The novel features the shores of Europe being overrun with hordes of dark-skinned foreigners, and it explains a lot about the sentiments of white nationalists. If you feel under threat, of course you would form an identity group. But the obvious problem is that white people in America are not under real, material threat; you need look only at any picture of a Trump cabinet meeting to reassure yourself that the position of (particularly old and male) white people is on top of the world. <br />
<br />
Then there are MRAs, or “Men’s Rights Activists.” Like claiming that whiteness is a status that needs to be protected from destruction, claiming that being male means being a member of an oppressed group in society is what some might call an “alternative fact”--but one with harmful consequences. MRAs have spewed vitriol at female writers and gamers on the internet, preached the acceptability of violence against women, and advocated for sexually aggressive tactics that frequently venture into the realm of harassment and even assault. <br />
<br />
Columbia professor Mark Lilla writes in the New York Times, “Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.” <br />
<br />
Centralizing identity and the role it plays in life has led to substantial political gains for many marginalized group, and society as a whole; therefore, unlike Lilla, I am not prepared to reject it wholesale. We must have some bulwarks to keep ourselves from falling into the trap of casting ourselves as universal subjects--the “faceless proletariat” or “all women” that Adrienne Rich critiques. If we really mean “male workers,” or “white workers” (as many trade unions historically did), or “white women,” or “rich women,” then we do truth an injustice by claiming this language of universal membership. <br />
<br />
And the truth is that in many situations our outcomes depend on facets of our identity. It’s harder to get a job with a “black name” (<a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873">National Bureau of Economic Research</a>), harder to get your pain taken seriously by a doctor if you’re a woman (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/">The Atlantic</a>). These realities are something that the “identity politics are divisive” camp of people would be wise to pay attention to. Political coalitions have a duty to interrogate their own impulses to universalize, and acknowledge the role that our various identities play in our lives. It’s just the right thing to do. <br />
<br />
Ironically, many critiques of identity politics and its divisiveness come from white men; but no one does segregation by identity quite like white people in America. Today, you can still see the legacy of housing policies that prevented black Americans from living in certain neighborhoods. You can go to places where housing is so racially split that you can walk from one end of town to the other and see a sea change in skin tone. Developers created all-white suburbs, and there was “white flight” out of urban areas. Housing isn’t the only staging ground for segregation; marriage is another. 2013 Pew Research Center data shows that white people are the group least likely to “marry out” (just 7% of white newlyweds in 2013 married someone of a different race, compared to 28% of Asians).<br />
<br />
This wouldn’t be surprising if you knew what white social circles looked like: a non-partisan research group, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), shows that a full 75% of whites have “entirely white social networks without any minority presence.” <br />
<br />
<i>Two-thirds of white people in America have completely white social circles.</i><br />
<br />
For minorities, there is tremendous value in groups of other people of color; in some spaces, a certain kind of self-segregation may be protective. But in places like where I grew up, self-segregating was not so much about consolidating power for solidarity in the face of racist society (Asian-Americans were doing well in Redmond) as it was about the economic reality of our ZIP code that placed us, largely, in proximity to wealthy white and Asian families. <br />
<br />
I want to be cautious about following the historical impulse of a dominant social group trying to protect its “purity” or its property values. No matter the rationale for forming clans around ethnoracial identity, we must always consciously seek encounters--pushing for everything from increased media representation of minorities to mixed-income housing--with people who are unlike ourselves. <br />
<br />
All of us must resist the impulse to segregate.<br />
<br />
After all, self-segregation relies on a belief that our fates are not all inextricably bound up with each other’s; Hindu-Americans for Trump cheered on the idea of a strongman who talked tough on banning Muslims and being “strong on terror,” forgetting or ignoring that many white nationalist Trump supporters can’t tell the difference between a Muslim and a Hindu, or a Muslim and a Sikh--to them, all people of a certain skin tone are part of the same <i>Camp of the Saints</i>-esque invading dark horde.<br />
<br />
I hope that we can build political discourse that is inclusive of a wide range of identities, that gives individuals space to discuss how their many varied categories and allegiances produce the realities of their daily lives. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both met with leaders of the Black Lives Matter, and Clinton talked about implicit racism in one of the presidential debates--exposing some Americans to the concept for the first time. It is possible, and indeed necessary, for politicians to dialogue with identity-focused groups in good faith and bring their concerns to the national political stage. And it is the willingness to do that actively and consistently--not the color of their skin or the community they come from or the languages they speak--that should win votes.<br />
<br />
The expectation of dialogue should apply to relations between minority groups as well. Letters for Black Lives builds solidarity for Black Lives Matter by offering a letter that minority folks and children of immigrants (especially Asian-Americans) can send to parents, grandparents, and other elders struggling to understand the necessity of supporting BLM. The crowd-sourced letter has been translated into numerous languages<br />
<br />
From the Letters for Black Lives Matter project: <br />
<br />
“In fighting for their own rights, Black activists have led the movement for opportunities not just for themselves, but for us as well. Black people have been beaten, jailed, even killed fighting for many of the rights that Asian Americans enjoy today. We owe them so much in return. We are all fighting against the same unfair system that prefers we compete against each other.<br />
<br />
When someone is walking home and gets shot by a sworn protector of the peace — even if that <a href="http://nypost.com/2016/04/19/nypd-cop-peter-liang-gets-community-service-for-killing-akai-gurley/">officer’s last name is Liang</a> — that is an assault on all of us, and on all of our hopes for equality and fairness under the law.”<br />
<br />
What I appreciate about the Letters for BLM project is that although the letters cite the profound debt owed by Asian-Americans to African-American civil rights leaders and community organizers, the primary logic of the argument that we should support BLM comes not from a self-serving or clannish place but rather a sense of universal humanity--that an assault on a black person “is an assault on all of us,” that we are all fighting against the same injustice. Let’s follow the lead of projects like Letters for Black Lives and build solidarity across identity groups on the basis of our shared hopes and shared humanity.<br />
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During Spring Break, I leave Berkeley for my parents’ home in suburban Sonoma County--a place of rolling verdant hills, chicken farms, and houses with manicured lawns and “Black Lives Matter” yard signs. My Ye Ye and Po Po are visiting, and Ye Ye asks me one day what my plan for the day is.<br />
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“I’m going to work on an article that I’ve been working on for a long time,” I manage in broken Chinese.<br />
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“What’s the topic?”<br />
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“It’s--uhhh, it’s really hard to say in Chinese,” I fumble for Google Translate on my phone and type in “identity politics.” <br />
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Ye Ye looks at my screen and his brow furrows. “What does this mean?”<br />
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“I don’t think this translation is correct,” I say. “Um. It’s...people using their...um, themselves? Their culture, their habits, ethnicity? To...um...say that a politician should be supported?”<br />
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“What’s your argument?”<br />
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“That people should support people who can improve society as a whole and other groups, not just their own people. Like, even if you’re Asian-American, you should support black people.” I suck in my breath, waiting for a disapproving response from the man I associate most with Chinese nationalism. “We’re all Americans.”<br />
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“Not just Americans,” Ye Ye says. “We’re all <i>renlei</i>.”<br />
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“What does <i>renlei</i> mean?”<br />
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“Human,” he says in English.</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-75994536360800907672017-05-24T21:30:00.000-07:002017-11-27T23:07:02.298-08:00Half a Motherland Part 2: Pride<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>"In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others" -Claude Levi-Strauss</i></div>
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I'm proud to be X.</div>
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Insert what you want for X: Asian-American, mixed-race, woman, descendant of ridiculously long-lived Chinese people except for one unfortunate soul who died from dysentery, descendant of a Czech orchestra player whose violin my sister inherited and plays, and--according to my grandma--also a descendant of Mayflower dude Miles Standish. </div>
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“I’m proud to be X.” </div>
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Insert what you want and I still can’t say it. </div>
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Maybe it’s a vestigial hang-up from my white side. Racial pride in the hands of ethnic minorities is the wholesome material of multiculturalism in modern liberal democracy, of urban parades and campus celebrations. Racial pride in the hands of white people is combustible material. But accepting this set of facts in my own divided body--throwing myself at Mao while ignoring Miles--always felt awkward and contrived. Some artists and activists attempt to bring us ethnically confusing folk into the proud-of-my-identity fold: there are books like Kip Fulbeck's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Part-Asian-100-Hapa-Fulbeck/dp/0811849597">Part Asian, 100% Hapa</a>, a collection of photographs of people of mixed/partial Asian descent. As much as I appreciate seeing media representations of people who look like me, it feels...well, kind of weird to express a pride for my ethnic identity. </div>
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I could be like my sister, who went to Chinese school briefly with me but also picked up a Czech phrasebook and attempted to learn the language (well, for maybe a month). But learning everything about all the histories of my inheritance would be a life’s work. It felt easier to just run away from it all. </div>
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What would I be running away from, though? The same labels that can be used to stereotype and exclude also give people a vocabulary to express love and support. (See #BlackGirlsMagic.) </div>
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Plus, many would agree that some measure of pride in your culture is a necessity for its continuation. If you don't like it, why bother carrying out its rituals or sending your kid to weekend school to learn the language? It's in this context that I finally understand my Ye Ye (grandfather) and his constant, fearsome lectures on the civilizational supremacy of China (including several entreaties to read the complete works of Mao). </div>
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Maybe these weren't lectures about the past and the present so much as an insurance policy for the future--trying to instill some kind of innate pride in me about my culture, so that even if I inevitably ran astray and married some non-Chinese-speaking foreigner (foreign to him, not to me) the anchors he'd dropped would always pull me, and hypothetical descendants, back to some version of a Chinese identity. </div>
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Did those lectures work? </div>
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To this day, I cringe at exceptionalism--even when it wears new and prettier masks. </div>
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My suspicion of the impulse to say "This [nation/culture/language] is [super great/uniquely blessed/the best]" probably comes partially from childhood; my parents never did the sorts of things that Other People's Families did, like watch Sunday-morning football and cheer on a favorite team, wear their college sweatshirts, say "God bless the USA," or imply that one religion or philosophy was better than the rest. Sometimes, I think that what my parents were proudest of was not being proud of anything. </div>
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And in some ways, they had good reason to be. The very pride, or school spirit, or religion, or nationalism that glues some groups together can also drive wedges in humanity. </div>
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Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, one of India's most prolific poets, was a fierce critic of nationalist and ethnocentric sentiment; in one of his poems in Gitanjali, he wrote of a vision "Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; / Where knowledge is free; / Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls." Through his novel The Home and the World, Tagore critiqued nationalism and ethnocentrism as being opposed to more universal values of justice and fairness. One of the novel’s characters, the ill-fated and mild-mannered nobleman Nikhilesh Chaudhary, says, "To worship my country as a god is to bring curse upon it.” </div>
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I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to bring curses upon the things I love. </div>
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Nations are imagined communities. Their boundary lines are often drawn by outsiders as the product of colonialism and violent conflict, not any special logic of geography or progress. Our cultural identities, too, have tenuous grips on reality; what binds us to our identities aside from our adherence to a set of norms, adherence informed by a certain kind of pride? </div>
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But having pride in my heritage as special and unique is an act of resistance in a society that constantly belittles Other-ness. Pride is about cultural survival, I think. Every day, we see evidence of how minority groups in the US come under pressure to assimilate by shedding parts of their culture that don't fit neatly into the dominant culture: think of the way some teachers will say "I don't even want to attempt to pronounce that" if they see an Asian name when they're calling roll (or the more recent and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/movies/jimmy-kimmel-mahershala-ali-tour-bus-tourists.html">widely criticized</a> instance of Jimmy Kimmel joking about Mahershala Ali's name at the Oscars). </div>
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Let me be clear: this is super shitty. </div>
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But isn't it possible to counteract these pressures without teaching little kids "Your culture is [this essentialized definition], and oh by the way, it's the best"? Because exceptionalism in the name of cultural preservation still falls into the trap that Gary Younge, writing on identity politics, decried: presuming a "fixed notion to who and what we are," essentialism even while the "meaning and relevance" of identities are constantly in flux. </div>
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Many of the modern-day essentializations of culture that we reproduce, knowingly or unknowingly, may be products of colonialism. For instance, if you ask someone what a Sikh looks like they may mention turbans, uncut hair, and long beards. Historically, this physical presentation was not always a kind of synecdoche for the Sikhism; when Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708) introduced the khalsa (meaning something like “pure”) order in Sikhism, most Sikhs were not part of it. The British recruited Indian soldiers with a belief in the concept of "martial races," or the idea that certain “races” were more predisposed to the military arts than others. Khalsa Sikhs, with their swords and turbans, were considered one such group, and more people had an incentive to present as Khalsa Sikhs. To this day, 20% of the Indian Army identify as Sikh. </div>
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Last summer, when I was interning in India’s capital, I met a young girl while staying overnight with a family in Gurgaon, the concrete jungle southwest of New Delhi. She and her brother had perched themselves cheerfully on my bed, asked me a great deal of questions about life in America, taught me the name of “the best” cricketers, and somehow started on the subject of religion. “The Muslims of the North are the bad Muslims,” she told me confidently. “The ones in the South are OK.” She paused, then chirped, “And the Sikhs are just angry Hindus.” </div>
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There was a lot to think about in what she said, but I thought the "angry Hindus" was perhaps the (darkly) funniest. Angry Hindus? I wondered. Where does a young kid get that description? </div>
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Family, I assumed. But it was later, in a South Asian history class at Berkeley, that I learned (at least part of) the real answer: the British. </div>
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No culture exists in a vacuum. Rather, we live in complex feedback loops. The example of Sikhs and the British conception of “martial races” evidence the fact that how peers, elites, and governments view culture all construct the daily lived reality of what culture is. </div>
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In many cases, the weight of expectation can be oppressive. Elizabeth Povinelli writes in <i>The Cunning of Recognition</i> that the multiculturalism of the modern, liberal state may inadvertently hold ethnic minorities to high standards of “authentic” culture. These standards breed stagnancy: the answer to how Chinese culture is performed--in the Chinese restaurant in A Christmas Story, in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in suburban Seattle--in is the same, year after tiresome year. The psychological burden of this is difficult to encapsulate. Maybe it’s something like when white people travel abroad and find that people assume they love eating hamburgers and drinking Coke, and that everyone owns a gun. You’d protest that it wasn’t true. You’d try to make people see the you underneath the American. </div>
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But to face such stereotypes in America because of the relentless essentialization and freezing-in-time of your culture means feeling like a perennial visitor in your own home. You are that guest whose inner life remains illegible, written in invisible ink between the lines of filial piety and Tiger Mothers, dragon festivals and dumplings. At some point, maybe the strokes blend so much that even you don’t remember the difference. </div>
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To some degree, culture makes all of us. I think a lot of people fear that if we unmake what we have learned is our culture, we unmake ourselves. Maybe that’s true. But it’s also necessary--because culture doesn’t stand still, even though every day, we treat it like it does. </div>
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Our nation is multicultural, and interactions in our modern world are increasingly transnational. The winners of this world order will be those who know how to travel. This point is belabored by travel brochures the world over, but encounters with the Other can elicit positive change. </div>
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An Asian-American student wrote <a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2017/03/17/cooking-spoon-love/">an article</a> in Berkeley’s student-run newspaper, describing a childhood filled with traumatizing corporal punishment from parents. Notably, she wrote, "Being beaten by your parents and grandparents has become a sort a twisted joke in the Asian American community. Comparisons of the creative and painful punishments that they have conjured up are punctuated freely with laughter and smiles. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lVQRaErGD4">YouTube</a> personalities have made “on the street” videos asking Asian American millennials about their experiences with physical punishment. Being hit with metal coat hangers is not uncommon, and the interviewer himself lightheartedly recalls a time he was sent to the emergency room by his parents’ hands." </div>
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Growing up, I had it easy. (Look, my parents didn't even demand good grades.) But we still had our twisted jokes. My sister would tell friends about how when she was very young, she would walk out of our room and stand at the top of the stairs, refusing obstinately to go to sleep. It became a tradition: she would stand there, our mom would come up the stairs and slap her, causing my sister to cry. Subsequently, she would get sleepy from all the wailing and go down for her nap. Rinse and repeat. (Don't try this at home.)</div>
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This whole story registers as hilarious to Adrianna and me. </div>
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Retelling stories like this, laughing about them--it’s the kind of thing you do with people to signal that you’re part of the in-group. It's as if the long-faded sting of a slap is the ghost that takes you arm in arm to march you through the gates of identity. It's screwed up, sure, but sometimes I’m grateful for the stories I have of miserably sitting through patronizing lectures on morality (“only bad people go to clubs to drink and dance”) from my grandparents or my sister getting slapped by my mother--it’s my proof that I, too, at least somewhat went through that same boot camp of Asian childhood. </div>
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When I went to a Stanford summer camp in high school, I met a new friend. He had curly hair, a guitar, and an obnoxiously cool name--in short, everything I didn't. But I didn't realize how divergent our lives really were until we started talking about family. I told the same old story about how our mom would slap us in the face if we were misbehaving (or, in Adrianna’s case, refusing to nap). </div>
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He was horrified. “That’s awful. Your mom hit you?” he said, eyes widening. </div>
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Our relationship at that point was mostly composed of sarcastic banter and deprecating jokes and talking about <i>Fight Club</i>, which I had borrowed from him to read the other night. I was surprised that someone who would gleefully stomach the violence of that book (I’d summarize it, but first rule of <i>Fight Club</i>…) would be so alarmed by the revelation of a kind of violence that I saw as far more normal. His tone had become suddenly serious. </div>
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“No, no, I mean, it was literally nothing,” I said hurriedly. “Like just a slap.” I mimed the motion and smiled extra widely, as if to try to re-emphasize the nothing-ness of the whole thing. “Especially not compared to what she had--I mean, she really got beaten up by her parents.” </div>
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He shook his head. “Dude, that’s still, like, child abuse.” </div>
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“What? You mean your mom never slapped you, or spanked you?" I asked in disbelief. </div>
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He shook his head. </div>
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"Not even once?” I asked, aghast. </div>
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At that point it just seemed unfair. Mischievous-eyed and audacious, he seemed like someone who would have been a profoundly spankable child. <i>Maybe that's why he seems so free</i>, I ruminated later. <i>The rest of us have it slapped out of us</i>. </div>
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For all my traveling, it took that summer camp encounter to teach me that there was a world outside of the families I knew. Despite my parents being unorthodox people in many ways, all their best efforts could not contradict the environs of a company town. In Redmond, it seemed like everyone’s parents worked for Microsoft. Everyone’s home was glossy, vacuumed, and immaculate. Everyone had an SUV that had never seen mud, sparkling in their garage. </div>
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The more I touched the edges of my friend’s world, the more it seemed a distant utopia--a place where atheists had godparents, dads went to Burning Man, and magic mushrooms could be the mundane subject of dinner-table conversation over wine. A place where lesbian Jewish moms homeschooled long-haired sons, wore their Chacos inside the house, and drove Priuses where mud-crusted dog hairs and breadcrumbs commingled. A place where you could watch Orange Is The New Black without any awkward fast-forwarding through the naked bits and studious avoidance of eye contact with everyone else sitting on the couch. </div>
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I always found it difficult to explain my wide-eyed sense of wonder (or occasional tight-lipped shock) in this world, biting back my instinct to take off my shoes or affect a studious innocence I had long since lost. The rules in Delhi, where everyone was an uncle or an auntie, <i>bhaiyya</i> or <i>didi</i>, somehow felt less inscrutable than the norms at my friend’s house. None of the rules I had once learned about Other People’s Houses applied there in Berkeley. It was disorienting, and it was glorious. </div>
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Thankfully, what my parents did instill in me was to try to reject the impulse to self-segregate. If my parents had told me, implicitly or explicitly, that I should stick to my own kind, that people who seemed like me were where safety lay, I never would have questioned the corporal punishment that many people inadvertently normalize. If I had had the same conversation that I had at summer camp with an Asian-American friend, the response might not have been a shocked “your mom hit you?” but a distinctly un-astonished “mm, me too” or even a “oh my god once I had it so much worse.” </div>
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What does this echo chamber do for culture? What does this do to who we are, and what we think “being Asian” means? </div>
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As a child, I thought that the gatekeepers of identity guarded temporal heavens. I now see that jealous gatekeepers only guard places of excarnation. If we breed insularity in the name of “preserving” culture, we are only huddling in our towers and waiting for the vultures to come. We think that by doing this we are keeping our bodies of culture alive. </div>
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We do not see that, in doing this, we have already declared them dead. </div>
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What "Chinese-American identity" means can and should change. It doesn't have to forever mean a staid, essentialized grouping of beliefs and customs--the Confucius lite of fortune cookie slips, cloying mooncakes crumbling in my hands, cash in red envelopes. </div>
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Cui Jian understood this. China’s “godfather of rock n’ roll” heard something he liked in the recordings of American music that friends smuggled. He started learning guitar after hearing performers like Simon & Garfunkel, John Denver, the Beatles, and the Talking Heads. His songs blended influences from American rock, Chinese peasant songs, and even Communist sayings. When students marched in Tiananmen Square, his song “Nothing to My Name” became a rousing anthem for the protesters. Cui Jian said in an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/06/04/this-is-the-song-of-tiananmen-blindfold-my-eyes-and-cover-the-sky/?utm_term=.f2700350c62f">interview with the Washington Post</a>, “Back then, people were used to hearing the old revolutionary songs and nothing else, so when they heard me singing about what I wanted as an individual they picked up on it.” </div>
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I like Cui Jian’s story because it reflects that cultural change does not need to be unidirectional, constantly the product of Western repression or appropriation. It implies that we “ethnic” people of the world--whether members of diaspora communities or of non-Western countries--can jump out of our cultural lanes too, pulling strands out of foreign cultural experiences to thread together new creations. There are people like Paris-born Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, whose Silk Road Ensemble includes Armenian duduk, Korean janggu, Galician gaita, and countless other instruments from around Eurasia. </div>
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There’s art like the designs of prominent Beijing-based fashion designer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Pei">Guo Pei</a>, which evince the influences of both Chinese motifs and European icons; <a href="http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2016-couture/guo-pei">Vogue wrote</a> “each passage represented a different rarefied archetype: ice queen, Art Deco diva, Belle Epoque enchantress, Russian princess, first lady, neo-Joséphine.” </div>
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<img height="628" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/2v5rX32TOPIqbj9RRWINOqFXeboHaL3gJjaKS5tiR4cB7SiCgQpeDtZoZwaY9OjsgSpHF24on2v4Y0xj86QxzLrba3F261ir8FmYND0SPEFA-4Y4Ga-P7SByTf4PYjkoQIk63OjR" width="640" /> </div>
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Maybe Chinese identity means singing along to Cui Jian in the shower, turning Silk Road Ensemble up on Spotify, or admiring Guo Pei’s designs in the pages of Vogue, and maybe I do it not out of fear--whether my grandfather's, of lost culture, or mine, of identity gatekeepers--but because I like the art. </div>
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I like that version of the story better, because it feels more free. </div>
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Marisa Meltzer writes in New York Magazine about how, to some, the movement for “body positivity” only creates new, more exacting pressures--some women now not only blame themselves for failing to regulate their bodies physically, but emotionally, as they look in the mirror and fall short of the high bar of self-love. Therefore, some women seek instead to cultivate “body neutrality” instead--what Meltzer terms “a kind of detente, a white flag, a way station between hating oneself and loving oneself.” </div>
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I related to the article, in thinking about identity, because my cultural agnosticism has always felt like a kind of identity neutrality, a failure to wave some brightly colored flag with any genuinely felt enthusiasm. That’s why I am happy with white flags and way stations. I don’t believe in climactic clashes of civilization and culture wars. All I know, as a biracial person, is the messy business of becoming a certain kind of person around one set of relatives and a different one around others, of dancing in between worlds and trying not to disown them all. </div>
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I recently added my Chinese name in parentheses after my English name on Facebook. I did it not out of pride, but self-recognition. </div>
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The name, I realized after too many years of running away from it, was mine.</div>
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<i style="background-color: white; color: #777777; font-family: Lora; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Next up is Part 3: Vote.</i><span id="docs-internal-guid-4c6ee58d-1a90-4f47-1af1-bc44f11bad09" style="background-color: white; color: #777777; font-family: "lora"; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-44660587931252658312017-05-18T01:18:00.002-07:002017-05-18T13:47:26.724-07:00Half a Motherland, Part 1: Labels<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/PZCyd63BxXPBVYOQHn_JaVTw5RzR6lIqYXWcvppHnwivH5-WnjWGxKgxz2iGGnEqOpYKIogPUfNlgTuFUBkmx8eo1BQzzopHY0p2mQwLYOEECgY46BIEP7eFjzmdjFAEoDYzKIUS" /><br /><br /><i>Should I get this "Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders for Hillary" shirt?</i> I mused last November, my finger hovering over the laptop trackpad as my eyes darted back and forth between t-shirts on the Hillary Clinton Store webpage. <i>Am I Asian-American enough to wear it?</i><br /><br />I asked an acquaintance once about the topic of identity politics and group affiliation. We were hiking in a group, and I remember thinking about the subject, wondering who to ask, and immediately looking at her--the sole other half-Asian in the group. The other girls had golden ponytails that caught flecks of burnt amber from the setting sun.<br /><br />"Do you consider yourself Asian-American?" I asked her.<br /><br />She shook her head. "Not really." <br /><br />I ended up just buying a black shirt, with "Hillary" in printed in blue on the front. I went running in it once. There was a man out on a walk with his 5-year-old daughter, all pink puffer jacket and strawberry-blonde hair. I smiled at her; he saw my shirt, and gave me a spirited thumbs-up. I wondered briefly if he would have, if the first words he had seen were "Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders for"; would he have even kept reading, or would those words have been a signal: <i>This shirt is not for you</i>?<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">
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<br /><i>These posts are not for you</i>. <br /><br />High school: summer rolling around meant seeing a spate of posts on Facebook from Asian-American friends about "going back to the motherland" and "HEADED BAAAACK to [insert country name here]." I always hit "Like" with a kind of wistful feeling, the way you like that Instagram photo of a beautiful classmate in athleisure who you simultaneously envy and wish to be. I hit "Like" knowing that there was something of these posts that was of, and yet not of, my world. <br /><br />Posts about internships and research grants quickly replaced those posts about trips to the motherland as the grasping hand of Gainful Employment snatched away college students' summers wisp by wisp. But those posts made me ask a question that I still haven't been able to answer: <i>if that non-US country is my friend's motherland, what's mine?</i> <br /><br />This question became much more important in college, when I started wondering about what identities I fit into, what associations I could claim. Coming to Berkeley it seemed profoundly important to have one, maybe a couple. There were clubs for every ethnicity, interest, or desire. Call it prejudice or snap judgment, but you learn quickly what identities can be divined from a glance: what sexual orientations, group affiliations, majors, origins could be ascribed to someone with the right color of hair or a certain number of piercings, second language or favorite conversation topic. Maybe they'd even announce those identities themselves. <br /><br />Especially as the American right persists in dismissing identity politics--throwing it into the same refuse barrel as their dreaded "PC culture" and "liberal snowflakes"--it's crucial to celebrate identity politics and its potential to bring vital stories into the light of public consciousness. Think Black Lives Matter, public support for trans students, or protests against Islamophobic policy--the sustained energy in all of these movements stems from a willingness to make recognition of identity central to your politics. <br /><br />At the same time, identity politics are not infallible, and I argue that we need to carefully consider the origins of many of our classifications of identity and how reinforcing them may be counterproductive; the dangers of overzealous "gatekeeping" of identity; and the potential for cultural "pride" to become dogma, and our identities, far from being liberating, to become gleaming cages. <br /><br />Edward Said writes in Orientalism, "No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life," and true to form, the questions about identity politics that have motivated this Half a Motherland series of posts all stem from a selfish root: that perennial question, where do I belong?<br /><br /><br /><h3 style="text-align: center;">
Part 1: LABELS</h3>
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Whose classifications are we using? </h4>
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<i>The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. - Audre Lorde </i></div>
<br />I'm living in New York with my sister one summer. We sit down at the bus stop near Columbia University and a black woman in a deep purple skirt suit sits beside us. <br /><br />Without any prompting, she declares, "Ni hao!" and waves at us. "I could tell you were Chinese," she says cheerily, "you know, from the eyes." She reaches up to her eyelids and pulls them to the side, making her eyes slanted, narrow slits. <br /><br />Adrianna and I exchange shocked glances and laugh uncomfortably. The woman (a Jehovah's Witness looking for converts) later got on her bus. Adrianna and I sat there and discussed in shock how one never expects that egregious of a comment from a fellow minority--the horror! <br /><br />In her 1993 article "How Native is a "Native" Anthropologist?" Kirin Narayan writes, <br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
"For those of us who are mixed, the darker element in our ancestry serves to define us with or without our own complicity. The fact that we are often distanced--by factors as varied as education, class, or emigration--from the societies we are supposed to represent tends to be underplayed." </blockquote>
<br />Therefore Tiger Woods (half-Asian) is "black." <br /><br />And the one-drop rule applies to Asian-Americans too: one <a href="http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/one-drop-rule-persists/">Harvard Gazette article</a> discussed this with the subtitle "biracials viewed as members of their lower-status parent group," and adds that "individuals who were a 50-50 mix of two races, either black-white or Asian-white, were almost never identified by study participants as white." <br /><br />Therefore I (half-white) am "Asian." The lady in NYC was no fluke; she thought about my race the way most people would. She only made the mistake of saying it out loud. <br /><br />I blame history. There's something of identity politics that relies on the colonial logic of the dominant race: that is, understanding race as a static, scientific sort of classification resistant to change. Scientific racism implicates many disciplines, from physical anthropology to biology; the idea that races are fixed biological categories, with their own characteristics, has been used to justify countless abuses throughout history. UNESCO said in its 1950 statement "<a href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001282/128291eo.pdf">The Race Question</a>” that "'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth,” one that has “created an enormous amount of human and social damage." <br /><br />To build a sustainable politics based on race, you need endogamous association (ingroup marrying other ingroup members) to assure inheritors to that politics; otherwise, you end up with people neither of one world nor the other, unsure of their allegiances. That's why endogamous association is so important to groups that feel the continuance of their specific identity under threat, and there are a lot of them: whether Orthodox Jews, high-caste Indians, or racist white people on Stormfront forums who laud men of certain minorities for staying away from white women (yo NSA, my internet history is all because of research, OK?) <br /><br />Mindy Kaling even took a jab at the subject in an episode of The Mindy Project, "The Coconut Question": in one scene, she's walking with an Indian-American friend in a store when a white woman calls them adorable and she comments to her friend, "Why do white people love seeing people of other races date within their race so much?" <br /><br /><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/EE9L5O-Rz31xQ5vVPGDcrpXqoF7Om5dKxHgJi8fvISIjrW_XHLdybjJsd3POQAJDkY3L5P2AlhiYpBdArgYN9W8uGX616-w90upBCD-RAfztPcb3lGit2u6wb5s60yOkzrfXbcXF" /> <br /><br /><br /><img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/R-qPKyyyU70GEBPBsH-ldF1rJ7XcutPX6wja2rOzYvXmrfQYdAfNAr0hab-FC-nhaz0yS1gOkU-ca7i7w4T47c7JBdjIGOXnVht3mtdLE6mHDnyEdWPVp2AUiFvLHs-DcD-qXtgp" /> <br /><br />Mindy answers her own question with this: “I think it’s because it’s segregation that they can feel good about.” <br /><br />I find it amusing how terrified white nationalists are of mixed-race children. But I can also see how our existence makes it hard to lean on the same old easy categorizations. A childhood friend recently posted 23andMe results on Facebook with the caption: "Got the results of the DNA test back and I finally have an answer to the age old question, "what the hell are you?"" What followed was a breakdown of ethnic ancestry from Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and Oceania, prompting a flurry of excited comments and one that stuck out to me--"Oh my god dude, I'm glad I'm not the only one who can't easily answer this ["what the hell are you?"] question." <br /><br />What are the identities that these "what the hell are you?" people should cleave to? <br /><br />The existence of people like my friend, and his friend, complicates race-based politics. They also reflect the reality that without endogamous association, identities won't remain static across multiple generations. Indeed, identities may not even be static within one generation: Hanna Haddad writes in this <a href="https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2015/07/24/revealing-a-hidden-minority/">Berkeley Political Review article</a> about the problem of defining Palestinian-Americans for Census purposes as white, and the popular emergence of "SWANA" (Southwest Asian and North African). With a change on a form, people could be rendered non-white, presented with an official recognition of a new identity. <br /><br />But new forms of recognition don't provide solutions for those of us who can't justify forming new categories of identity in the first place. You'll never find a "1/4 South Asian, 1/4 Oceania, 1/4 East Asian, 1/4 European People's Club" on a campus anywhere, because the cartography of identity was never charted for the people born on the borders. <br /><br /><br />Instead, the cartography of identity was charted for the people in power. Historically, the American government has been intimately interested in quantifying what it means to be "ethnic." Take Native Americans for example: “blood quantum” is a term used to refer to the fraction of your ancestry certified to be Native American. This fraction is used to answer a binary question: are you Native American, or are you not? It’s tremendously politically loaded. Whether or not you get to "count" as Native American can determine whether or not you receive certain benefits and protections under law, not to mention the psychological and cultural importance of being seen as authentic in your identity. <br /><br />Prior to the Civil War, the Cherokee and some other Native American tribes enslaved African-Americans in a pattern similar to their white counterparts. Black slaves accompanied the Cherokee in the wake of the Indian Removal Act. After the Civil War, the Treaty of 1866 ensured that these freed men became full-fledged members of the Cherokee nation. <br /><br />But in 2007, the Cherokee Nation decided to expel descendants of these African-American freedmen, citing their lack of “Indian blood.” In one <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/09/15/tribal-sovereignty-vs-racial-justice/">New York Times debate</a> on the subject, Syracuse law professor Kevin Noble Maillard wrote, "Real Indians were created by Real White People," going on to say that white policymakers wanted to <br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
"take away Native communal ownership and replace it with private possession...But to give away all the land, federal officials had to answer the question: "Who is Indian?" White bureaucrats (not natives!) classified applicants of mixed Afro-Indian ancestry as Freedmen, while full-blood and mixed-blood white Indians became Citizens by Blood. Paradoxically, white European ancestry did not categorically threaten membership, but black ancestry was a likely trigger for Freedmen status. The Holy Grail of "Indian Blood" comes from the federal government." </blockquote>
Associate professor at Hofstra Law School Rose Cuizon Villazor stated bluntly, "It is ironic that tribes that have themselves been subject to racial discrimination through the federal government's use of blood quantum rules have now adopted the very same rules to promote their own sovereignty." My sister wrote an essay on the subject of blood quantum in which she argued that its modern-day applications force Native Americans to play the often uncomfortable game of gatekeeping (a role once occupied by white Americans, like Henry L. Dawes of the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/dawes/tutorial/intro.html">Dawes Rolls</a> fame). Ultimately, the color of the gatekeeper really doesn’t matter. The power is the same: these temporal St. Peters stand at the not-so-pearly gates of cultural and racial identity. <br /><br />This gatekeeping makes the writer Gary Younge, who has written an entire book on the subject of identity politics, uncomfortable; he said in a Salon interview that <br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
"gatekeepers...affect the material conditions of people's lives...A gatekeeper's job is to say you can only do this and you cannot do that. There is the price of entry to be what you are, so if you want to be a member, this is what you must pay. And if you transgress this, then you're cast out. In order for that to work, philosophically, the nature of the identity has to be fixed. It can't change with time and circumstance. For gatekeepers to make sense, the identities that they evoke cannot be fluid." </blockquote>
When I was a child, the spectral figures of these gatekeepers terrified me. I ran headlong toward whiteness every time I looked in the mirror. I thanked my lucky stars that at least I had an eyelid crease, while desperately wishing for the green eyes and red hair of an Irish lass. Sometimes the ghosts of those desires traipse between my lashes again. In the university Counseling and Psychological Services meditation group I’m in one semester, we look at ourselves in mirrors and I find myself thinking back to a messy tangle of thoughts that resolve themselves in the sharp clarity of the glass: <i>Too Asian</i>. <br /><br />At other times, I wonder if I’m Asian enough. In childhood I slogged through 4th grade in Saturday-morning Chinese school with a puppy-like desire to fit in, to be as Chinese as the girl with the perfected Beijing accent. In high school, I sat with a largely Asian-American lunch group. I wished that my family were conventionally Asian enough to be invited to the boring “Asian parties” that my friends had the luxury to complain about. <br /><br />During Halloween in Berkeley, I see posters on cultural appropriation, scattered everywhere in the dorms, declaring “MY CULTURE IS NOT A COSTUME.” White Berkeleyans are (mostly) too “woke” to dress up as Pocahontases or Mulans. I wonder what I’m allowed to do. <br /><br />One day I shop for costumes at a vintage store near campus. I look down at the thick lustrous pile I have clutched in my hands, rayon and taffeta and gingham all spilling out between my fingers, and realize that I don’t know if I’m overstepping with the spate of vaguely Chinese-looking dresses I hold in one hand. I frantically look up articles on EverydayFeminism.com about appropriate situations for “ethnic wear” and realize that there’s nothing about people of mixed backgrounds. Do we get to wear more? Are we supposed to wear less? Aside from the elementary “stay the f**k away from blackface,” what are the rules? <br /><br />I wonder, too, about the idea of culture as a costume. My freshman-year roommate once explained her abiding disgust for cultural appropriation this way: “In elementary school, these white kids would make fun of me for my food ‘smelling funny’ because it was Indian. And now I see them getting likes on Instagram because of henna on their arms. You don’t just get to make fun of me for being Indian and then turn around and wear a bindi at Coachella.” <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://37.media.tumblr.com/c9bbb92ccda71f9552980e9f0b21f4aa/tumblr_n3zstnLo6U1sgmimgo1_500.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://37.media.tumblr.com/c9bbb92ccda71f9552980e9f0b21f4aa/tumblr_n3zstnLo6U1sgmimgo1_500.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fig.1 for "What Not to Do at Coachella." </td></tr>
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But what about those of us who never paid our cultural dues, in suffering or in pride? People like me, who ate sandwiches and pasta for lunch, didn’t speak much of a foreign language growing up, never got bullied because of ethnicity, only rarely participated in anything vaguely “cultural?” <br /><br />Do you get to wear a culture as a costume if the only tenuous link you have to that culture is the color of your skin? For some, culture is skin-deep. It’s a glittery outfit to be trotted out of the closet when it’s “cool,” it’s the “sari not sari”-captioned Instagram photo before going home to jeans. <br /><br />Maybe my discomfort, standing in that vintage store in Berkeley, was less with my divided race and more with my undivided cultural agnosticism. I didn’t feel Chinese enough to feel that I wasn’t appropriating if I were to dance out a dress with a Mandarin collar. <br /><br />I have never dressed up as anyone non-white. Felicity this year, the Greek goddesses Nike and Athena the years before, Little House on the Prairie’s Laura Ingalls Wilder before that, a spate of cliche drugstore-Halloween-costume witches before that. The most ethnic I ever got was when I was three years old and my aunt and mom wrapped my sister and me head to toe in Kirkland Signature toilet paper. We were mummies. <br /><br />There are non-white folks in history, mythology, and activism who would make for more interesting Halloween tributes. What about Cleopatra, Nur Jahan, Empress Theodora, Rosa Parks, the Mirabal or Soong sisters? <br /><br />When one Chinese-American friend told me that she was thinking of being Frida Kahlo for Halloween I remember warning her that it might be interpreted by some as cultural appropriation. She raised her eyebrows in surprise. <br /><br />That Halloween, I minced into a party wearing a pink-striped vintage frock that swished at my feet--I was Felicity Merriman, the Revolution-era American Girl doll. I twirled. I curtsied. I reveled in period costume and the feeling of not stealing anyone’s culture. <br /><br />But when my friend waltzed in, red shawl draped artfully on her shoulders, flowers in her hair and a dark unibrow flawlessly penciled on her skin, I felt a twinge of envy. <br /><br />Next October 31st, I probably won’t stray from my prairie girl/Greek goddess tradition. Somewhere, there is always someone who is much better at performing Chinese-ness, Asian-ness, POC-ness, than me, someone who will never question their own birthright to a costume, a hairstyle, an accent. I am not that person. If I weigh in on issues of cultural identity, an Asian friend will quickly remind me, non-maliciously, that I’m half white. So when I come running toward those vaunted gates of cultural entry, I pause when I get there. I look a gatekeeper in the eye. She looks like me.<div>
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<br />There are other strands of identity, not just cultural, where gatekeepers play a role. In LGBTQ movements, people who identify as bisexual frequently have to reiterate their authenticity and fight for visibility. There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject of “Bisexual erasure.” Then there are groups of people for whom the rigidity of existing labels may cause challenges--Amy Sohn’s light-hearted New York Magazine article “Bi For Now” describes the challenges of women who came out as lesbian, only to later end up in heterosexual relationships (who Sohn describes as “hasbians”). In this narrative, “hasbians” present a threat to the marginalized communities they step out of, while male partners interpret their unclear sexual orientation as threatening. The article quotes comedian Deidre Sullivan, saying: “The hasbian is very threatening because she crosses in and out of a sacred space.” <br /><br />No wonder some are drawn to larger terms of identity--Maya M <a href="https://www.bustle.com/articles/170551-7-reasons-i-use-queer-instead-of-lesbian">writes in Bustle</a> that she uses the word “queer” to identify herself, rather than lesbian, because it is “a word that actively resists definition.” <br /><br />The first time I met someone my age who identified as queer was in high school. We were sitting across from each other at a table in a Redmond Regional Library meeting room, talking about an event that we would collaborate on planning. She stated it -- “I identify as queer” -- flatly, without even the hint of a pause. In my head, an exclamation point lit up in neon pink even as my face stayed neutral. What does that mean? I thought. I was not a “woke” fourteen-year-old--no Tumblr, no forays into radical feminist theory. It was 2011, and I didn’t know what to do with a term like “queer.” So I translated it to something more easily digestible: lesbian. I guess she likes girls, I assumed, and thought no more of it. Assuming that “queer” equaled “lesbian” meant some form of knowledge, some form of power--it was a term that I could look at and say “I know who you like,” neatly filing you away with Ellen DeGeneres and Wanda Sykes. But “queer?” What a mysterious, big-tent sort of word. It lets you render yourself more unknowable to the casual observer, and this is a powerful thing: in a word, it lets you say that someone else has no especial right to know the composition of the bodies that live in your dreams.<br /><br />But even such an umbrella term quickly falls prey to the same forces of gatekeeping and exclusion that render other labels intimidating to those unsure if they make the cut. In “<a href="http://www.rolereboot.org/sex-and-relationships/details/2015-09-am-i-not-queer-enough-for-the-queer-community/">Am I Not Queer Enough for the Queer Community</a>?” Sarah Gladstone writes, “Sometimes I have to amend the assumptions about my sexuality by clarifying that yes, I like girls, but I like boys, too. I’m left feeling sheepishly ashamed, apologetic, exposed. No one’s ever said it, but I feel like I’ve let them down, like I’ve tricked other queer folks into believing that I am queer enough to share their spaces. The outline of my being blurs, my mirage settles into angles that just don’t quite seem to fit, and I’m left feeling like I’m occupying a space I’m not queer enough to take.” Jennifer Wong writes in “<a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2015/03/17/not-queer-enough/">Not Queer Enough</a>,” “People beg queerness to be visible in a way they would never demand of heterosexuality.” There are entire advice columns geared toward the individual struggling to be seen as queer by others.<br /><br />Berkeley is home to a number of people who wear queerness on their tattoo sleeves, comb it through neon-colored undercut hair or reflect it in gleaming steel piercings. I felt like the odd girl out in my freshman dorm room; I was the only one without a tattoo or a piercing, the only one who, one Valentine’s Day (how sappy of me) started steadily dating a cis hetero man. “You’re so straight, Adora,” my roommates would say lightheartedly, along with disappointed sighs that they hadn’t managed to “turn” me. <br /><br />They hadn’t been there at Student Orientation, in a dusky room with a bunch of newly admitted students students noisily daring each other to strip and kiss and make out. They hadn’t seen me lean in toward another girl on a dare--she had a boyfriend then, but she said “he says girls are OK”--and kiss her. The noise stopped. And then she pulled away and gave me a momentary, eyebrow-half-raised glance. “Woah, don’t get too into it,” she said warningly, and then she laughed. I wondered if there was something wrong with the fact that I had liked it, that a moment practically engineered for the teenage male gaze had felt like something I would do without anyone daring us first.<br /><br />They hadn’t been there at the last hurrah of my post-high school summer, the last party I threw in the old Redmond house where I grew up before we moved away forever. I wrote in my journal, “I ended up kissing her twice that night, S. once, B. once, and H. once. They were all brief, free kisses. We cuddled on my bed like so many pigs in a pile and it was warm and beautiful in all senses of the words…”<br /><br />They hadn’t been there in Berkeley’s Hearst Gym pool, the day we got to play water polo. None of us knew how to play, so we all gathered by the wall like fish in a tank clamoring for food, waiting for the PE teacher to explain the game. There, gripping the slippery black marble ledge with wet hands and panting from the exertion of too much treading water in the deep end, I caught myself staring for a moment at a classmate. All about her head, animated droplets of water caught the sun, and they adorned the ends of her close-shorn hair like a net of jewels. I drank in the picture for a moment. Suddenly I grew self-conscious of my gaze and looked bashfully away.<br /><br />Once I stand in line for pizza with a friend and she jokes about wishing she were lesbian, because it would be “easier” than dealing with the flaws of the opposite sex. Later we look at art and she comments that our light-hearted banter on the subject was probably insensitive. After all, people don’t choose their sexual orientation, she commented in the tone reserved for Things That Are Certain.<br /><br />I wondered out loud, “If someone’s sexuality was fluid enough that they, like, could be lesbian, it just wasn’t as easy, could they make the joke about wishing they were?” <br /><br />She looked at me blankly. “I think if it takes work to be something, then you’re not that thing.” <br /><br />I tried to explain, feeling acutely aware of not having presented enough identity qualifications, or perhaps the wrong kind. “No, not ‘more work’ exactly...just like...they don’t know? Like their sexuality feels kind of moment-dependent? So sure, they’re straight for all intents and purposes now, but maybe once, they could have not been?” <br /><br />She shrugged. <br /><br />It occurred to me, too, that I could have said something clearer: “Well, I might be queer; I don’t really know, and anyway, I’m in a straight relationship.” But it would have been clearer for her, not for me. <br /><br />In the end, I wondered if this ineloquent sexual indecision registered to her, just as “queer” had once registered to me, as simply another version of some more rigid category that she could understand and then file away--a knowledge built on a lie, gathering dust in the card catalogue of her mind. </div>
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<br /><i>Edited on May 18 to add an additional section.<br /><br /> Next up is Part 2: Pride.</i><span id="docs-internal-guid-4c6ee58d-1a90-4f47-1af1-bc44f11bad09">
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-73387317345837405092016-11-10T04:26:00.000-08:002017-05-18T01:36:24.550-07:00Post-Election Feelings<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><br /></i>Sometimes on weekend mornings I wake up and find myself lazily fascinated by the image of my partner's sleeping form. The innocence of resting lips curved into a dreaming smile, mussed hair and arms drawn close.<br />
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The night of the election, after CNN had all but called it, I trudged to bed still half-unable to believe or accept it. Neither of us could sleep. When I thought about the election and looked into his gentle eyes I felt two emotions intermingle painfully--a rush of dread and fear, a <i>Will you be safe? </i><br />
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I felt the visceral desire to hold him close, as if my arms and that room's four walls could be permanent guarantors of safety. I have never felt this pit in my stomach before. That has been my privilege. The parents who have told their black sons in decades past to step off the sidewalk and never look a white woman in the eye, the parents who still have to have conversations with their children about racialized police brutality today--this has been a feeling they have known for so long. The feeling of looking at a person you love and feeling the seesaw in the soul: simultaneous delight in their beauty and innocent hope, next to the frustration and impotence you feel knowing that you alone can't keep them safe.<br />
<br />
I felt this sense of fear for him more than me because even though Vincent Chin was brutally murdered for the color of his skin in 1982 Detroit (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/opinion/why-vincent-chin-matters.html">NYTimes</a>), I know, deep down, that I--the 5'2" half-Asian female--am not constructed as "the threat" here, at least not in the same way that he is as a brown man.<br />
<br />
Yet my fear wasn't something I voiced out loud. I told myself I was being irrational, and eventually, sleep came. Then I woke up and saw that this election has already emboldened people to lash out at those they see as Other. You can take a look at some of the things that folks are posting about on reporter Shaun King's <a href="https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/?fref=ts">Facebook page</a>.<br />
<br />
Particularly in the wake of post-election hate crimes, I feel mystified by the decisions of people I know--the parents of dear Asian-American friends from the seemingly liberal hotbed of the greater Seattle area--who voted for Trump. Not out of any affinity for the KKK, but because social or economic reasons outweighed concerns about his temperament or inflammatory rhetoric toward Americans of many identities.<br />
<br />
What confuses me is the logic behind that weighing.<br />
<br />
After all, money can only insulate you and protect you up to a point. Flying first-class doesn't mean skipping a TSA security line where religious garments or the color of your skin make you a suspect. Kunal Nayyar (the guy who acts Raj Koothrappali on the Big Bang Theory) tweeted "Well if you look like me - you'd better start shaving your beard every day." Just because you're the member of a "model minority" doesn't mean that people won't yell at you to "Go back to China!" in the middle of a crowded New York City street.<br />
<br />
In the wake of hatred and divisiveness post-election, I saw on Facebook that there are folks making uplifting videos with the hashtag #MyAmericaIs. I whole-heartedly support the idea, but I have to admit that my first thought was not a generous one.<br />
<br />
It was this: my America is also the America whose scientists deliberately infected Guatemalans with syphilis (without any semblance of informed consent) in a clinical trial perhaps worse than that conducted in Tuskegee (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html">NYTimes</a>).<br />
<br />
My America is the America that backed the overthrow of democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile, and subsequent dictatorship of Pinochet (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/07/chile-coup-pinochet-allende">The Guardian</a>). And then there's what we do at home: my America is the America that disenfranchises people of color, then turns around and fails to teach it comprehensively in our history books (e.g., the moves made by conservative Texas school board members--<a href="http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2010/05/22/20100521-Texas-State-Board-of-Education-approves-9206">Dallas News</a>).<br />
<br />
Certainly my America is beautiful, too--like the Big Sky country of Montana that I fell in love with as a kid on a road trip to Yellowstone--but reading a book like <i>Missoula</i>, Jon Krakauer's searing book on that town's acceptance of rape culture and prioritization of college football over women's welfare and justice (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/books/review/jon-krakauers-missoula-about-rape-in-a-college-town.html">NYTimes</a>), brings some clouds to that big sky.<br />
<br />
We don't get the luxury of picking and choosing which Americas are "ours" if that means selectively ignoring the narratives that make us feel sad. Ashamed. Complicit. Repentant.<br />
<br />
We have to see our country for what it is and what it has been if we want to make good decisions on what it will be. And in fairness, our education system hasn't necessarily done the best job of giving all Americans the opportunity to study a complicated history of the US. A US history that problematizes pilgrim dioramas and lends nuance to our "victories."<br />
<br />
Still, I clung to some semblance of faith on Election Day. Maybe I just imagined that more people, like me, would put their faith in <i>her</i>.<br />
<br />
At the risk of sounding hagiographic, I've looked up to Hillary Clinton since I was ten years old. (I've written about it in an <a href="http://adorasv.blogspot.com/2016/08/im-with-her.html">older blog post</a>.) I'd like to think that my admiration became more nuanced recently. After all, when I was ten, I didn't have too many friends who were forwarding me thinkpieces about HRC as a bastion of neoliberalism or cunning engineer of DNC intrigues or, well, straight-up evil.<br />
<br />
I read them all.<br />
<br />
But here's the thing: I rarely hear people saying they voted one way or another because of reading a lot of thinkpieces. Instead, people get excited to vote for the person you'd "get a beer" with. Clinton hasn't ever been perceived as charismatic in the same way that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama were. It said something to me about the profound difficulty of striking the right balance with voters as a female politician: being energetic, but not too energetic lest you be "hysterical," and being steely, but not too steely, lest you be "bossy," or worse, "bitchy."<br />
<br />
My admiration for Secretary Clinton persisted because of an appreciation for imperfection in a female role model. Tavi Gevinson, the founder of Rookie, said it best in her TEDxTeen talk: "What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws, who is maybe not immediately likable, but eventually relatable."<br />
<br />
For a lot of people, Clinton's relatable moment was when she shed tears in New Hampshire in 2008. For me, it was when I read some excerpts from her letters to a friend during her Wellesley days and I saw something of my own 19-year-old angst--NYTimes described her writing as "by turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient." The excerpts are worth reading (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/us/politics/29letter.html?ex=1186632000&en=0cc7dc1a48848986&ei=5070">here</a>). That was the moment I found Secretary Clinton relatable. I wish that more of America had had that moment.<br />
<br />
At the same time, it's relatability, and a sort of personal identification with the candidate or party, that makes the outcome hurt more.<br />
<br />
I'm reminded of a time I walked past some Berkeley guys waiting for a bus and they were talking in loud, jocular terms about people "being pussies."<br />
<br />
I'd heard people toss the phrase around before, but for some reason that was the first moment that it clicked. Instead of "pussies" just being some abstract slur I thought to myself, "I have one."<br />
<br />
And then, the question that entered my head, as it now always does, was a simple one: "Why do they hate us?"<br />
<br />
That was 3 guys. It was easier to brush off. But now it's 59 million people, men and women both, and it hurts. It hurts when I think of kids sleeping tonight who wake up and go into a world where shit like <a href="https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/photos/a.799605230078397.1073741828.799539910084929/1193976943974555/?type=3&theater">this</a> happens. It's selfish, but it hurts when I think back to my kid self too, so full of hope in a Clinton rally in Seattle in '08.<br />
<br />
At that time, I was more politically active than I am now. I watched the news every night, and made low-resolution YouTube videos where I railed against George W. Bush (especially on education policy) and did a very, very bad impersonation of Sarah Palin. (Really. Don't go looking for it.)<br />
<br />
I know that I've lost some--well, a lot--of that zealotry; it's been tempered into something a little more reticent. With this election over, I have wondered if I should feel more guilty for that reticence. For not supporting Hillary Clinton more vocally. In reflecting, though, I realize that I've never been sure of how much preaching to the choir can do.<br />
<br />
So in the end, it's 4AM and I'm sitting on the floor in my bedroom because, like last night, I can't sleep. But I made it to my classes today, and there's a "Love Trumps Hate" shirt (purchased from the HRC website) on my chair. Wearing it may not feel un-ironic for a long time, but I'll wear it tomorrow to go running. It'll be an aspirational thing. (Plus, that shirt is way too soft--and expensive--to never wear again.)<br />
<br />
I'll go to a Chinese class that I share with a room full of the smart and striving and funny children of immigrants, and an International and Area Studies class called "Cultures and Capitalisms." Maybe in class I'll feel that lurking feeling of frustration, of impotence, as we discuss scholars whose names may never touch the lips of many of the people who voted for Trump. As we have lofty conversations about capitalism I'll wonder if all of us with our raised hands are preaching to the choir.<br />
<br />
But then I remember, because 4AM is the hour of random things connecting in the brain, something we discussed in another theory-heavy class--my English class ("Postcolonial Sex"--a quintessential Berkeley class if you ever heard one). There we discussed the formation of nations as imagined communities, and how nations are prominently gendered and oftentimes figured as female--i.e., the "motherland."<br />
<br />
I bring this up because of all the people who equated the Trump victory to America going down in flames (there was even some spoof video on Facebook circulating titled "Live Electoral Map" that just superimposed an American perimeter on a video of logs burning).<br />
<br />
I dearly hope that a Trump presidency will not be a realization of that image.<br />
<br />
But if it is, maybe this is the only silver lining of our strange gendering of nations as female: it is women, all the stories tell us, from Sita to Daenarys, who walk through fire the best. And emerging, at the end, unbowed. Unbroken.<br />
<br />
Till then, no matter who you voted for, hold each other close.</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-53052642700574027012016-11-01T02:08:00.000-07:002017-11-27T23:35:57.611-08:00Data-Driven Everything<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC1iLCHhcHM5KErPd_ozfiYdKLUX1k-Yp3ymp-h6kXS0p_I2bUWUWNKFEdTwffwrRSzcLj-rhKKT6PtTi0DdSIn5CvZxYX8gWDu-MMVBcaTG11_khzt8bC8RlxVYv6id7tDGCx/s1600/1940+US+census.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="502" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC1iLCHhcHM5KErPd_ozfiYdKLUX1k-Yp3ymp-h6kXS0p_I2bUWUWNKFEdTwffwrRSzcLj-rhKKT6PtTi0DdSIn5CvZxYX8gWDu-MMVBcaTG11_khzt8bC8RlxVYv6id7tDGCx/s640/1940+US+census.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">1940 US Census. Source: Census.gov</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
My boyfriend wears a Fitbit so regularly that once, scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed, I mistook a friend for him—all I had seen, with half the picture cut off, was an arm and the grey, Flex-model Fitbit on the wrist.<br />
<br />
I view the thing as half object of intrigue, half handcuff: while the data it collects (on everything from steps walked to sleep patterns) is interesting, it seems like such a lot of work to scroll through it all.<br />
<br />
I admit that I’m a hypocrite in saying this, though. My phone’s built-in Samsung Health app counts the steps I’ve walked and can measure my heart rate. With various other tracker apps, you can note menstrual cycles, food consumption, the number of liters of water you drink in a day...it goes on. It would seem that if it exists, it can be measured.<br />
<br />
On a larger scale, this love affair with data—what Berkeley geography graduate students Camilla Hawthorne and Brittany Meché termed “fetishized numeration” in their <a href="https://societyandspace.com/material/commentaries/camilla-hawthorne-and-brittany-meche-making-room-for-black-feminist-praxis-in-geography/">Space & Society article</a>—is visible in corporate, academic, and policy circles. At UC Berkeley, Chancellor Dirks <a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2016/03/01/346188/">wrote</a> in March that “Across all of higher education, faculty and administrators are increasingly recognizing the need to treat data literacy as a core competency for liberal education.” In an <a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2015/09/02/uc-berkeley-piloting-new-data-science-class-fall/">older article</a>, a campus Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor was more blunt: “There has been massive growth in job opportunities in data-science-related areas…and a shortage of people prepared to fill them, according to Culler.” Dirks’ language of data as a “core competency for liberal education” disguises the perhaps more pressing motive that Culler’s statement illuminates: market demand for data exists, and the university needs to fill it.<br />
<br />
William Deresiewicz has written a lovely article entitled “<a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/">The Neoliberal Arts</a>” about how “college sold its soul to the market,” but that’s actually not my argument here (Deresiewicz does it better).<br />
<br />
My concern is, instead, what we we lose when we treat quantitative data as our preeminent means of knowing things about the world.<br />
<br />
I worry about this because people seem to gush a lot about things with the words “data-driven” placed in front of them, whether decision-making or teaching or journalism or policy. We talk about “data” as though it possesses magical qualities of complete rationality and objectivity. After all, how could numbers be wrong?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/why-big-data-is-not-truth/?_r=0">NYTimes profiled</a> Kate Crawford, a visiting MIT professor and researcher at Microsoft Research; she criticized “Big Data fundamentalism—the idea with larger data sets, we get closer to objective truth.” In one example she provided, even something like analyzing the millions of tweets following Hurricane Sandy could provide biased data (since Twitter users tend to be younger and more affluent than the general population affected). Further, she added that “Big Data is neither color blind nor gender blind…Facebook timelines, stripped of data like names, can still be used to determine a person’s ethnicity with 95 percent accuracy.” (Indeed, ProPublica recently published a <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race">piece about Facebook</a> using their “Ethnic Affinity” data to give advertisers the option to restrict who viewed their ads—a potential violation of the Fair Housing Act.)<br />
<br />
“Ethnic Affinity” is only a recent inheritor of a long history of politically charged data. The late scholar of South Asia Bernard Cohn did extensive work on the first Census conducted by the British in India, pointing out that their Census had a mercantile, extractive goal—after all, counting the subjects of a state is a prerequisite for taxing them. If the British Census in India, Kate Crawford’s example of analyzing tweets, or the use of Facebook’s Ethnic Affinity by advertisers, all serve as any indicator, data is rarely objective: neither in its motives, collection, nor analysis.<br />
<br />
But what if we lived in a happy utopia—one of both objective data and objective data analysts? There’s still a problem with privileging one form of knowledge production because of its perceived objectivity and rationality: it denigrates other academic fields. And the fields that my CS major friends might describe as “hand-wavey” are, incidentally, also fields that are heavily populated by women. The ranks of your average Anthropology or English class are very different from those of your average CS or Mathematics class. In 2014, when Berkeley offered its inaugural online data science master’s program, 78% of the course’s students were male (<a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2014/06/24/uc-berkeley-offers-new-online-data-science-masters-degree/">Daily Cal</a>). Certainly people like my data science class’s professor and others at Berkeley are making admirable efforts resulting in tangible change (a little over than half of my intro to data science class is female).<br />
<br />
But even if the arbiters of data are increasingly members of underrepresented groups, the issue of discrimination against certain forms of knowledge remains.
There’s a clear bifurcation of disciplines into those we think of, implicitly or explicitly, as “feminine” or “masculine.” It’s something that you can witness every time you turn on the evening news, with its lineup of “hard news”—the talk of war and death, money and politics. But take a look at women’s magazines and websites, and it’s often a different set of stories. <a href="http://www.xojane.com/">XOJane</a> has an entire section called “It Happened To Me”: personal narratives. <a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/">New York Magazine’s The Cut</a>: a weekly feature called Sex Diaries, in which people (men and women alike) submit anonymized documentation of a week’s worth of sexual exploits.
Increasingly, however, there’s cross-over—magazines like Cosmopolitan, once better known for aspirational sex positions, are covering “hard news” (documented in this Vox article, “<a href="http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/30/13089842/feminist-women-magazines-trump-clinton-election">Don’t Underestimate Cosmo</a>: Women’s Magazines Are Taking On Trump”). And papers like the New York Times, with its stiff “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” now feature columns like Modern Love and Campus Lives that put personal narratives, not coldly outlined facts and figures, front and center.<br />
<br />
I see this as progress. Plenty of feminist writers like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jessicavalenti">Jessica Valenti</a> use their personal experiences to illuminate global problems, but the language of memory and the personal as a language of knowledge production is not reserved for women alone. Personal narratives should not be considered the stuff of “women’s issues” any more than the 2016 election should be considered not a “women’s issue.” Consider PostSecret (which collects postcards from around the world with secrets depicted on them, posting them weekly), Story Corps (a non-profit project aiming to record stories from Americans of all backgrounds), Moth Radio Hour (a weekly series featuring true stories told live on-stage). One of my favorite Medium articles, a<a href="https://medium.com/matter/youre-16-youre-a-pedophile-you-dont-want-to-hurt-anyone-what-do-you-do-now-e11ce4b88bdb#.nwmqxu6bp"> haunting piece</a> with the title “You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?” came from an amazing series called Matter. Matter articles talk about big issues, like “<a href="https://medium.com/matter/the-racism-beat-6ff47f76cbb6#.x056863u4">The Racism Beat</a>: What it’s like to write about hate over and over and over,” or “<a href="https://medium.com/matter/living-and-dying-on-airbnb-6bff8d600c04#.3h6dznci1">Living and Dying on Airbnb</a>: My dad died in an Airbnb rental, and he’s not the only one. What can the company do to improve safety?”<br />
<br />
Notice anything?<br />
<br />
These articles all provide knowledge that is grounded in the personal—in story, in life, in memory.
<br />
<br />
Not numbers, tables, and scatterplots.<br />
<br />
I’m not saying that we don’t need quantitative data. We do. But putting it on a pedestal, ignoring and belittling personal narratives or ethnographies or literary analyses, ignores everything that can’t be quantified.<br />
<br />
Take Colorado State University anthropologist Jeffrey Snodgrass’s <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3805466?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">article</a> “A Tale of Goddesses, Money, and Other Terribly Wonderful Things: Spirit Possession, Commodity Fetishism, and the Narrative of Capitalism in Rajasthan, India” as an example. It told the story of a young mother named Bedami and her husband Ramu. The story started with Bedami’s possession by a goddess (with this being her community’s understanding of her condition). That story unfolded in parallel to an exploration of Ramu’s rejection of the community’s traditional livelihood and norms; he had chosen to take a salaried job, open a bank account, and ordered Bedami to undergo sterilization because of the worry of the expense of too many children. But this parsimonious behavior meant that peers viewed him as insufferably stingy and a traitor to his community. The community concluded that her possession had occurred at least in part due to his miserliness and rejection of tradition.
Most of this narrative would go unseen if not for the qualitative information of Snodgrass’s laborious ethnography. The job, bank account, and sterilization might become faceless numbers swimming about in some massive pool, but the real impact of the rocky incursion of modernity in Bedami’s community, and on individuals’ lived experiences, would be rendered invisible.<br />
<br />
If you’re a policy-maker trying to get more Indians to sign up for bank accounts (a real priority of the current government, which in August 2014 launched the <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/175-million-new-bank-ac-in-india-in-three-years-world-bank/article7109166.ece">Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana scheme </a>to increase bank account penetration) you need to see people like Bedami and Ramu, not just the numbers of the latest World Bank report, to make effective policy.
<br />
<br />
The information that comes from documents like personal narratives and ethnographies is often our only window into worlds that are too fraught to speak of in terms of big data. Where do you get statistics on things like pedophilia or goddess possession? Who answers the polls, or tweets, or picks up the phone, to talk about those topics?<br />
<br />
Not everything can be quantified, and that’s a good thing.<br />
<br />
I said at the beginning that this was an article about quantitative data, but really, this is a plea for humility. The idea that any one discipline has a monopoly on the truth is highly dangerous. Worshipping at the feet of gods we build out of numbers and code is no better than worshipping at the feet of the gods we imagine. (I’m reminded of that classic Dumbledore line: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”)<br />
<br />
Scientists and engineers who believe that their fields lend them omniscience make bad things happen: just Google “scientific racism,” “Guatemala syphilis experiment,” or take a look at the current news about Standing Rock, where engineers seem willfully ignorant of Native American history in their aptness to dismiss the protestors' cause. These all should serve as reminders that our world is much, much better off when scientists and engineers learn from, and believe in the value of, fields like the humanities and social sciences.<br />
<br />
And right now, that equality has to start with revising how we look at numbers.</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-51308393710674330442016-10-31T23:00:00.001-07:002016-10-31T23:08:05.654-07:00Locker Room Talk<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRVJRHdOeBmuJn3-u2wFaEadjJHZET-cf4wqTEtIFR4afjpcEGrSoVM8dGot5rKTFlL_jg5Yzlw4hFpKtjAKJmOYAGW3dPDWeAqtKNzmchrN641Dl9sbCq876BIEpGVrWV0Dnq/s1600/soccer+ball.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRVJRHdOeBmuJn3-u2wFaEadjJHZET-cf4wqTEtIFR4afjpcEGrSoVM8dGot5rKTFlL_jg5Yzlw4hFpKtjAKJmOYAGW3dPDWeAqtKNzmchrN641Dl9sbCq876BIEpGVrWV0Dnq/s640/soccer+ball.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<i>Facebook group chat:</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>girl</i>: f**k i need to vent about men<br />
so tonight was the last IM speed soccer game of the semester
and f*****g no one shows up except for me, M, and J and it's like 2 mins to the game starting or we forfeit<br />
so M is calling ppl up being like get your asses over here<br />
we forfeit bc AC and BT show up at berkeley time
but we're like "ok let's scrimmage"<br />
other team is a bunch of really big guys
and then theres M, J, B inexplicably in dark eyeliner and eyeshadow (for halloween costume i think??) and little ol' me
ok so we're very clearly outmatched<br />
but nbd, we start playing<br />
from the moment we begin playing
the other team keeps on saying things like<br />
<br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
"pass that like a MAN"<br />"come on DON'T PUSSY OUT"<br />"SUCK MY DICK" </h2>
<br />
to each other<br />
and im just over here thinking... wtf guys<br />
the whole point of everyone being outraged at donald trump for his whole "grab them by the pussy"
thing<br />
is that that s**t is supposed to be the exception not the norm<br />
and here you are at Cal doing this same f*****g s**t<br />
<br />
<i>boys</i>: it's locker room talk<br />
if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen<br />
Blog about it<br />
<br />
---<br />
<i>recommended read</i>: <a href="http://www.theplayerstribune.com/deandre-levy-sexual-assault-awareness/">Man Up</a>, by Detroit Lions Linebacker Deandre Levy</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-66778579961814012782016-10-10T17:59:00.000-07:002017-11-27T23:09:02.702-08:00Neither Here Nor There<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgItk7tGwlvS1F9-MjTElZpYkDq-5hTU4EqtRPV5u20GFi_iZmiJj35Mt-U6eUpypqBjCcFAPZc5jDBZQIP4IS6BbiT7lx2-3ORawJjaeKjbJHR0Lg1whYqY6EAuYrsC6gpEmKU/s1600/DSC_0179%255B2%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgItk7tGwlvS1F9-MjTElZpYkDq-5hTU4EqtRPV5u20GFi_iZmiJj35Mt-U6eUpypqBjCcFAPZc5jDBZQIP4IS6BbiT7lx2-3ORawJjaeKjbJHR0Lg1whYqY6EAuYrsC6gpEmKU/s640/DSC_0179%255B2%255D.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Picture from a visit to Xi'an, China. 2008.</td></tr>
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<br />
<br />
"我不想我的肤色写我的--我的--uhhh--怎么说 '<i>destiny</i>'?" I said, frustrated, during one particularly angsty phone call with my mom. I was trying, clumsily, to say "I don't want my skin color to write my destiny." But there was one little problem--I didn't know how to say "destiny," and I wasn't even sure if my grammar was half-correct.<br />
<br />
That clumsy declaration sums up my simultaneous attachment to, and flight from, the language that is my mother's mother tongue. Lots of children of immigrants can relate to the feeling of running away from the language their parents speak, seeing it as foreign, yet another thing to mark them as "other," or just inconvenient. I had a French neighbor who would speak French to her sons only to hear them respond in English: they were the blonde-haired mirror images of my sister and me in our rebellious childhood. We were Chinese school dropouts, tired of having to make the trip to Kirkland on Saturday mornings to struggle through memorizing characters we never dreamed we would need or want to use.<br />
<br />
But it becomes a little more complicated when you're not <i>really</i> forced to use the language or learn it via osmosis. When your dad speaks English and all your aunts and uncles do too, it becomes pretty easy to get by on English alone. Sure, it gets a little awkward at family gatherings, when your grandparents fix beseeching eyes on you and deliver yet another lecture on the value of learning Chinese: don't you know that China is an ascending economic power, don't you know that China has 1 billion people--but you could get that from any Econ or History or Poli Sci class, so what you really hear is the subtext, <i>don't you know that </i>you're <i>Chinese?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I thought of being a South Asian Studies major, once. First it started as a joke, the kind of thing I said in Facebook group chats to scare the kind of friends who think of any majors that end in the word "Studies" (whether of the ethnic, American, media, or regional variety) as hopeless wastes of money. After I'd taken my second class in the South and Southeast Asian Studies department and realized that these classes were the sources of my sole A+'s at Cal (and, more importantly, the classes I most enjoyed going to), I started thinking about it more seriously. I could happily envision taking endless classes about everything from pre-Mughal history to religious nationalism to the effects of globalization in the subcontinent.<br />
<br />
My only hang-up was the language requirement: two years of one of the department's supported languages. I still remember telling my mom casually during a hike in Marin County that I was thinking of studying Hindi or maybe Sanskrit to do the major, instead of just the minor.<br />
<br />
"I think the minor is enough," she said with an inscrutable expression. "What about Chinese?"<br />
<br />
<i>What about Chinese? </i><br />
<br />
This question has haunted me ever since I was a kid.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I don't want my skin color to write my destiny, </i>I think now, and yet there is only one language other than English in which I can even <i>begin</i> to construct that sentence. When I try to use three years of high school French some mis-connected neurons in my brain send me every other word in Chinese, instead. There is only one language other than English in which I can improvise insults to say to my sister, describe my major, say the words "colonialism" and "government representation" and "politics"--<br />
<br />
And most importantly, only one language other than English in which I can talk to my grandparents.<br />
<br />
That was a good reason to study Chinese, said one Berkeley Language Exchange Program group facilitator. He was an exchange student from Hangzhou, a boy in a pink button-up who excitedly told us all about his upcoming performance of an Eminem song at the Chinese People's Union annual concert. He asked us all why we were studying Chinese, and he seemed singularly intrigued by my answer. He remembered it later, when I showed up to the group late one time -- "Hey! You're the one who studies Chinese to speak it with your grandparents."<br />
<br />
Something about that web of filial piety immediately binds us together, creates recognition between the exchange student from Hangzhou and this half-Chinese girl from Seattle: no matter if we feel we are the spider spinning, or the unlucky insect fated to be devoured. Sometimes I feel more like the latter. Once, I vented to an Asian-American psychologist who I see sometimes about feeling guilty for not wanting to see my parents (who live locally) more often. She told me, with a ruefully knowing expression, "You sound so Chinese right now! You don't hear it?"<br />
<br />
But then -- "You're such a banana, Adora." The voice of one of my friends. Banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. He said it after a Chinese class where we'd talked about traditional table manners, and I'd confessed I didn't know any. My family makes frozen fish filets from Costco and mixes tofu and bok choy with lemon pepper pappardelle pasta from Trader Joe's; you'll realize quickly we don't care too much about traditional Chinese cooking, much less table manners. I liked my childhood, I liked eating out at more Indian and Italian, Mexican and Thai joints than Chinese, but--<br />
<br />
<i>What about Chinese?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I dutifully picked Chinese to satisfy my Development Studies major language requirement. In my third semester of Chinese, "Advanced Chinese for Heritage Speakers," I sit next to classmates whose parents speak Mandarin to them regularly, a class that reminds me every day that really, I'm not Chinese enough to be there, not white enough to be somewhere else. Today when my teacher passed out test results -- I looked to my right and saw the boy next to me had gotten a 90.75, something he made a disappointed noise over -- and behind me, more 90s -- she didn't pass out my test. I went up to her and asked for my test, and she asked if I had time to stay after class. I went to her office hours, where she surprised me by printing out a blank test and asking me to redo the listening portion. "I know you don't have the same background as the others," she said softly and kindly in Chinese. It's not the only time she's alluded to this--once, she told me that she "worried" about me, because of how badly I was doing on quizzes, and reminded me to go to her office hours--you're not like the others, she'd said then too. I was a little blindsided by the generosity of being able to do the listening portion again but also too tired to do much better. I finished, and she-regraded my test. I went from 57.5 to 60.5. (Out of 100.)<br />
<br />
Someday, I thought ruefully, maybe it's the kind of thing I can show my kids. Like the time I found one of my dad's old math quizzes from elementary school at my grandpa's house and he had a D, and it was so funny because my dad was <i>so good at math.</i> But that was only funny because of his PhD in Physics, and I wonder if my Chinese test D will ever be funny in contrast to some hoped-for eventual fluency, or just another reminder that I failed to be good at the one language that people <i>expect</i> me to speak. I'm serious: people (usually well-meaning 60-something white men in tweed suits) have approached me at conferences and started sentences with "Ni hao!" Just like that: a brutal reminder that I am at least slightly Other, and that no number of reminders that I was Made in the USA (e.g., first line of my Wikipedia page, "born 1997 Springfield, Oregon") or SAT vocabulary words in my speeches can erase the everyday fact of the color of my skin.<br />
<br />
That same color of my skin that I don't want to write my destiny.<br />
<br />
When I walked out of my teacher's office hours there was a balding white man who emerged from one of the offices in the same hallway; she saw him and they conversed briefly in fluent Chinese. Two other classmates and I exchanged a shocked glance, and one of my classmates said, "He speaks better than me!"<br />
<br />
I will never get that kind of reaction for speaking Chinese. If I'm lucky, a "You've improved!" but otherwise a sort of palpable disappointment that it isn't <i>better</i>. When Gary Locke went to China as the American ambassador, a tremendous amount of awkwardness ensued when people expected him to speak Chinese and he couldn't. My teacher held him up as a cautionary tale.<br />
<br />
It's a tremendously shallow desire, but deep inside I want to be that guy in that hallway, not Gary Locke. I want to be able to walk into a room and speak a language that no one expects me to know, instead of forever feeling duty-bound by heritage to study one language, but too un-fluent to claim it passionately.<br />
<br />
Does this make me a traitor -- to my heritage, to my family, to myself?<br />
<br />
I declared my Development Studies major in the office of an advisor who I can only describe as one of those jovial tall white guys who seems like an Adult Who Plays Sports (probably something cardio-intensive like Ultimate or soccer or running marathons, and probably with other tall, pretty people). He looked at my transcript, looked back at me, and said in the blunt way that funny people can get away with, "You know that studying a language that doesn't align with your regional concentration is pedagogically <i>crap</i>, right?"<br />
<br />
He was so jovial that I responded only, dryly, "I'm aware."<br />
<br />
What I didn't say: Mr. Major Advisor, I do this pedagogical crap because it doesn't get easier, walking into family reunions and being reminded of my shirked responsibility, answering people's questions as to why I'm studying South Asia and not East Asia, why I spent my summer in India and not China, constantly trying to outrun and disprove the tenacious notion that I want nothing to do with my heritage. I do this pedagogical crap because it is my penance, my haircloth shirt and my bread and water, for using my other classes to study history and culture and literature so foreign to my grandparents.<br />
<br />
See, Mr. Major Advisor, I do this pedagogical crap because I'm not white.<br />
<br />
When I was little, I wanted to look white (more on that <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adora-svitak/teen-body-image_b_5251604.html">here</a>), and maybe my misguided obsession with physical appearance belied a desire for a sort of freedom: when people have forgotten who your ancestors are and where they came from (I mean, we say 'white people,' not 'Irish-German-Czech-French'), your ethnicity goes from being the determinant of the languages and cultures you study, to a mere suggestion, to irrelevance.<br />
<br />
I suppose you can call it freedom; I suppose you can call it loss.<br />
<br />
I'm undecided. <span style="background-color: white;">And so I plod on, clumsy composition after composition and failed test after test, trying to catch up, trying to memorize the characters to--if only on the surface--rewrite myself.</span></div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-2069647374647806132016-09-09T19:59:00.001-07:002016-09-09T19:59:57.307-07:00Spectating<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Edgar Degas</i></td></tr>
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<i>All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players - Shakespeare, </i>As You Like It<i> </i><br />
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The other day, I vented to a friend about how nervous I was for an audition for an on-campus improv group. I wasn't optimistic about my chances. He asked what was so hard about improv, and I said that, at least for me, it was hard to get out of the sense of being a spectator of myself.<br />
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"So...you're just looking at yourself?" he laughed.<br />
<br />
I spectated, then, I guess; I saw my words through what I imagined to be his eyes, heard my own words a little distorted. "Being a spectator of myself." Suddenly it sounded like something vain, like a preoccupation with staring at your own glossy reflection in an imaginary mirror, always hovering above you.<br />
<br />
"No, not just like that," I said defensively. "Haven't you ever been in a conversation with someone where you find yourself seeing yourself from the other person's eyes, except it's not <i>really</i> their eyes, it's what you imagine them to be thinking? That's what I mean by spectating."<br />
<br />
"At that point, I just give up," he shrugged.<br />
<br />
We waved goodbye as he walked away and I went to line up in a crowded cafe for an overpriced cup of watermelon chunks. I kept thinking about being a spectator, though, and its ramifications. I thought about it when I ran into someone I knew, waiting in that line, and one of my first instinct after I walked away from the cafe and the conversation was to look at myself in the mirror in a library bathroom to see how I had looked. It's a peculiar instinct, because I doubt that he or anyone else much cared, or would remember. It was an un-extraordinary outfit--a blue merino sweater that kept riding up, and a striped button-up shirt.<br />
<br />
Awkwardness and self-consciousness are states of being that are at least comfortingly ubiquitous--most people can at least relate, even if with only one or two experiences, to a sense of utter mortification. Maybe that's why we can use questions like "What was your most embarrassing moment?" as convenient mediums for fostering bonding. Everyone has an answer.<br />
<br />
And in order to have that answer, you need to have a sense of being a spectator; how can you know your most embarrassing moment if you didn't see the moment, even briefly, through the eyes of someone else? Embarrassment is a state that relies on the perceptions of others, and our perceptions of their perceptions too. It is embarrassing to, as one of my friends did, have uncontrolled explosive diarrhea in a dirndl and liederhosen store at the Munich Airport not just because of your personal standards but because of <i>spectators</i>.<br />
<br />
Briefly, in embarrassment, you become one of them.<br />
<br />
But what happens when this spectatorship is not only trotted out for special and catastrophic events in liederhosen stores, but is everyday? Mundane? Then you stop being "in the moment," and you move someplace far away from the moment. Like the perch above California Memorial Stadium where they fire off the cannon, where you can stand and see the happenings below--but are powerless to play the game.<br />
<br />
No one likes feeling the spectator passing judgment. So we drink at cocktail parties until the spectator is swaying in its step, hazy-eyed and hard of hearing. We stay up late to lull the spectator to sleep until it's snoring on our shoulder, and then we can share secrets with our 4AM BFFs. I once read a line, "Secrets are the currency of intimacy," and I remember this now because the link between intimacy and spectatorship is so deeply fraught: the famed American sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson even coined the term "spectatoring" in the context of sexual intimacy and how this behavior, a sort of profound self-focus and monitoring, could preclude enjoyment. Certainly it does for casual conversation.<br />
<br />
I have friends for whom this level of self-consciousness seems alien. They exude a certain kind of ease--the ability to throw themselves onto a couch that isn't theirs and sprawl gangly-legged all over it, to curse animatedly and reveal heated opinions in front of people they've just met, to disclose emotions and experiences with the comfort of the assumption that nothing is too sacred to be spoken of. And it's not that they're insensitive (usually); just that they don't seem to need anything to let go of their reservations. And that's sometimes contagious--once I started talking to one of them in a Berkeley bookstore and we found ourselves talking so loudly that a woman marched over and belligerently shushed us, and we fled in a storm of giggles.<br />
<br />
I love my memory of that obnoxious moment. It's also the kind of moment that I rarely catalyze for others.<br />
<br />
I tried to explain what it's like being with people like that to another friend. "You'd never step on a book, would you?" I asked him. He said no, and I clumsily tried to summarize the difference between him and these other friends with that one thing: "there are some people who will step on books, and some who won't, you know?" My friends who don't seem to have a spectator on their shoulder all the time are the kinds of people who take up space without apology. They probably step on papers and books and maybe, inadvertently, people, too. But all my thinking about spectatorship and how much it ties my tongue has made me consider friendship and community, at their strongest, to be a kind of stepping on and being stepped on and snapping right back up. Of lying in the same bed and rolling closer to each other, instead of staying militantly to your side because you don't want the other person to think you're taking up too much room. If you are, they'll just push back.<br />
<br />
And maybe this fearless give-and-take, more than secrets, is the currency of intimacy.</div>
Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14587538.post-651002856440143832016-08-01T13:03:00.003-07:002016-08-01T13:03:40.579-07:00I'm With Her<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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When I watched Hillary Clinton's speech at the DNC, I teared up. I'll admit, not as much as I did for Michelle Obama. But when Clinton said, "Tonight, we've reached a milestone in our nation's march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for President," I found myself remembering 2008. </div>
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In 2008, I was a ten-year-old girl who desperately wanted Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee. My family was neatly split down the middle: my mom and I backed Hillary Clinton, while my sister Adrianna and my dad backed Barack Obama, who I derided as "too young and inexperienced" (the irony of this opinion, in contrast to the sentiments of my 2010 TED talk, does not escape me). My dad would listen to Obama and Clinton soundbites on NPR while driving the family van. I asked him on one of those drives why he was supporting Obama. He said with a thoughtful frown that Clinton's seeming hawkishness--her vote for Iraq especially--gave him pause.</div>
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Buried under the weight of stereotypes that expect them to be soft, overly emotional, or even "hysterical," women in politics frequently struggle to claw their way out of this trash heap of biases and be seen as Commander-in-Chief material. It's a fine line to walk, though, as evidenced by my dad's hesitations about her in 2008. Back then Clinton also attracted derision when the president of the Sheet Metal Workers' Union <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-boss-says-clinton-has-testicular-fortitude/" target="_blank">introduced her</a> during an Indiana campaign stop as "an individual that has testicular fortitude." Clinton's "testicular fortitude" may lend itself to accolades like Michelle Obama's praise of her toughness and persistence, but this election cycle it has also led many of my friends to criticize her. <i>How could we vote for Hillary? </i>they've said, in Facebook posts and Twitter retweets of thinkpieces on her stances on foreign intervention, failure to support legalizing gay marriage earlier, or support for her husband's welfare reform policies. On <i>Real Time, </i>Bill Maher <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hBnwPycFUQ" target="_blank">joked</a> that Clinton should ditch the mother/grandmother image and instead accept becoming the "wolf that has bits of Grandma in its teeth." Accept the "Crooked Hillary" moniker, he said, just make it clear that you're "Crooked <i>for America </i>Hillary."</div>
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Jokes aside, it's important to recognize that Clinton is not purely the DNC's saintly grandmother wreathed in white--nor is she anything close to the "super-villain" of Republican fantasies. One thinkpiece I read criticized Clinton's status in popular culture as a role model for young women, saying that her nomination only proved that little white girls could grow up to be president, nothing more. I completely get behind the idea that we need to present more diverse role models to our children, especially women of color. I grew up on a pretty embarrassingly steady diet of books about white women. But I also disagree with the idea that we can only draw inspiration from people whose identities or ideals align completely with our own. </div>
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As a kid, reading about people like Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, and Eleanor of Aquitaine inspired me. Sure, their power was derived from deeply unequal societies that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of unelected monarchs. Did that faze me? Ehhh...not really. Consider that I also read ancient myths like <i>The Iliad </i>and <i>The Odyssey. </i>In these myths, you'll encounter gods and goddesses--glorified in statues and temples--who rape and kill innocents with abandon (remember Zeus turning into a bull to kidnap Europa?) And beloved characters in India's <i>Mahabharata </i>practice brutal caste discrimination (consider the treatment of <i>nisadas, </i>like when the guru Drona demands the thumb of the archer Ekalavya). </div>
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If you like art history, you might know that the Impressionist master Paul Gauguin--whose painting of two Tahitian girls recently sold for a record-breaking $300 million--also slept with Tahitian girls as young as 13, infecting them with syphilis. </div>
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The Nobel Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi has come under fire for ignoring the crisis of the Rohingya in Myanmar (a minority ethnic group being mercilessly persecuted) and even muttering "No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim" under her breath during an interview with BBC journalist Mishal Husain. </div>
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Mahatma Gandhi's beatific face appears everywhere from Indian rupees to tote bags in Berkeley, but he used <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882" target="_blank">derogatory terms</a> for black South Africans and complained about blacks and Indians being classed together in jails. His <a href="https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/gandhi-was-a-racist-who-forced-young-girls-to-sleep-in-bed-with-him" target="_blank">misogynistic tendencies</a> included responding to sexual harassment by "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jan/27/mohandas-gandhi-women-india" target="_blank">forcibly cutting girls' hair</a> short to make sure they didn't invite any sexual attention" due to the assumption that women, not men, were responsible for men's impulses. He stigmatized menstruation and contraception, and slept next to women (including underaged girls), using them as "props to coax him into celibacy," Mayukh Sen writes. The article is part of an <a href="https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/topic/you-know-who-sucked">entire series</a> on Vice's Broadly called "You Know Who Sucked," with clickbaity-but-accurately-headlined takedowns of historical icons. "Einstein Was a Genius At Treating His Wives Like Shit." "John Lennon Beat Women and Children." It goes on. There's a Tumblr, "<a href="http://yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr.com/list">Your Fave Is Problematic</a>," that takes on pop culture celebrities--all their racist theme parties, sexist comments, anachronistic views. </div>
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<i>Everyone we love has done some fucked up shit</i>. Or, as the BBC article about Gandhi stated in a more genteel way: "But even the greatest men are flawed." </div>
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Is Hillary Clinton not allowed to be?</div>
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Many of my friends who backed Bernie in the primary are claiming they won't vote for Clinton this election because of all the flaws that make her too unpalatable for them. Look: I can appreciate a criticism of neoliberalism, the Clinton Foundation, mass incarceration, American intervention in other countries, and whatever else as much as the next Berkeley student, but <i>there is a time and a place for sticking to your guns</i>. The national electoral battlefield does not exist to be a soapbox for spewing ideological purity. It's our stab at trying to make a better future. If you find it difficult to imagine supporting Hillary Clinton, then choosing not to vote or voting for a third party candidate (t<a href="http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/07/19/24362128/dan-savage-on-jill-stein-just-no">his article</a> is one response to that) might soothe your individual conscience. But it does nothing to help our nation. </div>
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Once upon a time, I was a ten-year-old who cheered at her rally, peering at the stage from behind burly guys in their union jackets. All I wanted was to get a sight of the woman whose face I'd cut out from a TIME Magazine to tape haphazardly on my pink bedroom wall--and there she was, a fuzzy black-pantsuited dot to my nearsighted eyes. </div>
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Eight years later, my appreciation of Hillary Clinton is a little less hero-worship and a little more tempered by reality. I saw a picture one time from her Wellesley days, her long hair and big glasses, and I felt a twinge of recognition. Her campaign slogan, "Stronger Together," is reflective of the humility that we all need to embrace. Eight years ago, I saw Clinton in the same way I saw Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great and Eleanor of Aquitaine, my lineup of powerful women who I looked up to without caveats. Now, I see her the same way I would want someone to see me if I were in her shoes: someone who's profoundly human and trying her best. Someone who's imperfect, too--but then, so is America.</div>
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Adora Svitakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06516038528516495495noreply@blogger.com1