Non-Fiction

There’s nothing better, in your eyes, nothing better in the world than an hour of twirling to music in your room. Alone, nothing to worry about, no motives or pressures—you dance for the sake of dancing and nothing else matters. You deep-cleaned your room a year or two ago, so you have enough space and a visible dance floor. And you’re happy in that hour, voices and beats washing over you like waves over sand. But you have to be quiet about it, because your parents might find you kicking in a circle like a plucked chicken in your room.

You’re not sure what to make of your parents. Sometimes they love you, and sometimes they hate you, and you don’t do drugs or drink alcohol or shoplift so you assume that they’re at least marginally proud of you. But you can never be sure. Maybe they think you’re crazy. You definitely know that they still think of you as a kid—but they like to ask you whether you’ll major in biomedical engineering, and no one asks a kid those kind of questions.

When you were small, your mother fed you almanacs and math books like tax returns into a paper shredder. She told you it’ll make you smarter, but you struggle to earn A-minuses at each semester’s end. She said, you’re a prodigy, honey, but a prodigy has to live up to her parents’ standards, and parents want more than a daughter who receives A-minuses. They want a one-hundred-pound model with Einstein’s brains, and you are only a pig with fecal matter for a mind. The state of your room back then proved your state of being. You lived in a pigsty, your dad told you, so you gritted your teeth and pulled some heavy-duty garbage bags from the kitchen cabinet. But you still felt like a pig afterwards, fat and lumbering, slobbery and idiotic.

Your mother would be angry at you if you threw away the family scale, because she says it reminds you that you need to lose weight. Your thighs are gargantuan and your arms rival those of an alpha gorilla’s. She tells you to play a sport, so you sign up for track and field in the spring. But who told you to weight-lift? Pick a more feminine sport.

Why are your friends so stupid? Pick better ones. It is not enough, now, that your friends don’t smoke marijuana. She jokingly asks for their transcripts and you laugh, empty.

In eighth grade, you had a boyfriend for three months. It was puppy love, nothing serious; you tell yourself that it wouldn’t have lasted much longer, anyway. You told him that he was too good for you. But your mother thought you were too good for him. She drove him home once, and when you got home she turned and told you that she’d already figured out his character. You dumped him the day after Valentine’s Day; you avoid him in the halls and he doesn’t talk to you anymore. But your mother is happy, and that is what matters. You aren’t good enough for her, but you’re too good for him.

Your parents’ expectations are taller than the stratosphere. And yet you can’t fail your kin, no matter how inadequate you are. You’re just going to have to shed more pounds, read more books, study with more fervor. You love your parents, and you’ll fulfill their wishes if it kills you.

Classical music makes you smarter, said a health expert in a video your mother forwarded to you. Her second text read so do it! You listen to Mozart and Dvorak until your brain bleeds key changes. Classical music will get you to an Ivy League, she says, so you replace your Fall Out Boy playlist with Beethoven. The best way to lose weight is dancing in your room, your mother said. You’ll be having fun and shedding pounds. So now you twirl to a playlist to shed pounds. And you twirl to classical music.

B. Jang is a high school junior with a passion for literature, particularly poetry and ​historical fiction. A member of her high school debate team and a political intern, she is deeply interested in helping to bring the flaws of society to light. Jang enjoys reading, playing the violin, and weightlifting. She really likes penguins.

Grandfather tells me about how he lost a ring finger in the jungles of Fujian where you could hear the bullets sailing through the tops of trees like firecrackers on New Year’s.

When it happened he’d been holding a Type Zhongzheng rifle, Chinese make, a copy of a German Mauser down to the bolt action and before the jungle he had fired it twice. Once in a Kuomintang firing range surrounded by rice farmers whose ears pricked up at the sudden noise. Once by accident while filling his canteen in a nearby river when he heard the rustling of grass and thought Mao’s guerrillas had made it past the NRA lines.

They called it Chiang Kai Shek’s rifle after the general himself had gotten the exports from Germany and provided the guns to his best troops. But the first shipment of rifles hadn’t been enough, so the troops also bought the rejects which the Wehrmacht refused to use. In camp, whenever an NRA man got a Type Zhongzheng, he was told to pray for luck every time he pulled the trigger. But in the deltas and rivers with the bullets sailing by no one had much time for prayer.

In the Fujian jungle, Grandfather loaded his Zhongzheng with copper jacket rounds and propped the gun on a rocky outcrop. He waited for the glint of sunlight that would give away the brim of a soldier’s helmet. After fifteen minutes of waiting, Grandfather wiped off the sweat that had gathered on his brow, letting it drip onto the grass. Then Grandfather caught a glint of steel in the light and pressed his finger on the trigger to fire.

That was the third and last time Grandfather fired a rifle in his life. The Zhongzheng he’d received was of brittle make and collapsed with the combustion of the gunpowder in the barrel. Bits of the metal chassis cut into the bark of nearby banyan trees and one shard pierced Grandfather’s ring finger and cut it at the bone, leaving it splayed on the jungle floor as if pointing its way to sanctuary. Grandfather swore in Fookien, cursing himself for forgetting to pray.

At this point in his story Grandfather stops to roll up the sleeve of his loose button-down polo and points out two red marks on the skin of his left arm. Two smaller shards of the rifle lodged themselves into the flesh there. The welts are like small valleys among the ridges of his wrinkles. Grandfather gestures at them as if to say that to this day he still remembers the heat of the jungle, still remembers the digging of metal shards against his skin.

After the medics sewed up his wounds and discharged him, Grandfather went home to Gulangyu Island and burned his poster of Chiang Kai Shek. He told me the name reminded him too much of the rifle that severed his finger and left it in the soil. While letting the ash coat the bottom of an iron barrel grandfather realized that it was no longer safe for him to stay, so he boarded a boat bound for the Philippines.

In previous stories Grandfather said he went to the Philippines because his uncle had set up a small business there shipping rattan to Indonesia. But today Grandfather says something different and tells me he was drawn somehow to the fractured archipelago. On humid monsoon days, he would unfurl maps of the world within the spare ship cabin and circle out the country in red marker. In his dreams instead of counting sheep he would count the bulbous and broken landmasses, trying to divine how many islands there were based on his recollections of the map. Sometimes his counts reached two hundred, though he could never get past that number before drifting off, leaving the bottom regions of Mindanao uncharted.

On the rattan ships of his uncle, Grandfather developed callouses on his remaining fingers. He drew rope to anchor and dragged coils of it across the steel flooring of the craft. Sometimes when the ship was ready to unmoor he would untie rattan cords from the harbor’s posts, leaving rough patches on the undersides of his thumbs. Grandfather tells me that though his uncle was frugal and paid him little, he was able to see much of the world. The busy Jakarta ports with stone lions and many-armed goddesses on the prows of skiffs; coral scraping onto the hull in the shallow regions of Scarborough Shoal; the rough typhoon winds of Basilan, which almost grounded his craft. In each of these places Grandfather coiled and uncoiled lengths of rattan rope for trade, leaving small scratches on his fingertips and shedding flakes of his skin.

Once again Grandfather stops his story to unfurl his hands and asks me to run my small smooth fingers across his wrinkled ones. I avoid the stump of his ring finger on the right hand, then feel the callouses on his thumbs, like jutting promontories or islands so small they sink underneath the high tide. There are so many bumps and crags that each mark seems to carry the weight of its own unrecorded history. For some reason I imagine Grandfather again in the cabin of the Philippine-bound ship, this time tracing out the lines of his palm with red ink before sleeping.

Grandfather then gestures to his right calf, discolored with a large bruise. And his story continues forty years past the rattan ship to the suburbs of San Francisco where he stayed for a few months in a home for the aged. He kept busy there, acting as a bookkeeper and typing out the purchases of the directress.

Grandfather tells me that one humid afternoon he was walking to the local convenience store for groceries when he heard the loud horn of an approaching Cadillac. At the sound, he turned around with his walker in front of him as if to shield himself from the blow. It wasn’t enough; the metal twisted with the impact of the car and the front bumper of the Cadillac bruised his right leg. The last things grandfather heard before passing out from the pain were the screeching of brakes and the crunch of metal.

In the hospital he fielded nightmares. All of them were punctuated by the sound of twisting metal and bone, though the landscape was always shifting – first Jakarta, then Fujian, and afterwards San Francisco. Always grandfather felt as if a part of him was being rent away by something beyond his control. Always the parts of him that were pulled away from his body still retained sensation. In his nightmares grandfather cried out as a steel-toed military boot crushed his ring finger in a Fujian jungle, as dry flakes of his skin sunk onto the spines of sea urchins clutching to Scarborough rocks. Grandfather tells me his dreams were what an archipelago must feel like when it is being born, torn by currents and tides into constituent islands.

For the last time Grandfather stops his story, mid-nightmare, leaving out the part where he wakes up. Perhaps it is because he is inviting me to fill in the rest of the tale with my own recollection – a rushed Delta airlines flight from Metro Manila to San Francisco; a child holding the hand of his father while staring at the IV drips injected into his grandfather’s withered frame. I cannot be sure; instead I let my fingers feel, again, the ridges and contours of this discolored bruise, this landmass of dried blood, Grandfather’s geographies spelled out for me in silent ritual.

—

Grandfather died five years ago on this day, and these words are the last things of him I remember. He did not say whether he wanted to be buried or cremated though I knew he would have loved neither. My father cremated him and placed his ashes in an urn; he placed the urn within a two cubic meter marble tomb; he embossed grandfather’s name on the marble in golden lettering. Like any child I did not want my grandfather to die. And when I saw him cancerous on the hospital bed breathing the last ragged breaths of his life, I wanted in vain to freeze his flesh into sculpture somehow, so as to never lose the features of his skin.

Though I know Grandfather’s ashes lie contained within the Sanctuarium urn, I do not imagine that to be his resting place. Instead I tell myself this: it takes roughly one month for new skin cells to reach the top layer of one’s body, meaning that the skin I will wear one month from today will be completely new. But that does not mean the old skin is gone – it is gathered as dust on picture frames, television sets, library books, and typewriters, trillions of discarded geographies and islands lost to the high tide.

Grandfather’s bones now make up the roots of banyan trees in Fujian which are only today beginning to sprout. His dust is spread across the Pacific Ocean leaving trails of trade routes from metro Manila to Jakarta where skiffs vending rattan cords once ran yearly expeditions. On a San Francisco freeway the front bumper of a Cadillac still holds a small part of Grandfather’s salt lake bruises, smudged ever slightly by red paint.

Long ago grandfather dreamed of being born like seven thousand islands proceeding from the body of one. That is the image of him I carry now, five years down the line, as I press my palm against the gold-embossed letters of his tomb.

Ethan Chua is a Chinese-Filipino spoken word poet from the Philippines and a freshman studying at Stanford University, where he is part of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective. He has written poems about stars, short fiction involving bisexual vampires, and essays where his grandparents escape Communist soldiers in Fujian again and again. He’s also the cofounder of Ampersand, an organization dedicated to giving the youth avenues to express themselves through art. Read his work at medium.com/@ezlc327.

In short, high school has ruined me. After middle school I felt as if the world and all its possibilities were at my fingertips. Ninth grade created a crack in my bubble of childlike wonder. The kind you see in cartoons. Small at first, advancing towards the feet of the main character who then falls off a cliff or in a hole. By tenth grade however, this bubble had shattered. It’s hard to know whether or not the world had always been cruel, if people were dying while I was swaddled against my mother’s chest, while the ribbons in my hair came undone, while I learned how to ride a bike. I’d like to think not. I’d like to think that before I turned fourteen life was as beautiful for everyone as it was for me.

Of course tenth grade mathematics annihilated me but most of my cynicism arises from the world around me, rather than my academics. Though I did learn that no matter how hard I want to pass math, no matter how hard we all studied the most efficient way to succeed was through a whisper and pleading eyes on the day of a test. When I go home I’m meant to have a reprieve from my high school woes. No, instead it seems like every day a new video of an innocent person being murdered in public. People who are five years older than me being shot on what was supposed to be a night out. Things are meant to be easier when you go off to college. But how can I ever go to a club or the movies when even now my chest get tight when a man in a hoodie walk inside of a dark theater?

Trayvon Martin died when I was twelve years old. Of course my family was furious, as was I. Because I knew what it meant to be innocent and black. But I did not yet know what it meant to be sixteen years old, as I am now. From my newly gained experience I can say that I still feel like a kid. And my mom still calls me her baby. Furthermore, I can say that one of my worst fears is that one day my mother will feel the way that Trayvon Martin’s mother felt. Second only to death. I found out the verdict of the Trayvon Martin case in a diner. My greasy fingers were wrapped around a glass of Coke but my eyes were turned toward the TV in the corner of the corner of the room. How could he be innocent after he murdered a little boy? How could the murderers of kids like me, men like my brother, women like mom be…heroes?

The truth is, I’ll never know what it feels like to not go to school because I’m a girl. As a matter of fact I was raised with the moral that a child’s only job is to excel in school and respect their elders. Recently, I’ve watched a documentary called Girl Rising and I’m melodramatic enough to say that it changed my life. It made me ashamed to complain about math when in Nepal, little girls who were younger than me were being sold off as Kamlari slaves. But in all honesty I will continue to complain. I will complain because I don’t think that anyone who has power truly cares about my education. I will complain because whenever we, the students try to fight back everyone who has a nice office goes silent because their hands are tied. I will complain because everyone gets to vote for my future instead of me…and they always pick wrong.

If I am ever to have children I have to make things better for them. And for myself too. It’s so important for me to change something. Right now in Shakespeare class we are reading Macbeth. In it Shakespeare says, “All our pasts have lighted fools The way to dusty death”. Which means that the hate and absurdity that was regurgitated to as by our parents, grandparents and so on is just what I called it…absurd. When we die we return to dust anyway. In my opinion, it is the responsibility of all of us to leave the world better than we found it. This is exactly what I plan to do. One way or another. I think I would like to be a humanitarian. Usually I change my career goal every month. I think this one will stick.

Jordette Cummings is a Jamaican born junior at Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York. As much as she loves writing, she much prefers to immerse herself in stories that are not her own—as they contain dialogue, which she has yet to master. Her three true loves are fiction (film and television included), memes, and debating. She prides herself on having strong opinions and loves defending them. She tries her best to inspire political action amongst her peers without coming off as the pretentious know-it-all that she is.

The chilly, mist-filled, early morning breeze swept past my open window as the car slinked along the curved road. The grinding sound of gravel against the tires and the faint hum of the engine echoed in the silent countryside. Over the horizon, a faint light shone atop a distant mountain, beginning to bleach the edges of the dark night. Small houses made out of clay bricks and tiles clustered around the edge of a river; smoke lazily drifting out of their chimneys before dissipating into the sky. I lay sprawled in the backseat, tugging at the platinum blond hair of my favorite Barbie doll. I puffed up my cheeks and leaned forward, tapping my father’s shoulder. “How much longer until we reach the docks, Dad?”

“We’re almost there,” answered the authoritative voice behind the steering wheel. “It should come up three minutes after we pass the lepers’ compound.”

I peered out the window towards the side of the road. There, partially hidden by a jagged rock ledge, stood a solitary building. In the nineteenth century, when leprosy was fairly common in Korea, people separated those with the disease into compounds out of fear of contamination and out of disgust at the sight of their disfigured bodies. The compound seemed to loom over the village, the pale blue morning light glimmering off the stark aluminum walls. A thin line of smoke wafted out from a crude chimney slapped onto the roof.

“Do people still live there? I asked. My father nodded. “Why wouldn’t they want to come out after all these years?”

My father stared at the road ahead, twiddling his thumbs around the steering wheel. “Some people would rather live in isolation than integrate back into the same society that rejected them.”

The road rolled past the compound and merged into a four-lane highway. I shifted around in my seat hoping to catch another glimpse of the building, but it had become obscured by the rock ledge as the village shrunk into the distance.

“Don’t be too upset about them,” my father added.

**********

A slender hand hung over the side of the operating table, an IV stuck into its wrist. Suddenly the hand clenched, veins straining against the pale white skin. I craned my neck and stood on my tiptoes to try to get a better view, but the row of nurses standing beside the table towered blocked my view.

“15cc more,” my father commanded, and clear liquid trickled down the tube into the patient’s arm. The hand relaxed, falling back onto the table.

My father, clothed in mint-green scrubs and black tennis shoes, hunched over his patient. With a clean “snip,” he sighed and flexed his back. He gestured towards the attending nurse, and triumphantly set down a bloody surgical scissor on the metal plate. Plucking a towel from the side cart, he wiped down the patient and observed his handiwork.

“Come,” he gestured towards me.

The patient’s bloated face stuck out from a green surgical sheet, stitch marks running along the eyelids and on the side of the nose.

“She got a blepharoplasty and a rhinoplasty. I made incisions on the corners of her eyes to make them open wider.”

I nodded silently, carefully examining the changes to the patient’s face. The stitching across her skin seemed as intricate as the embroidery on my grandmother’s blankets, the evenly spaced thread contributing to some grand design.

**********

“Ms. Cho,” My father smiled exasperatedly, “you mean to say you want a second rhinoplasty?”

The middle-aged woman sat across from my dad in the consulting room, hands firmly pressed against the table. I sat next to my father with my hands respectfully folded across my lap. She inspected her stitches in the mirror before pulling a crumpled sheet from a magazine and smoothing it down across the table. She directed my father’s eyes to the airbrushed model smiling up from the cover. “I want a pointier chin and wider-set eyes. And-” she took out another magazine clipping, “I want my nose bridge modeled after hers.”

I stifled a snort and quickly glanced up at the woman. She had clearly struggled to yank up what gravity had weighed down, resulting in a permanent maniacal, almost fiend-like expression on her face.

“We’ve already put in a silicone insert-,” my father pleaded.

She impatiently tapped the picture. “I want my nose to be exactly the same as hers.”

My father opened his mouth, then closed it. “Very well, Ms. Cho.” Without a second thought, he took a notepad from his side drawer, scribbling down the details of her request and attaching the worn magazine image. My eyes widened and my foot instinctively nudged my father under the table. His eyes flicked to the side, instantly silencing me. I lowered my gaze and he continued scribbling.

**********

I sat on the edge of the subway bench, absentmindedly picking at the frayed ends of my jumper as the subway car came to a jolting halt and announced Seo-dong station. Only two stops till my grandmother’s house. My casual beach ensemble stood out amongst the businessmen and Korean students entering and exiting the train. Unlike me and my classmates back in New Jersey, they still had a month before summer vacation started. I looked up at the young woman across from me as she scrolled through her phone. Rhinoplasty, double eyelid procedure, I assessed. Further down the row, a woman flipped her hair to the side. Rhinoplasty, jaw reduction, and columella augmentation. Another dabbed on powder from a small compact. Double eyelid surgery and an epicanthoplasty. They were everywhere: a dozen double-eyelid surgeries, ten rhinoplasties, three brow bone reductions, three jaw reductions, and a cheekbone augmentation.

My eyes fell on a girl wearing a pleated skirt and a collared shirt quietly seated next to a heavily made-up woman in stilettos. I recognized her uniform from a high school near my hometown. She sat with her hands folded in her lap. Once in awhile she’d nervously lick her lips, exposing a row of wire-framed teeth. The student turned her head and timidly peered up at the woman beside her: a woman with long, silky black hair, a chin augmentation, and bright red lips set in a haughty pout.

One woman flicked her gaze toward the student, then did a double take. Her brows crumpled with annoyance, and her lips curled into a sneer. The student quickly lowered her eyes, slumping down in her seat as an embarrassed blush bloomed across her chubby cheeks. I looked down at my stubby toes that peered out from my cheap flip flops; they were baked to an earthy brown by the sun and sand from Hae-Un-Dae’s beach was still caked under my nails. I adjusted the spandex band of my training bra, still unaccustomed to its sweaty constriction, and diverted my gaze to the student as she sat with both feet planted while mine still dangled in the air.

When will she first go under the knife? Will she become that woman that so easily dismissed her?

Will I become that woman?

Sensing my stare, the student looked up. My mouth curled upwards, attempting a grin. My gesture was not reciprocated. Her gaze flickered down to my shoes, then up to my tangled, still-damp hair. She quickly turned her head away from me. The train plunged into a tunnel and the harsh fluorescent lights drew sharp shadows across my features. In the window, I could not recognize the foreign girl who stared back at me. I frantically searched my face looking for some similarity to the other subway passengers, but there were none. Tanned, unkept, different, alien.

The subway came to a rumbling halt. The student quickly stood up, glanced at me once more and shuffled out. The doors hissed closed, and I sat in the almost-empty car, my feet still dangling.

**********

I pushed up the plastic window shade as the double-decker plane leapt into the sky and peered down at Seoul’s buildings becoming specks. In thirteen hours I would be home. Soon, all I could see below me was white. Wispy clouds streaked past the window and soon my childhood home disappeared from view. My younger brother squirmed in the seat next to me. “How much longer?” he whined, pushing his coloring book to the side. I had asked the same question at his age. I thought of the lonely leper compound looming underneath the mist; smoke curling out of its jagged chimney. The smoke dissipated into the sky, and became one with the clouds. Had I isolated myself from my society or had my society isolated me? I looked out at the blanket of clouds, the orange yolk of the sun beginning to settle into its pillowy folds. Or was just I headed for a new horizon? Soon, from the ground in Korea, the plane had become a solitary dot floating in the sky as I steadily drifted back home.

Chaeyeon (Annika) Kim is a high school junior from New Jersey. Originally from South Korea, Chaeyeon explores the concept of identity in her writing. She also enjoys binge-watching Orange Is the New Black, eating breakfast for dinner and playing with her cat, Butterfly.