Issue 33

Talking about the Kerala chai requires a geographical explanation of the land that is even titled as God’s own country, where the emerald green landscapes meet the bright blue embrace of the Arabian sea. But amongst all this charm, it’s the evenings at home that truly transport you to a dimension of artistry, emotions, and sweetness beyond compare.

The evenings are always different. It can be a warm, golden embrace that caresses the lush green landscape, or sometimes after the morning rains that quenched the thirst of the earth, the evenings bring a refreshing change to the sky once heavy with clouds, now wearing a duet between the royal purples and the most ethereal blues.

Our home is nestled amidst a lush sanctuary of trees, both big and small. The big trees with their sprawling canopy and the delicate flowering plants that hug the fence co-exist in the harmonious surrender to nature’s rhythm. The mango trees in our front yard are in full bloom, their branches heavy with fragrant blossoms, a perfume that lingers on the senses. It is as if the very essence of Kerala’s summer has been captured in those blossoms.

Snacks play an important role in the illustrations of evenings in Kerala. They are not just culinary creations; they are incorporations of generations of culinary understandings, wisdom, love and tradition.

Imagine biting into a crispy golden brown yet yellow sphere that crackles like autumn leaves underfoot. This is the magic of the lentil-stuffed sukhiyan. As you take the first indulgent bite, your taste buds are met with a sweet surprise – a luscious, fragrant filling of cooked green-gram in jaggery and grated coconut, infused with love and the flavors of cardamom. As the effort I put into explaining sukhiyan would explain my love for them, there are also other snacks like neyyappam, and vattayappam. And how not to mention wonders created with plantains,— and impossible not to mention a malayali’s relationship with tapioca, with love – kappa. The creativity and ability of Kerala home cooks to turn a humble root into boiled or crispy , savory chips and much more.

Sitting on the porch, as we sip our chai with some homemade snacks, the warmth of the cup in my hands mirrors the warmth in my heart.

Neighbors pass by with their cows, heading back home after a day of grazing. An everyday sight that adds rustic charm to our village, we exchange pleasantries, wits and stories, connecting in a way that only happens in tight-knit communities. The rhythmic clinking of cowbells accompanies our conversations, blending seamlessly with the philharmonic evenings.

My grandmother, a living storehouse of wisdom and love, joins me. Watching the world go by, her wrinkled hands, adorned with simple undecorated gold bangles that chime like music effortlessly find their way through my hair, massaging my scalp with a fondness that words cannot express. Her touch is a balm to my soul, an unspoken reassurance that I hold dear. A very simple gesture that spoke of a lifetime of care and affection. Our conversations about life, her advice, stories, her patiently listening to me, her beautiful smile filled with innocence and all that love, together makes all those moments very special.

As the stars begin to twinkle in the velvet sky, nature quiets down, the only sounds are the crickets. It’s a moment of serenity, a reminder of the beauty of simplicity. Whispering “good night” to the rustling leaves, I carry the evening’s magic with me to my dreams.

An aspiring healer with a passion for words and a stethoscope around her neck., Diya Maria is a Tennessee- based nursing student. A devoted reader and an art enthusiast, she tries to bring unique perspectives to the pages that resonate with the heartbeat of readers everywhere.

Dear Nani,

I’m writing to you from the mountain top in Sewanee. I’m participating in a creative writing conference here. I think I told you this, but you probably forgot. You always love reading my pieces, so I’m sending you a few stories with this letter. I’ve enlarged the font, so you can read them. I know you’re forgetting so much, so let me tell you what I remember.

I remember bowls of Annie’s mac-and-cheese with peas and purified water from a pitcher. I loved that mac-and-cheese, and I also loved the bowls. You always used the same one, ceramic white and laced with green tulips on the lip. One time, I asked my mom to make the mac-and-cheese, just the way you did, but it didn’t taste quite the same. When I asked why the water was purified, not the normal water I had at home, you said “Only the best for my favorite granddaughter!” I remember smiling.

Even when Nana spent hours in his room, lying on the gray comforter and staring at the chipped ceiling with glazed eyes, you were moving around, grabbing balled up socks and playing cards trapped under the legs of kitchen chairs, bony fingers hammering nails into the wall to hang up my school pictures and family photos, light bouncing off smiling faces.

I remember watching Young Sheldon in your living room in the evenings. Usually for the first twenty minutes of each episode, you would be bustling around in the small kitchen, pulling out chocolate-almond Dove bars and pouring us glasses of fizzing Coke, but I loved when you would join Rahul and me on the couch, the embroidered burgundy blanket draped across our laps. I’m pretty sure I looked at you more than the television screen, how a smile broke across your face whenever Missy and Sheldon teased each other, reminded you of me and Rahul, I think. You were so pretty when you laughed, your head thrown back, slightly crooked smile and dimpled cheeks, dark eyes creased. I don’t remember you ever scolding us, even when bits of chocolate broke off the bar and fell onto the carpet, lost in the plush crimson. I always fell asleep before the episode ended, my soft snore pushing into the quiet room.

This piece that I’m writing now came from an “I remember” prompt. When our teacher assigned it to us a few days ago, the other kids in my class rolled their eyes. It’s a generic prompt, an easy one. But I couldn’t wait to jump in, to close my eyes and picture your egg-shell white plaster walls, your large fluorescent light bulbs, the small manicured lawn out front. I do a lot with memory in my writing. It’s funny how memory works, how I can remember which photos are taped on your fridge but lying in bed some nights, staring up at the glowing stars taped on my ceiling, I forget the sound of your laugh. I have a bit of an obsession with memory in my writing, maybe because there’s so much of it. There’s always more to remember. And I’m watching you and learning how easy it is to forget.

I remember you would carry me to the bed, your fingers pressing gently into my ribs, until you no longer picked me up. I learned this one evening as I lay sprawled on the couch, my brother’s voice muted. I waited for you to scoop me up, for your cool hands on my waist, but instead you gently shook my leg and told me I was too heavy for you to lift. When I looked up at you, lines creased your cheeks, your dimples. I went to my red-and-white trundle bed that night with a lump in my throat and fell asleep to Rahul’s voice talking on the phone in the room next to mine, where he slept. I woke up in the morning to find clumps of dark brown hair in the bathroom trash can, thick locks among cherry Dum-Dum wrappers and Old Navy t-shirt receipts. That was how I found out. I ran, crying, to the kitchen, where I found you. You set down your whisk and pushed the bowl of egg yolks to the side to sit down with me, groaning as you lowered yourself onto the cool linoleum tiles. Our backs against the refrigerator, you pressed your hand firmly onto mine. Later that afternoon, I curled up in the sagging bean bag in the corner of the room, my face in the fuzz. When you survived the chemotherapy, and the doctors removed the lump in your breast, I thought you were immortal. Then aging kicked in, and I could see every day that you weren’t.

I remember Wii tennis, standing on the crimson carpet, flinging the remote around to hit the ball flying toward us on the screen. We almost hit each other so many times, a light breeze from a remote whizzing too close to skin. I got a bruise from when I slammed my arm mid-swing into the side of the brown sectional couch. You were never too good at playing. You’d have to sit down on the couch a few points into the game, out of breath, your shoulders pressed against the fabric back of the couch, and you’d lose some leverage on your swing. So, I played easy on you. Some points, I even pretended to not see the ball and swung a few seconds too late. You would always grin when you won, spinning around on the carpet, your arms flying around your waist in celebration.

At our meeting yesterday, my teacher told me to remove some of the details. They’re unnecessary, she said. I nodded, smiled politely. I didn’t know how to tell her that the kitchen isn’t just bright, but sunlight falls through the window in showers. The carpet isn’t red; it is maroon with flecks of gold and auburn if you kneel down and stare at it long enough. The speakers aren’t low quality; the voices crackle like static into the family room. I understand what my teacher is saying, but I am attached to these details I’ve grown up with. The carpet is not red.

Whenever I walked to the bathroom, I would stop at the portrait of your brother, clean-shaven face, dimpled cheeks, military uniform ironed and smooth. He died in a plane, you had told me once, after I’d asked a few times. When I probed further, you suggested a game of carrom and walked out of the room before I could respond. I have a lot of questions. What did you want to be or do in your life? Did you get it? Were you loved in the way you wanted to be?

Tara Prakash is an eleventh grader at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. Her work has been recognized in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards (where she won a National Gold Medal and a National Silver Medal), YoungArts, the New York Times, Blue Marble Review, Bow Seat’s Ocean Awareness Contest, The Daphne Review, and other literary journals and platforms. As a 2023 mentee in the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program, a participant in the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and the founder of a nonprofit, Write to Right, which teaches writing to underserved communities, Tara loves writing poetry, flash fiction pieces, and creative nonfiction essays.

Dear R. F. Kuang,

I didn’t know who you were when I was in middle school. If I did, you would have been the person seventh grade me wanted to be when she grew up.

I had less access to iPhones and computers than my peers growing up, a decision by my parents that I credit with creating a love for reading and writing in the absence of the constant distraction that is social media. I entertained myself using the pages of books, both those authored by adults (J.K. Rowling and Rick Riordan, but also older, more arcane authors that made seventh grade me really think she was something of an intellectual) and by myself (I wrote constantly, in spiral notebooks and cloth-bound ones, carried them everywhere because a handful of graphite-smeared pages really did contain the boundaries of my world). My stories were long and winding, their plots propelled by contrived coincidences more than cohesive conflicts, their characters so blatantly derived from my favorite fictional protagonists it was as if I’d pulled them from the published page.

I wrote about Adventure and Magic and War and Love (as much as any twelve-year-old raised in a privileged suburban bubble can write about Adventure or Magic or War or Love), and I think if I knew what your books were about–which is to say, Adventure and Magic and War and Love (and also lessons on colonialism and imperialism and real life war crimes communicated through the lens of historical fantasy, except seventh grade me didn’t really know what any of those words mean and would have been distracted by the rawness of your characters and the shininess of your fantastical world over your stories’ real life implications, so I will overlook these issues for now)–if I knew what your books were about, I would have loved them, and my stories would have started to emulate them as they did everything I loved. My writing would have taken the shape of yours, my characters morphing their physical appearance and quirks and flaws to resemble your own protagonists, the system of magic I constructed in my fantasy world a mirror image of the type of magic used in your bestselling novels.

You became a published author when you were barely twenty, and in seventh grade, a published author was exactly what I wanted to be. I am certain that if I knew you then, I would have wanted to become you.

The problem is that I haven’t been a seventh grader for nearly half a decade. I’ve outgrown my graphite pencils and college-ruled composition notebooks, exchanged them for a laptop and Google Drive stuffed full of ideas for stories or poems with an eternal audience of one: me. Instead of spending free time writing at a desk, pencil flying to transcribe characters and plots and worlds from mind to finger to page, I take breaks from homework on social media, relying on a kaleidoscopic plethora of Instagram Reels to stimulate my exhausted brain.

I spend so much time on school and sports and extracurriculars I convince myself that I don’t have the capacity to pursue intellectual activities for fun, so my downtime is dedicated to consuming media over producing it. And with the loss of creative pursuits I’ve lost my desire to become an author, because growing up means realizing that if you are someone who doesn’t have the self-discipline to do homework for more than an hour without checking social media, a job with a work schedule that’s entirely self-imposed might not be the job for you.

Besides, no one wants to become an author when Chat GPT will soon be able to write better than a human can. No one wants to pursue an overpriced liberal arts degree in English or Comparative Literature when the job market seems saturated with opportunities only for people who study business or STEM. I once told my aunt, who graduated from Cornell with a master’s in engineering, that I wanted to study anthropology in college because I am interested in the connections between humans and histories and cultures. She laughed and told me to pursue a degree in engineering if I really wanted to be successful.

I think that growing up means learning which things are impossible under the constraints of time and the anxiety of living a real life. It is impossible to be a creative and successful person in a world that squeezes profit only from people who maximize their fields of study, their money, their time in the pursuit of the most obviously practical skills. To be successful in life is to pursue an occupation you might find unfulfilling, one you can only tolerate, something lucrative enough that you live comfortably but so inevitably exhausting that when you get home from work each day you have neither the desire nor the motivation to pursue the production of anything artistic.

To be creative in life is to spend your time writing silly little stories and silly little papers while your friends take college level courses in physics and calculus, is to acquire an overpriced degree from an overpriced institution only to fail to foster a worthwhile career, is to come back home and live in your mother’s basement at the ripe old age of twenty-seven or thirty. You cannot be both.

This is what I might believe, Ms. Kuang, if I did not know about you. How are you only twenty-seven years old and a published author of five New York Times bestselling books, a recipient of multiple degrees in East Asian Studies and Chinese Literature from institutions like Cambridge and Oxford and Yale? You are successful and important and studied something that really mattered to you, and every day you wake up and use your degree to do the things that seem to really matter to you (write about things that are important to Asian Americans and East Asians and simply The World, about British imperialism and the Opium Wars and cultural appropriation in the publishing industry, but write in such a way that you are crafting a beautiful narrative even before you are educating your audience).

I am not naive: I know the shiny, perfect, academic bubble of a life you project on your Instagram account and Squarespace website are as fabricated as anything else on social media in 2024, and for all I know you might hate what you do and wish you were an engineer, an ophthalmologist, a woman in STEM. But I do not think this is the case; I think the facts speak for themselves. Your ability to derive success and profit from a degree with no obviously practical application, your budding literary empire that operates and thrives under the constraints of capitalism, speak for themselves.

I don’t think I necessarily still want to be an author. I do think I want to study anthropology, or history, or philosophy, to pursue education for the purpose of learning something I care about and to believe I can still build success at the end of it all. I think it doesn’t really matter what you pursue but how you take advantage of your opportunities, and studying something that’s not obviously practical doesn’t mean you will be useless for the rest of your life.

Dear R. F. Kuang,

I think you are still who I want to be when I grow up.

Juliet Rotondo is a high school junior from Rye High School in Rye, New York. Her writing is recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and featured in her school’s literary magazine and newspaper; she is on the editorial staff of her school’s literary magazine, newspaper, and Polyphony Lit. She loves using art and writing as creative mediums to connect her lived experiences with universal ones.

Kenkyo, Kenjitsu o Motto ni Ikite Orimasu is a mouthful—and a true masterpiece that transcends time.

When I initially delved into its pages, I expected another run-of-the-mill Japanese reverse harem web novel with a Mary Sue protagonist—an exhausting trope that often gives romance web novels a bad name. However, I Will Live with Humility and Dependability as My Motto (its translated English name), which debuted in 2013, expertly dismantles these stereotypes, one by one, in a way that many authors continue to struggle with even a decade later.

From the age of five, our endearing protagonist, Kisshouin Reika, realizes that she has been reincarnated as the archetypal villainess from a shoujo manga titled You Are My Dolce. With her cool exterior, elegant princess curls, and exorbitant wealth, Reika is destined to become the reigning empress of her posh private school, the very setting in which You Are My Dolce unfolds. As the villainess, her role is to bring about the downfall of the handsome and affluent male lead and his commoner female love interest—a fate she has no desire to fulfill, given her attachment to the golden spoon lifestyle she was born into.

Instead, this web novel is filled with Reika’s hilarious antics of saving up money, reminding her wealthy yet tanuki-like father to clean up his act, and trying to prevent her supposed fate. Even more so, Reika is far from being a Mary Sue character; for one, she isn’t an academic weapon. Instead, she struggles to recall the knowledge she acquired in her past life, resulting in a refreshing portrayal of a character who must work diligently to excel academically. Kenkyo beautifully captures her endearing angst as she fluctuates between ranking in the top 20 to the top 50 of her Japanese school’s test results.

One of Kenkyo’s greatest strengths lies in its ability to create rich and multi-dimensional characters. Each character we encounter harbors hidden facets, and Reika herself proves to be an unreliable narrator. While we are primarily privy to Reika’s thoughts, where she portrays herself as a soft-hearted drama queen, it becomes clear through intermittent glimpses into other characters’ perspectives that her outward appearance exudes a domineering demeanor, making it challenging for others to get close to her. These occasional perspectives from other characters are like savoring a scoop of ice cream on a scorching hot day—refreshing and leaving you yearning for more.

And what about the “emperor” of the school—the cool, dignified male lead from You Are My Dolce whom everyone admires? The heir to a vast business empire? Well, in reality, Kaburagi Masaya is a lovesick “stalking horse,” as Reika playfully labels him, constantly seeking her assistance in resolving his love troubles and winning over the original female lead—the plain commoner girl. And let’s not forget the angelic figure adored by all—the friendly “prince” everyone longs to engage with. Surprise! Enjou Shuusuke is, in fact, a mischievous devil with a dual nature, playfully tormenting Reika. He’s someone you’d never want to owe a favor to.

But, what truly sets this web novel apart is its lack of completion.

Even today, Kenkyo remains immensely popular in Japan, consistently topping the web novel charts. Regrettably, its anonymous author stopped writing the web novel mysteriously at the 299th chapter over six years ago, on October 20th, 2017. International readers, like myself, have since speculated about the author’s fate—was she akin to Reika, a young wealthy girl, who was silenced by her parents? Did she meet an unfortunate accident? Or did she simply grow weary and decide to cease writing?

Perhaps my affection for this novel stems from rose-tinted nostalgia, idealizing it more than it deserves. And maybe, just maybe, it’s my love for Kenkyo that intensifies precisely because I yearn for something that I can never have: a happy ending for Reika.

Kathryne Hong is a junior at a high school in North Carolina. She adores reading multicultural literature, playing tennis, and exploring stationery shops in her free time.