• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

  • Home
  • About
    • Masthead
    • Contact
    • Donate
  • Issues
    • Covid Stories
  • FAQs
  • Submit

Issue Eleven

For an Asian

By Manya Zhao

I am five years old the first time I can recall feeling ashamed about my heritage.

The lunchtime bell had hardly finished ringing when I, along with my twenty brand new kindergarten friends, come pouring out of the room like jelly beans spilling from a jar — bouncing, clashing, full of sugar.

My stomach rumbles eagerly as I take out my two thermoses.

“Two,” my mother always said, “One for the rice, and one for the entrée. You don’t ever mix the two beforehand. The rice will absorb any extra moisture there is.” This wasn’t orange chicken, or broccoli and beef, or anything close to the disgrace, as my parents called it, of Chinese food they sold at Panda Express. This was authentic Chinese cuisine.

As I unscrew the cap of my “entrée thermos,” I let the deliciously pungent smell of chives and bacon wash over me. It isn’t chive dumplings, my favorite, but it’s close enough and smells like home.

Just four weeks prior at the airport terminal, Mama had had no choice but to forcibly peel my hands off of my grandmother’s pant leg as I melted into hysterics, begging Po po not to leave me for the first time since birth.

My doting grandparents had been making chive dumplings from scratch every weekend since I could eat solid food, and at that moment, all my five-­year-old brain had the capacity to process was, without my Po po and Gong gong, no one would make me my favorite food.

Struggling to hide the tears in her eyes from me, Po po had grabbed Mama’s hand right as we were about to step into security check, “Promise me you’ll make my little girl her dumplings.” Her voice had caught as she turned away, so I wouldn’t see the tears spill down her wrinkled cheeks. My mother didn’t get a chance to promise.

I glance around slightly boastfully at the other children with their cold PB&J’s, their dry chicken nuggets, their greasy pizzas, and pity them for not having a homemade meal like mine. I grin as I dig into my warm, savory food.

“Ew, what is that smell?” the little blond boy to my right me says, nose wrinkled.

“It smells like the toilet,” the redhead girl sitting across from me pipes up.

Their eyes seem to simultaneously land on me, and I feel the heat and embarrassment of being different creep up my neck. Suddenly, a soggy old sandwich doesn’t seem so bad.

“What’s that green stuff?” the boy asks, blunt and direct, as kids tend to be, “I’ve never seen it before, but it looks and smells kinda yucky.” The huge lump in my throat prevents me from talking, but even if I wanted to, I don’t have the vocabulary yet to explain to him that it’s actually one of the best foods in the entire world.

The girl to my left answers for me. “It’s probably normal food for an Asian. Look, she has rice too, Asians always eat that.” To this day, it’s still beyond me how a five­ year­ old can recognize a different ethnicity, much less associate a food with it.

I go home that day and tell Mama I never want chives for lunch again. When she asks why, I tell her it’s because it smells like the toilet.

For years, I only bring store bought American food.

After that, I learn to hide behind a westernized mask by pretending my quickly unaccented English is my first and only language. Pretending I prefer the frozen prepackaged Costco burgers and Lunchables that everyone ate to my mother’s ethnic, seasoned dishes.

Pretending I had only ever known the American way of life when I missed the frequent sparkling fireworks, the feeling of my grandparents’ arms around me, the sense of belonging, more than words can describe.

__

I’m in sixth grade when my little brother comes home from kindergarten grade upset, near tears.

It takes much coaxing, but, eventually, in bits and pieces, the story comes out.

During their international unit in social studies, his teacher had asked which kids were bilingual, and my brother, along with a few other children in his class, had eagerly raised his hand, proud of being fluent in multiple languages. His teacher, who was monolingual, went down the line, having each child tell her their second or even third language.

“French.”

“Korean.”

“German.”

She had smiled at each, nodded perfunctorily.

When she reached my brother, he had proudly chirped, “Chinese. It’s one of the hardest languages in the world!” His teacher stopped then. Looked at him. Tilted her head and smiled like he was being naive.

“Honey,” she said gently, according to my brother, as if breaking bad news, “it’s not hard for a lot of people…” It wasn’t said, but I knew it was there:  It’s not hard for an Asian.

My baby brother hadn’t caught on to the insinuation, he had simply been offended for having, what he considered, a great achievement of his be carelessly dismissed by someone whose approval he craved.

My brother was born and raised here. He has never lived in China, nor will he ever, but our father doesn’t allow us to speak English to him or my mother at home, so we can preserve our native tongue.

Surrounded constantly by English ­speakers at school, however, my brother and I typically converse in English, and he, having much less awareness, often turns to my parents as well and goes off on a rant in English.

My father usually calmly lets him finish before saying, mandarin syllables tumbling smoothly off his tongue, in a way my brother’s, and even mine, rarely did, “Say it in Chinese. We’re all Chinese here, why would you use a foreign language?”

I remember hearing his typical spiel about the importance of speaking Chinese once, just months after the chives incident, and feeling so frustrated I had screamed at him, “No one cares except for you! We live in America, Chinese is stupid, everyone thinks so, and I don’t need it!”

I genuinely hated it then.

English, to me, felt trendy, international, slipped out of my mouth as smooth as caramel. Chinese was awkward, bulky, mundane. It felt far more like chewing coffee beans.

The words must have stung, but he didn’t say anything back, he just remained silent until I grudgingly repeated myself in Chinese.

“Trust me,” he said quietly afterwards, the hurt clear in his tone, “Chinese or not, the gift of language is one of the greatest in the world. Being fluent is something you should be proud of. Your culture is something you should be proud of.”

And he was right, my brother’s pride in knowing the language of our ancestors shouldn’t have been dismissed. I don’t want him to learn to cope with the judgement the way I did at his age and often still do now.

___

It’s the end of seventh grade when one of my friends, while we are fixing ourselves up in the locker room after PE, looks in the mirror at me, studying, analyzing, before saying, “You know, you’re actually super pretty, especially for an Asian.” It’s not meant to be an insult in any way, simply an endearing observation. I force a smile and mutter “thank you,” unable to respond in any other way to the blatantly racist comment disguised by a compliment.

The bar used to judge beauty had been automatically lowered because I’m Asian.

She proceeds to list all the qualities of my face she liked, briefly and superficially repairing the damage she had done to my ego. She concludes her analysis of my face with, “If you got double eyelid surgery though, you would basically be perfect.”

She smiles kindly at me then, as if she had given me some sort of validation. As if saying, if not for the one shortcoming I had, the one belonging exclusively to my ethnicity, I would be beautiful.

What is the worst part, what hurts the most, as I think back years later, is how I distinctly remember nodding in agreement. I would be much prettier with double eyelids, like typical American girls, whose faces are composed of lines that connect in ways that seem fluid but defined, soft but bold, all at once.

Weeks later, I claim a sick day. Stay home from school spending hours perusing YouTube tutorials, trying to figure out a way to artificially induce double eyelids without surgery.

—

The summer before high school rushes by way too quickly in a flurry of freshly squeezed lemonade and painful sunburns, and the first day of school ambushes me before I can mentally prepare for it.

In my first class, I am approached by a cute guy, dirty blonde hair looking effortlessly windswept. He’s tall, sinewy. He introduces himself, then asks, hazel eyes twinkling, “Can I see your schedule? I want to see if we share any other classes.” I hand over my schedule and pick at my fingernails, freshly painted just for school, already bracing myself.

Exactly as I expect, he looks up half a minute later, previously flirtatious look replaced by a mixture of judgement and awe, “Damn, you’re taking all the highest-level courses? Do you not have any spare time for fun? Are you like, really smart, even for an Asian?”

I don’t even bother to defend myself at that point, simply suppress the urge to scream, chuckle and shrug modestly instead. Finding no other common classes, he quickly finds an excuse to leave, and, for the rest of the year, we only make awkward small talk when we have to.

—

For an Asian. Those, collectively, are my least favorite three words in the English language.

In my mind, those words bring with them the connotation of being a prude, being ugly, being insufficient. They imply that I’m not good enough, that any accomplishments that I do achieve can be easily dismissed.

They are the reason that, for years, I work hard at changing myself, changing my exterior to fit the status quo, to look and act more “normal.”

They are the reason that I westernized myself to the point where, years after my meltdown at the airport, when we finally return to China to visit, my beloved relatives can hardly recognize me with my strappy tank top, hoop earrings, lululemon leggings — hardly speaking, in shame of my now accented, long abandoned Chinese. I had only preserved the most basic of words to heedlessly satisfy my father.

When I am finally wrapped in my Po po’s arms once more, but with me, this time, towering over her small, shriveled body, the same warm florally scent she’d always worn encloses me. She says something then, and the Chinese words, like coffee beans once seeming so bulky and bitter, are now rich and warm again.

I have to ask her to repeat herself, however, more than once, as my rusted understanding of the language can no longer keep up with her emotional, accented dialect. And then, then is when I realize the extent of the damage I have done to the foundation of what makes me who I am.

We step into my childhood home, where my grandparents continue to live the last ten years that I have been gone, unwilling to leave the memories and emotions, even though they could have easily moved into a smaller, much nicer place with just the two of them.

The smell of chives rushes up, embracing me, welcoming me home. I glance at the table, where, just like all those years ago, fresh ­made chive dumplings await. Gong gong, back now bent with age, stands stooped over the kitchen counter rolling perfectly round wrapper after wrapper out of fresh dough, his hands still keen as ever.

He sees me, wraps me in a hug, and pushes me toward the table, “Go, go eat, I made your favorite.” He’s always been this way, communicating his love not through words, but through delicious concoctions. I don’t have the heart to tell him I have barely touched chives in the last ten years, unable to shake the memory of being called out for their putrid smell.

I tell myself to eat some just for his sake, and as I bite into one, and the memories burst through. Unfortunately, being chronically tainted with the bitterness of humiliation, it’s not as good as I remember it being, but the memories that come with it are. Exploding fireworks, bustling farmer’s markets, harassing the neighbors’ dogs. The nostalgia is overwhelming.

Before I know it, we’re all standing around the counter reminiscing, laughing, talking, eating, rolling out wrappers — my grandparents’ round, mine looking more like paint splatters.

But I am no longer punishing myself, no longer distancing myself from the culture of my ancestors for the sake of avoiding the ignorance and prejudice of others. Those three words:  for an Asian, they still bother me, and I imagine they always will, but they no longer will me to change parts of myself. The American culture, it remains an integral part of me, but now the Chinese counterpart has become indispensable as well.

And the words that had become foreign, that felt like coffee beans in my mouth, they’ve started flowing more smoothly too. It’s not quite the consistency caramel yet, but it’s getting there.

The Grandchildren

By Anjay Kornacki

I am not a child of Bangladesh.

I am her grandchild.

And as a grandchild amidst the dinner party,

I would scoff:

at the hugs of my aunties,

and the spicy food that they hand-fed me,

and the bottles of Coke that were always flat.

Begging to go home, as my droopy-eyed cousins left with their families,

in ‘97 Camrys and champagne beige Corollas.

 

But when I grew up, and I was told the stories:

of the Language Revolution, that set our tongues free and gave us our voice,

of our uncles, the freedom fighters, who traded their textbooks for rifles,

of an operation they named Searchlight, and the sacrifices that followed,

 

What I thought was focus in my aunties’ eyes as they prepared that night’s surplus of food,

I realized was desperation.

Desperation to remember what home smelled like,

What it tasted like,

And how it sounded.

 

As children, clutching their panicking parents’ hands as they hurriedly rushed for Pan-Am flights

bound for the United States,

They could not take with them the tea plantations,

Or the sprawling mangroves of the Sundarbans,

Or Gulshan’s roundabout, center of a new capital,

Or Cox’s Bazaar’s pristine white sand.

 

But they brought with them midriff-bearing saris,

They brought the recipes, and the songs, and the boisterous, ever-loudening laughter that

only Chittagong’s children could produce.

They brought with them a history of outspoken women and fierce rebellion.

They brought with them what the rest of the world tried to call ‘East Pakistan’.

 

And so I feel shame at knowing I scoffed,

Knowing now how much was lost

to get me here.

Because that laughter was louder than their gunfire.

Because a nation’s streaked tears turned to a tiger’s stripes.

We have a duty, grandchildren.

Do not lose what they brought.

Do not let time and conformity do what Pakistan’s armies could not.

 

Heaven is a dinner party;

There are relatives there that we never had the privilege to be annoyed by,

Waiting with the hugs they never got to give us.

I am Bangladesh’s grandchild,

And I love my Nanu dearly.

 

 

 

A sophomore creative writing major at Colorado State University, Anjay Kornacki was born in Yonkers, NY to a Bangladeshi-American mother and Polish-American father, the aspects of his heritage making up the core of his writing identity. This is his first submission to a journal.

Lessons from Pot Stock on Living My Life

By Lilly Dickman

“What do you want to do in life?” My biggest fear is having to answer this question. My twin sister answers it with ease. Being twins, we’re obviously the same age, so we’ve had the same amount of time on this Earth to come up with an answer to this question. Clearly then, time isn’t the independent variable in this equation. I don’t know why we both couldn’t have woken up one day with a light bulb above our heads.

“I want to go to film school in California so that I can live by the ocean and be a screenwriter. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll be a biochemical engineer,” my sister answers in one breath. Her plan seems unrealistic, until she explains her web of filmmaking classes and independent studies, acting courses on top of AP Biology classes, that seem to have been worked seamlessly into her schedule. In reality, her meticulous plan wasn’t easy to configure. My sister worked through emails upon emails, meeting upon meeting, and summer school to achieve the arrangement of courses that will create the yellow brick road to her dream occupation.

Me, on the other hand— I can’t even decide what I want from the sushi menu at dinner. Faced with any decision, especially about my future, and I shut down. At a time when I’m preparing to make choices involving hopes and dreams, colleges and majors, my indecision is an issue. One day I think I should study psychology, the next I think I want to write, the day after that I want to own an overnight camp and live in the woods. I can’t even decide who is the more “normal” one in this scenario, my decisive sister or wishy-washy me.

“Work hard, and you can achieve it,” says pretty much every teacher, college counselor, or parent ever. “How am I supposed to work hard if I don’t even know what I’m working for?” I think. I can’t strive for it if I don’t know what it is. It’s not fair, I think. Why do some people get to know what they want to do and not others?

It seems to me that the people who know what they want to do from the beginning have an overarching better shot at life. The sooner you know it, the sooner you can work toward it, the sooner you can achieve it, right? I yearn to have a passion, something that makes me hungry, something that makes me work toward a specific outcome, an it. It’s the lack of knowing that triggers my fear. The “up-in-the-airness” of no plan is scary.

Which is why, most likely, I am freaked out by the cannabis stock that my grandfather bought for my sister and me a week ago. “I’m telling you,” he said at dinner, “this stuff is gonna be big. Just hang onto it for a little while.” So, in addition to questioning the legality of the purchase as well as my existence, I spent the past week watching the price of my weed stock on my iPhone app. It kept rising.

“Do you want to sell it?” my grandfather now asks us at dinner this week. I have no idea. I don’t know about stocks in general, let alone cannabis stocks. And I don’t know about me. Am I striving for millions and going for broke? Or am I playing it safe and cashing in now so that at least I come away with something? My twin sister, of course, knows what she wants to do. She’s in it for the long haul.

So is my grandpa. “Let it sit,” he advises me. “It’ll go up, it’ll go down. Just take it day-by-day. See how it goes and see how you feel. Eventually a day will come and you’ll know what to do with it. It’s a gamble, play the game.”

I agreed to let it ride. Not that it’s easy. Not that I don’t check the price of the stock constantly and wonder if I’m doing the right thing. But, I’m practicing living with the unknown. I realize now that my grandpa’s lesson on pot stock, of all things, is a lesson on life. Life is risky, unpredictable. Even if I, like my sister, knew what kind of game I wanted to play, there’s no guarantee of the outcome. Simply having an it doesn’t guarantee success.

And, just because I don’t know what my aspiration is, just because I don’t have an it, doesn’t mean I’m not in the game, striving for something. Maybe my it, right now, is just to figure out my it. Maybe it’s good to not have a plan, to let myself exist, and see how I feel. Life, like my stock, is a ride, and I just have to be okay with letting my hand play out.

One day I’ll know, the answer might even become obvious. But until then, when people ask, “What do you want to do in life,” instead of freaking out and questioning God’s purpose for placing me on this Earth, I’ll just rephrase the question in my brain: “What do you want to do with your cannabis stock?” “I’m not sure yet,” I’ll answer. “I’m taking it day by day.”

 

 

Lilly is a junior at Highland Park High School. She is a hip-hop dancer, a water-skier, a writer, and a twin. Her play, What Happens In Springfield, was performed at this year’s Short Play Festival at school. She lives in Highland Park, which is a suburb of Chicago, with her parents, her sister and her dog, Pickles.

 

What Goes Around Comes Around (Cover Art)

By Connie Liu

What Goes Around Comes Around
Often we don’t see how our decisions play out environmentally. In my illustration, I seek to show that if we continue to ignore human caused pollution, it will eventually increase to the point where we can’t turn the other cheek. It’ll get to the point where it will start to impact us as well. (Connie Liu)

Written Missiles

By Clara Leo

Written Missles

Clara is a college sophomore studying economics and music. Considering that her life hasn’t quite started yet, there will be more to say about who she is later. Soon. Stay tuned.

Into the Trenches

By Leah Mikulich

 

This morning was fine and dandy. The sun had popped out of the clouds after disappearing for so long. The air buzzed with heat and bugs hidden in the swaying grasses near the trench. I sat with my rifle leaning against my shoulder, sweat dripping down my neck. My captain lay next to me all quiet, as did my friend, Willis. They didn’t say much today. When I first met Willis, he taught me how to properly stab a guy with the bayonet. Good man. I enjoyed talking to him better than the other boys. The other boys now, they were up top, doing whatever it was you did when you had free time in this goddamn war. Oh the war was going splendidly! I’m sure we are going to win within the next few months. At least, that’s what they told us. I kicked my tired legs out, dirt spraying up. Just above, I was surrounded by miles of grassy plains overtaken by war. We were practically near no-man’s-land. A few cracks sounded in the distance.

I lied. I’m a lying liar who lies. This morning is not fine and dandy. In fact, it is god-awful and miserable. My rifle may rest at my shoulder, but I have no bullets. The blade at the end of it is caked in dried blood, some of which may be mine. Our captain lays in a crippled position, flies swarming. Maggots grow in the wound in his stomach. Willis, bless him, is dead. He succumbed to a head injury. Most of our men are gone, too, blown to bits by grenades thrown into the trench in the earliest hours of daylight. The cracks in the distance are artillery fire, they are close. So close.

I am deaf in one ear, but I cannot tell if it is the right or left one. I don’t remember the difference between right and left. The sunlight stings my eyes when I slide away from the captain to climb out of the trench.

 

“Good night,” I say to him.

“Sleep tight,” I say to Willis.

I am the only remaining man of my company. They were all gone. I’d thought that Castor may have still been alive, but now I see that the upper half of his body is stuck in burnt tree. That was a new one. I gag as I pass more men, eventually bowing to vomit in the swaying grasses that hide the little bugs. My only mission is to find ammunition. Until then, I have to make it up the hill. Pop! Pop! Pop! go the bullets in the distance.

I hike up past the half of Castor in his burnt tree to see if I can get closer to the other side without getting shot.

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” I say to Castor’s body.

He’s just another dead guy among thousands of dead guys. Just like me. I could be a dead guy, too. It didn’t matter, nothing did. We have to die one day or another, and I’m glad I could die doing something useful for once. To think that I walk the exact ground as the kid whose eyes are missing from his sockets. Those could be my eyes. They were probably the same shit-colored ones I have. That man slumped over against a rock over there could probably pass as my brother.

They said it would just be a few months. They were wrong, it would be a few years. Sweat slid down my back, the fatigues nearly soaked. What I wouldn’t give for a real bath and change of clothes. For the last week, our rations had been shortened and I can’t recall what food tastes like. I’m talkin’ warm bread with some butter, not stale crackers to choke down. I want to go home.

Where am I going again? Oh right, to find more bullets. Turns out, finding them was fairly easy. Always search dead bodies for ammunition. I snatch up a spare cartridge from corpse and load my rifle up.

“Thank you,” I say to the dead man.

“You’re welcome,” he does not reply.

There are more gunshots farther ahead. Too close for my liking. There’s bad men up there. They shot the captain, killed Willis, and blew up Castor. The only place to go is their trench. After all, I can’t do anything else. I’ve got no friends, no food; but what I do have it my rifle. I’d almost died more times than I can count on both hands, considering I lost a finger or two, this past week. I don’t seen how almost dying a another time could hurt. I mean, it could hurt a lot, but that’s not the point.

The earth below me is ravaged with deep holes, the swaying grasses are crispy and destroyed. I stop behind a bush, frowning as its pointy leaves dig into my exposed skin. Someone’s leg lays near me. They’ll be needing that. What am I doing up here? I’m going to be killed. This is stupid, a stupid idea, but one of the best I’ve had. Willis would be proud; not sure what the captain would think. I’ll be okay at the end, won’t I?

The sun beats down. No longer are the bugs hidden as they fly at me. They are the only ones that find my sweat appealing. There is shouting, there is yelling. I need to remember those soldiers are not on my side. They killed my boys. My boys are dead because of them. That is why I came up here. It won’t make a difference to them, but it will to me.

 

I move away, but on my stomach this time. I crawl along the rough dirt, feeling the shrapnel jab at me. I’m close, so close. Oh hell, this is it. Bodies litter the area around me. I can’t tell if they are my boys or not. Then I spot a withering form up ahead. When I crawl past the man, he yanks at me. I turn to face him, but he has no face.

“Morning,” I say to him.

A groan in response before he rolls away to another place to die. That was rather rude if you ask me. It’s not like anybody did, but I expected a simple greeting.

I smell their trenches before I see them. And I thought our latrines were bad.

Then again, maybe it was the stench of death that loomed in the air. I couldn’t imagine how many bodies were sprawled out around me. There were too many. Machine guns spray bullets that most likely caused the end of these men. Hand grenades soar into the sky, only to burst in the ground.

This is as close as I can get. Everything is loud and hot and sweaty. Please, I just want to go home. See, I even used my manners. The captain would have been proud. With shaking hands, I pull back my rifle and shoot blindly. Again and again I do it until they notice. I’m going to die I know. It’s time to go I know, I know. I turn to run, nearly tripping over myself. I run past the bodies, past the faceless, no longer withering, form. I pass the rock where the leg is. Nobody has claimed it yet.

Almost home–no not home. Almost back into the trenches. Back to my boys.

“I’m coming,” I say. I’ll be there soon.

 

But they’re after me. Metal bits whiz by my face. Gotta go, gotta run. The trenches are right there! Then there is pain in my chest, blood on my fatigues, my knees giving out. This ruins all my plans. I realize I never did get to change my clothes and I suppose I do need that bath now. Maybe I’ll choke down some crackers even though I want bread with butter.

“Fine and dandy,” I say to my corpse.

He agrees.

 

 

Leah is an aspiring author and this is her first published story. When she is not writing, she enjoys reviewing books, listening to music, and practicing French.

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 6
  • Go to Next Page »

Copyright © 2023 · Site by Sumy Designs, LLC