Issue Four

 

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.

 

 

“Come here. You said you weren’t Chinese, correct?” A stout, middle-aged woman said in a commanding voice. At the bold age of five, I was proud of my origins; it was known by everyone in my grade that I was not “another Chinese kid” and that I was the only “Korean.” Just the week before, I had figured out where the peninsula was located in Asia on my older brother’s globe and had admired the land’s vivid fuchsia color on the circular map. A piece of my heart felt like it was home, despite that I had never stepped foot in the country.

I nodded my head vigorously, trying to suppress my excitement. Why would a teacher call me over? Was it for a special treat? Had she somehow bought some Korean candy or snack? I had introduced many of my friends to Korean foods before; they had always raved about it whenever we had play dates at my house. The thought of a treat filled me with joy. She motioned me to stand beside her, where she was holding a food wrapper of some sort. “Can you read this?” I tried to ignore the pang of disappointment, before looking at the shiny blue plastic. It appeared to be from some assortment of cookies.

“This isn’t Korean,” I said defiantly, staring at the loopiness of the characters. “I think it looks Japanese.” The woman looked puzzled at my words as if I had uttered some gibberish to her. She was one of the after school program teachers who looked after children whose parents were too busy to come as soon as classes were over, although I had yet to talk to her. She seemed aloof most of the time, and not interested in whatever games we children had.

“But isn’t it the same?” I frowned at her question, furrowing my brows. I could not bring myself to meet her gaze, and steadied my eyes on the blue wrapper. A flash of light from the fading sun distracted me, and I shook my head slowly, sneaking a peek at the woman’s wristwatch. It was almost time for my mother to pick me up from the after school care. I did not want to stay here anymore. I could hear my friends, their shrill voices behind me somewhere on the playground in a vicious game of tag. A part of me longed to join them, but a larger part of me wanted to vanish under the woman’s scrutinizing gaze.

“We aren’t the same. Japan is an island. Korea isn’t!” The woman shrugged, and I felt a flare of anger at her obvious disinterest. It was worse than the children who always assumed I was Chinese—at least they would acknowledge South Korea as a country after I spoke. “You can just ask my mom when she comes.” It seemed almost like a desperate way for me to prove myself, by dragging my mother into such an issue. The woman nodded, her gaze unfocused on me. She lost whatever scrap of care she had for me the moment I made my uselessness to her evident. At age five I would not have known that there are hopeless cases to walk away from, but I was too stubborn to leave, my feet glued to that spot on the asphalt. I watched children run by, their shrieking laughter begging me to join. I did not.

By the time my mother came to pick me up, I was still standing beside the woman, my determination to prove her wrong overwhelming. She was fiddling with her phone, not sparing me a single look. My mother’s warm eyes were wide in anxiety as she saw me standing there, and I could see the panic on her face. She was worried I had caused trouble, and the teacher was reprimanding me for my behavior. I waved at her brightly, my pigtails flickering from side to side at my enthusiasm, before I pointed at the discarded blue plastic on the ground, picking it up to show off the label.

“Is this Korean? It isn’t Hangul, right?” I pestered as my mother looked over the blue wrapper. The woman put her phone away, diverting her attention back to the wrapper. She stared at my mother, ignoring the glee on my face as my mother shook her head. I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out, while the woman quirked her lips slightly, a hint of a frown revealing itself on her face.

“This is Japanese. I’m sorry I cannot help you.” My mother spoke in her gentle voice. The woman forced out a chuckle, and it was obvious she could not simply state that they were “the same” as she had before. My mother gripped my tiny hand in her own before bidding the woman farewell. I did not wave goodbye.

 

Brittany is a high school junior from northern New Jersey. Interested in psychology, Brittany explores the concept of character development in her writing. She also enjoys drawing, playing with her dog Angel, and baking goods to share with friends and family.

The room was quiet and still, and I would have thought myself deaf if it hadn’t been for the buzzing and whirring of the machines keeping my aunt alive. I hadn’t even known rooms could be so dark until that night, and the only window in the room let in the deeper darkness of the night. The silence itself was remarkable, achieved by a room crowded with bodies. Heat radiated from the bodies and made the room stuffy and suffocating. Everyone in the room was waiting for death. My aunt was lying on the bed that was more hardware than cushion, and many people who loved her were standing and sitting in various parts of the room. The room was definitely too small to hold all of the love… or the sadness.

ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, is a degenerative nerve disease that slowly and viciously kills its victims. My mother’s side of the family carries the ALS gene, and Auntie Chi Chi had developed the disease. My mother had taken care of her for as long as we could at our house, but in the final weeks of her life, we knew she would have to stay in a nursing home. I watched as my aunt, the energetic sales rep glued to her cell phone, became a wisp of a human body that could barely say anything. I had seen her spirit leave her eyes. She was not ready to die; she was too young and loved life too much. Everyone in the darkness that night realized the same thing: the end was near.

While privately mourning, I remembered my first-hand experience with my aunt and her lack of basic motor skills. My mother and father were busy preparing a medication in the kitchen, which was serving as a pharmacy. My task was to feed my aunt ice cream. This was the same ice cream the rest of the family ate, no special medications or supplements, just a creamy vanilla. I put the ice cream in a bowl, a bowl that we had all used for years. I grabbed a spoon, not a special feeding tool for the sick, a spoon that I had used countless times before. I sat in front of her, perhaps the only ill relative of mine who hadn’t been ready to die when it was time. Taking a spoonful of ice cream, I guided it towards her mouth. This was a mouth that could barely speak anything besides what must be described as a moan, let alone eat with much success. She opened her mouth and I inserted the spoon. I saw her molasses-like lips close around the spoon and I gently pulled back, as if I were feeding a baby. She had taken just a little off of the top. We went on like this, and we couldn’t even get halfway through the dessert before the ice cream had melted.

I knew no young child in my parents’ eyes would be charged with the duty of feeding the sick. My playroom had been long gone as well; my old toys were moved out and replaced with a bed and various medical accessories to keep first my grandmother (a victim of cigarettes) and then my aunt alive. I realized I was becoming a young adult. I was a twelve year old growing up alongside the diseases and sicknesses that had taken two family members in quick succession.

I struggled to keep the ice cream off of her face realizing what my aunt had to go through. She couldn’t even have ice cream without getting it dribbled down her chin. Ice cream, a universal symbol of happiness and glee, was an arduous task for her to consume. I thought of the kind of happiness it must have brought her when she was my age and younger; images of little kids running around playfully after the ice cream truck ran through my mind. I thought of the joy ice cream had brought me in previous years. I thought of Maya, Chi Chi’s daughter, who so enjoyed ice cream. My God, her daughter: How would she survive the years after her mother’s death? How would she deal with a motherless house? What was being imprinted in her brain at this moment, watching her mother slowly die? What would be left in my mind after this was all over? Would it ever really be over? These thoughts made me sick as I stared at the melted ice cream, and when we were done, I pushed the bowl away as if I could distance myself from these feelings.

That night in the nursing home, amongst the silent darkness, I came to my epiphany. My aunt would die soon, but it was okay. She was going to enjoy the heaven that she believed in much more than this life. Her long-term suffering, pain, and embarrassment (terrible for her Japanese pride) would finally come to an end. She would fly higher than the superficial world of today, escape the chains of her diseased body, escape the nursing home she despised so much, say farewell to the crowd of loved ones in her room, fly past my inescapable feelings and be reunited with wherever the spirit of her parents went. I knew Maya would soon come to the same realization, and the love in the room would guide her to this eventually. Chi Chi would die with those she loved on Earth all around her, and she wouldn’t have asked for more.

 

William Blomerth is a high school junior and Eagle Scout interested in English and the human mind. When not in school or on the track, he enjoys writing, playing music, and camping.

The first of February 2016 was just a normal day for billions of people around the world. For me it was the day where I had to face the death of more than a million innocent people. People who were tortured for their religion, their looks, their profession or simply their political orientation. It was the day where I had to face a part of the history of my country. Where I had to open my eyes for all the horrible things that had been done.

As a German these days it is not always easy. We have, fortunately, changed a lot since the days someone like Adolf Hitler was able to become Reich Chancellor of Germany. We have developed into a welcoming nation that is absolutely against racism and exclusion. Of course there are exceptions. Of course there is still a minority that represents racism in Germany. But the majority of people are wholly against racism, people who have learned from the past and who would and will do everything to never let something like the Holocaust happen again.

As a German you are confronted with your past very often. Most people know how to tell the difference between what has been and what is now, but some people still have prejudices. My English teacher once told me that when he was abroad twenty years ago some teenagers asked him if Hitler was still in power in Germany. A statement that makes me doubt all the development Germany has gone through, a statement that makes me doubt how I look at the world and in return how the world looks at a German girl like me.

We learn everything about our past in our history lessons at school. One part of learning about our past is the opportunity to visit Oswiecim, better known as Auschwitz. For one week we get to stay at a youth hostel in Auschwitz and visit the concentration camps Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau. We have the opportunity to talk to a person who survived the Concentration Camp. I decided to sign up for it.

 

A few months later, on February the first we arrived in Auschwitz. We unpacked, ate something, talked, and played table tennis, all the while, aware of what was still waiting for us on the following days.

We didn’t know what to expect and the uncertainty was a heavy burden. Needless to say we talked about the visit beforehand. We had the chance to talk to our teachers about our fears and expectations. But it is completely different to talk about something than to actually see it with your own eyes.

The next day we visited Auschwitz 1. The sky was grey and cloudy. We followed our guide, listening. “On the basis of the partially preserved camp records and estimates, it has been established that there were approximately 232 thousand children and young people up to the age of 18 among the 1.3 million or more people deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The fate of child and youth prisoners was no different in principle from that of adults. Just like adults, they suffered from hunger and cold, were used as laborers, and were punished, put to death, and used as subjects in criminal experiments by SS doctors. In the early period of the existence of the women’s camp, children born there were put to death, regardless of their ethnicity, without being entered in the camp records.”

Our guide told us facts that I had known before and facts that were new to me. But overall facts that were incredibly painful to know.

In between these old buildings, surrounded by people taking pictures it is really hard to believe that at this place humans were cruelly murdered, tortured to death and experimented on. Of course all over the concentration camps there are things that mark the death of these people: the gas chambers, the gallows, the photos of the dead. But one million is such a big figure. Try to imagine the death of one million people in your head, dying because of the irrational opinions of a few people. You won’t be able to.

The understanding of the extent of the concentration camps came the next day. In contrast to Auschwitz 1, Birkenau (Auschwitz 2) is huge. The concentration camp Auschwitz 2 is 171 hectares and four gas chambers big. Built, only to kill human beings. Our teachers bought roses and we were allowed to lay them down wherever we wanted as a sign of remembrance. I laid my rose down at the ramp where they selected which victim shall live and which shall die. I remember that I wrote in my diary that day: “I left my rose where hope became a weapon.”

At this ramp, they picked out the people that were to die immediately: The children, the elderly people, the people who were ill. They led them to the gas chambers, telling them that they would have the opportunity to take a shower and eat something warm afterwards-only to sneakily murder them in the gas chambers that looked similar to shower rooms.

They used their hope to kill them.

On our last day we visited Auschwitz 1 again, but this time without a guide. Going around in the concentration camp alone-or only accompanied by a friend-is something completely different than with a guide. I do see the importance of a guide, but without, you have the chance to stop at certain parts and take a closer look at everything. You have time to remember and pray for the victims.

 

Looking back at the journey I am glad that I signed up for it. I saw cruelty, I saw the foolishness of people, I saw horrible things. But this journey is something I will never forget and what happened is something that can never be forgotten. The only way that something like this can ever happen again is by forgetting this tragedy. By forgetting that all humans are the same and have to be treated in the same way. By giving someone the power who will use it for his own good and who doesn’t care about the people that suffer on his rise to power.

We have to be aware of what happened; it does not define us and it never will. We are different people than those who were in charge of Auschwitz, but this is a part of our past that we have to learn from.

Until today I have not been able to cry. It’s not a sign of my strength that I have not cried, because I wish I had. I am still processing and I am sure that eventually one day I will cry. Because no sane human being can see what happened in Auschwitz without having his heart broken a little bit.

 

Zoe Bunje is a seventeen-year-old-girl from Kassel, Germany. The German school system is not the same as the American school system, but she is currently in grade twelve which means that she is graduating this year. She has always loved to read and a few years ago started to write her own stories. Even though she mostly writes for herself she aspires to become a journalist one day.

 

 

Sources: http://auschwitz.org/en/history/fate-of-children/children-born-in-auschwitz

 

People in Edisto are friendly. When one smiles and waves, the recipient will do the same back. How would I know at thirteen years old being friendly would trigger harassment? All I did was walk. Along the bike path, shadows danced upon my nose and forehead. I was embraced and protected by the tree tunnels over my head. I waved and the man waved back as I entered a clearing, and the sun poured through the empty spaces above me. Then he whistled, and began shouting things about my body to his friends on the porch, who parroted him; laughing at my discomfort and sharing their opinions on my appearance, which I wasn’t aware I had asked for. I kept walking; looking down at my feet on the path and watching my hands quiver at my sides. With all their words I walked faster, and I felt smaller. I regret that I hadn’t called back to them­ and yelled, “I am thirteen! I am not here for you!” I tried not to run, because it would show them it had gotten to me, but all chaos broke loose in my head. The tunnels above, that I had seconds before found beautiful, were now drowning me. My mind somehow couldn’t figure out how to get out of the clearing.

The first time I got catcalled, I had just turned eleven. Downtown, I was walking by myself, though surrounded by careless strangers who bumped me to the edge of the sidewalk. Weeds popped through the cracks in concrete beneath my feet. Two guys pulled their car close to the sidewalk, made eye contact, whistled, and proceeded to blow me unwanted kisses. I was mortified, and even more so because it seemed like nobody in the sea of people around me cared. It was an everyday thing and no one objected, except me. I’ve had to “get used to” this harassment about every time I walk out in public, and it’s completely ridiculous. I’ve learned if you get mad, it only makes it worse. Once when I glared at someone for whistling at me, he yelled “God baby, take a compliment.” I have never, and will never, take harassment from strangers as a compliment. I don’t care if a stranger likes or dislikes the way I look. I am not an object of entertainment or a mid­morning confidence boost.

It’s barbaric that young women all over the world have to deal with this— ­­this is how it is, and we should just “take a compliment”. People say men experience this type of sexism too, and for men it isn’t recognized. In the most “polite” and “ladylike” way possible, I ask them to look around and stop kidding themselves! Ninety-­six percent of women in the U.S have experienced catcalling or street harassment, whereas for men it’s only thirteen percent. What people don’t understand, is something as common as catcalling is directly related to something as serious as sexual assault, and they are both extremely offensive.

Frustrated, insulted, degraded, unsafe: these are the only words I can use to describe how this makes me feel. People belittle this problem by talking about it without truly educating themselves. It’s an issue in itself that this isn’t recognized. I personally think it’s ludicrous and pitiful that these men have to tear women down in order to build themselves up. Nothing is going to shift unless you understand the anxiety and disrespect this makes women feel; unless you stand up for the scared eleven year old getting harassed on the sidewalk, or better yet if you don’t catcall her in the first place.

 

Ella Carlinnia is currently an eighth grade student at The Learning Community School in North Carolina. She is a young feminist who enjoys writing about social justice, and spends her time reading, dancing, and making things.