A Brown/RISD Visual & Literary Arts Magazine Vol. XV Issue I

Letter From the Editors

Dear Reader,

Thank you for picking up VISIONS’ fifteenth anniversary issue. Since our inception in 2000, our magazine has brought to light the creative wealth and cultural diversity of the Asian/Asian American community at Brown, RISD and beyond. With exciting projects underway and an editorial board re-invigorated by new faces, we are thrilled to share with you the latest iteration of our evolution.

This fall, we ask you: What are the walls, visible and invisible, that constitute your home? Your body? Your road, stretching before you? In order to contextualize our histories and our progress, we’ve included a new non-fiction section, touching upon the history of Asian American poetry and the ongoing fight for democracy in Hong Kong. Today, more than ever, we feel the urgency and necessity of speaking out and resisting silence both locally and internationally.

We thank our contributors for braving this task and for sharing their voices. We thank our editorial board, web team, and copy-editing staff for their relentless energy and diligence. Moma and Haejin refreshed and unified our magazine’s aesthetic. Mia and Lisa catalyzed Brown’s literary community by hosting an AAPI poetry workshop in October for fifteen student poets. Working with the Asian American Heritage Series, we invited guest poets Paul Tran and Zainab Syed to teach and inspire us with their craft. Collaborations like these extend our reach beyond these pages, and VISIONS will continue forward on this trajectory of community-building, healing, and illumination through art.

Thank you for reading. We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we have.

Yours,

Diverse Market City Insil Choi, RISD ‘14 Digital

Anny, Mabel, Betty, Lisa, Yvonne, Christina, Haejin & Moma

Editor-in-ChiefAnny Li ‘15

Managing EditorMabel Fung ‘15

Art & Photography EditorYvonne Fong ‘18

Literary EditorBetty Kim ‘15.5

Layout & Design EditorHaejin Park RISD ‘15

Digital EditorChristina Choi ‘15

Associate Literary EditorLisa Lee ‘17

Associate Layout & Design EditorMoma Wilwayco RISD ‘16

Publicity ChairGrace Sun ‘16

Networking ChairMia Gold ‘17

Copy Editing Staff

Paige Morris ‘16Hilery Chao ‘18Alicia Devos ‘18Atalanta Shi RISD ‘17

Web StaffSienna Bates ‘16Bianca Eyales ‘17Lisa Lee ‘17

Printer

PrintNinjaMade in PRC

A very special thanks to  ...

Kisa TakesueUndergraduate Finance BoardPan Asian CouncilAsian American Heritage SeriesBrown Center For Students of ColorJNBC Public Humanities CenterOffice of Institutional DiversityDepartment of Comparative LiteratureDepartment of MusicDepartment of Theater Arts & Performance StudiesContributors and staff

On the Cover

Fake Cake

Jenny Jisun Kim, RISD ‘14

Acrylic, collage, spray paint on wood

Mission Statement

VISIONS is a publication that highlights and celebrates the diversity of Brown and RISD’s Asian/Asian American community. We are committed to being an open literary and artistic forum for Asians and Asian Americans, as well as other members of the university community, to freely express and address issues relating to both the Asian and Asian American experience. VISIONS further serves as a forum for issues that cannot find a voice in other campus publications. As a collaborative initiative, VISIONS attempts to strengthen and actively engage Brown and RISD’s vibrant community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as the larger Providence community and beyond.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of VISIONS’s sponsors.

Contact

visions.brown@gmail.com visions-magazine.org facebook.com/Visions. Brown@VISIONSBrown

Visual Art

5 Escape Amber Carillo

7 Private Atalanta Shi

10 Meditation Everest Shi

14 Food Veronica Ni

15 Shoutotsu Lynn Tachihara

17 PINK in The Desert Ji Sub Jeong

20Stepwell Mabel Fung

21 Bojagi Bench Brandon Kento Saisho

24 Visiting the Mushroom God Veronica Ni

25 How to greet the rain Grace Sun

28Bayou Joshua Shiau

29 Splurge Crystal Pei

31

Prayer for serenity Margaret Hu

34 Choice Haejin Park

35Photography Larry Au

39Hello My Name Is Michael Ee

42 Cravings Ellen Shi

44 Perishables Soyoon Kim

Literary Art

6 Capture! Lisa Lee

8 Leaving Navya Dasari

9 Why I should be a doctor Ashely Wu

11Enclave Chris Tran

18 remembering driving uphill in sri lanka after reading michael ondaatje, 7 years laterMelanie Abeygunawardana

22A Prayer Ayoosh Pareek

23Typhoon Summer Jacqueline Gu

26Of the flowers Andy Li

28the thunder is made of glass and we are made of light Joshua Shiau

30EggSimone Kurial

32To Mother Anonymous

33the last egg Elaine Hsiang

35 A Visual History of the #UmbrellaMovement Larry Au

41 From “Beats” to Resistance Paul Tran

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Escape

Amber Carillo, Brown ‘18 Photography and Photoshop

And when we all came to the house for the first time, I remember it in that uncertain way as if my memory’s camera caught the moments inconsistently, abstractly (blurred really, but still saturated, still fresh, the feeling of diving into someone else’s pool, the sky a lighted gradient, the hidden creatures murmuring like something, but what, but what, there was no metaphor, they were murmuring like an ancient forest on the edge of nighttime, only it wasn’t a murmur but an uproar), we were the newcomers to this house’s history, not yet tenants, not strangers either, but lovers committing to a new relationship, in want of a home, visiting the house even as the earlier family was still living and breathing there, with their unfortunate toys and memories fallen on the carpeted floor, their own failed affair with the house weighing on our time and space; whichever house we chose it didn’t matter, we were a young immigrant family and wanted to own a house more than anything, and we didn’t care if the house was still warm with memories of another family and we didn’t care that in six years we would leave the rooms as barren as they had been when we first moved in.

Capture! Lisa Lee inspired by Jamaica Kincaid

Lisa Lee ‘17 hopes that the flowers will at least smell good as she descends down a dark and stormy path.

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Private

Atalanta Shi, RISD ‘17 Acrylic

Leaving Navya Dasari

In the driveway our words echo off whale bones warm flute notes holding the moment hypnotic something primal in the street-lit night watching pinata violence swing and laughing at the right moments thinking we can never come here again

We swim this haunting ribcage treading water see, we never learned how to cherish things not even this not even this enchantment too slow and obscure for me to hold, pushing out my lungs and heart I’m asking it to hold me instead but leave some warmth in my bones

Break break break them those swinging cardboard pieces let the candy spill out into the ocean so we’ll have something to remember this by

Can we let it hold us in metallic wrappings and wet grass in the people we swear we’ll never forgetin this cool dark dream expanding in the blueall of us swinging in the night

Navya Dasari ‘18 likes dead languages and green tea waffles.

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Meditation 1 and 2

Everest Shi, Brown ’17 Performing art

Why I should be a doctorAshley Wu

Ashley Wu ‘16 takes pictures not with a camera but with her phone.

when I was three, I asked

you for the camera—high on a glass shelf,

and out

of my reach. a memory capturer, maybe

it could teach me to remember you

stretched your 5’2” tall tall

tall and plucked it down from the skies.

it glided down to me, a square

black bat, one luminous eye gleaming from

the

center of its mass. conveyed by your two

forever

dish soaped hands, the left ring finger

gleaming

with the white gold band that had

led to my birth.

you must have been younger then, mama—

thinner and prettier, you often sigh. I should

have turned that one luminous eye on

you. I cannot remember. you stretched up

tall tall

tall, and the camera appeared

in my hands but so

did the shelf

came shuddering down. the eye, a sparkle

crash

cloudburst, the eye blinked glass shard

tears, the shelf

was gone. and how

did it happen, your wrist? now you tell

me our fireman neighbor leaped over the

fence, saved you

from losing that hand forever.

how is it that I do not, cannot

recall: the childish desire, the sudden

shatter, the wet gush, the emptied house.

girl

pushed to the side, her mama

pushed on a gurney into the

white van. square black bat wild

and dirty and stained in my two

whole hands. see it:

blood-

guilt, forgotten and unatoned. it is

a white scar under the

dish soap scum, it is

a wrist band thinner and more

precious than the one

that binds your finger.

what is

already gone, an inci-acci-dent flown

away, cannot be resolved

into its right dimensions, but

there is a debt,

a debt outstanding.

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EnclaveChris Tran

1. In the mid-1970s, to limit the strain and impact Vietnamese refugees would have on local American communities, the US government enacted a policy of scattering the population.

Vietnamese refugees, scattered like seeds, found themselves in every state, often without other Vietnamese people near them.

America’s goal: prevent the ethnic enclave.

Mangos and papayas bloomed in the potato fields of Middle America. And the wind carried these seeds like a monsoon. And like all blossoms sweeping in the diaspora, they found each other.

Concentrations of Vietnamese Americans harvested their own cornucopias, a Little Saigon growing through the corn and hay, like Chinatown rising from the rubble, like a firebird from chaos.

2. The conductor kicked us off at Canal Street. Bucktoothed rats swarmed the third rail and electricity erupted their bodies like firecrackers. Smoke poured into the station, leaving a smell of carcass and spine, charring against the Q train’s underbelly.

This is my first time in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The smoke’s aroma reminds me of home.

3. Growing up in Oklahoma, I noticed how my parents cooked with the windows open, a stench infiltrating the neighborhoods of the southern plains, a rush of garlic and chilis and dried fish and shrimp coming right behind the rain.

A white friend once visited my home, Noting the odor of a raccoon that must have climbed behind the couch and died. My parents instructed me to shower after I cooked our recipes, to rid my body of all that has fueled me, to sanitize our history, to smell like vanilla or freshly baked Wonder Bread.

4. Last year, a fire blew across the eyes and mouths of Irwindale residents, the scent of jalapeños grinding in a California factory produced an “odor”, so “extremely annoying, irritating and offensive to the senses” and therefore “a public nuisance.”

After immigrating from Vietnam in 1980, David Tran created the Huy Fong Foods brand of Sriracha to supply to restaurants in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

Sriracha can be found in a number of American concoctions including: Sriracha mayonnaise, Lay’s potato chips, and UV Vodka, once described by a blog as being “here to napalm your liver.” I must ask: If refugees leave with all that is left of their bodies and their bodies of knowledge, what separates these bodies from being a public good and a public nuisance? What is digestible?

5. During the period of Chinese exclusion, New York City’s Chinatown was a bordered gangland of street violence and fear, A frontier impossible for white women to cross Unless they fall victim to the yellow and bucktoothed.

Chinatown was a cauldron made of opium pipes, burning on the fears of sexual assault and torture. Its only contributions to New York society: Handwashed laundry and chow mein.

6. Columbus discovered the “New World” in hopes of finding spices from India, following other successful trades between Europe, Northeast Africa and Asia.

I am in grade school when I learn of this.

Later during lunch, as I bite into a baloney sandwich on white bread, I have to wonder where these European-discovered spices ended up. They definitely didn’t end up in America.

7. I grew up in a neighborhood where my family, another Vietnamese family and two Mexican families occupied one side.

On the other side, there were white families, the ones that do not take their shoes off when they walk inside the ones that are allowed to have family reunions,

For Thanksgiving, I overhear an old grandmother, chasing her grandchild that has run to our side of the neighborhood,

“Get back here. It’s dangerous over there!”

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For Christmas, we give pork eggrolls to one of our white neighbor’s families as a gift. They have cable and a trampoline and ask us to grab their mail when they go camping.

A week later, their son tells me they were “tasty but too spicy. But they were really good with soy sauce.”

8. I am older, and have been able to visit Chinatowns in Manhattan, Queens and Boston—a few of the backbones that hold up what’s left of Asian America. I want to say they are more than counterfeit jewelry, tourist money and dirty walls. More than two dollar dumplings and ducks hanging in the windows like lynched civilians.

This country picks culture apart like pulled pork off the bone, Takes the prime ribs and leaves only ligaments.

Someone tells me an overheated electrical box once set a Chinatown building on fire. It killed a man and left 200 other people without homes.

I wonder if Chinatown could ever receive the care and attention of a Midtown high-rise. Why it is left uninspected. To burn. To remain in fragments.

Maybe because they can bury Canal Street, Or leave us stranded in Oklahoma.

Even when we have nothing, Our recipes are in our bones, An ancestral recipe slow-brewing a skeleton, a flame igniting our breath.

We are in our kitchens, Bent vertebrae over an open fire, Making so much out of so little.

Our kitchens, rusted joints, burning, cooking up the largest firestorm this side of town has ever smelled.

Food

Veronica Ni, RISD ‘16 Watercolor

Chris Tran ‘17 constantly yearns for Southern fried cooking.

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Shoutotsu

Lynn Tachihara, Brown ‘17 Oil on canvas

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remembering driving uphill in sri lanka after reading michael ondaatje, seven years laterMelanie Abeygunawardana

“It’s colder here than anywhere else. 65 degrees, can you believe it?”

From city to country, and then back again. Tasted the jackfruit curry

my aunt made because I couldn’t say no, and it didn’t even taste bad, a dim

yellow richness that furrowed roots into my soft palate like the 300-year-

old tree I leaned against, gingerly, in Kandy, my sneakers resting against its

ancient, octopus-like roots. Donned a sarong over my denim shorts because

the Maligawa temple wouldn’t let me in otherwise, concrete pale and scorching

against the soles of my bare feet, so painful I didn’t even notice the guards

carrying AKs at the entryway. Gold and green, everywhere, the sky swelled with

water, always, light blues and grays staring like foreign irises. Broken palms

framing the edge of long highways, the ocean humming a siren song beyond.

There was the shell of a large boat tucked neatly into white sand, a carcass,

and I was told that the government still hadn’t cleaned up all the wreckage yet.

The seat always sticking to my bare skin as I took these journeys, up and down a

country no larger than West Virginia, but it seemed so large, so unknowable in

its blinding brightness. Brushed away innumerable tiny ants off continents of

spilled ice cream, where they shivered, strangely immobile, on white tablecloth.

My uncle’s driver took a liking to me and would bring me bread from nearby

stands – large loaves that tasted salty and small loaves that tasted sweet.

Scrambled for names of common food items, settled on English, or silence,

instead. Watched adorable elephant orphans spray water at each other in a

sanctuary that featured sheds made from corrugated metal, stamped with the

words “PHILADELPHIA ZOO.” Saw more elephants at the Perahera Parade, huge

PINK in The Desert

Ji Sub Jeong, RISD ‘15 Gouache

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animals draped in colored lights and filigreed, blood-red velvet, swaying like

moons against the orange night as they trundled in a row, carrying thin, shirtless

men and, just once, the Buddha’s sacred tooth, hidden in a gold box within

another gold box within another. On our way to our safely-reserved vantage

point at a nearby bank, I was nearly swallowed up in the crowd, brown bodies

and round syllables separating me from my parents, pressing clamorously

against me – the country I never knew claiming me as its own. Why did you go

through them? my uncle asked, incredulous, when we arrived at our box. You

could have walked around.

“The British liked this region because it reminded them of home. Because it was

so cold and gray. Funny, right?”

Tea country. The photographs on the side of boxes and canisters that

have made this country famous, in a sighing kind of way. Hills swelling lushly,

improbably. My breath opaque against the car window glass. Skin prickling

up as we rise like steam. My parents and I walk to a rest house at the edge of

a precipice and look out over the edge - an incredible view, so high above

everything. I am amazed, yet again, at how varied this country is – hot flatness

becoming crowded cities, becoming dusty deserts, becoming long highways

winding upward, and now this coolness, this elevation, this sudden, gorgeous

openness. The Pidurutalagala mountain yawns before me, birthed from violet

mist to white cloud like a dragon, maybe, or a myth. I absorb a greenness I do

not understand, a greenness so bright it hurts my eyes, reflects like a second

sky. A middle-aged Englishman in khakis sits on a rattan stool nearby, paints

the scenery in watery pastels that bleed, impotent, into white. A copy of a copy

of a copy. The mountain, a violent aftershock beneath my closed lids. Green

blooming against black. I will look out into the American fall and wonder, so

many years later. It is hard to believe that any of this is real.

Melanie Abeygunawardana ‘16 is preoccupied with maps and the length of her hair.

Stepwell

Mabel Fung, Brown ‘15 Photography

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S A Prayer Ayoosh Pareek

I designed and created this bench while investigating traditional craft, forms and techniques. The

form of the bench references traditional Chinese furniture forms and details, while the design,

color scheme and stitching techniques utilize the traditional Korean craft of patchwork quilt

making known as Bojagi.

Let us make our own traditions. We don’t smoke, you definitely don’t. But let me

rent a cabin somewhere (Vermont, maybe, or maybe the Catskills) where we have

a routine. We arrive with temptation, my hands on your waist. I open up a pack

of cigarettes like I’ve been doing it for decades (Lucky Strikes, maybe, or maybe

Camel). I pack it down into my palm, turning it over, doing it again every few

seconds as if it was the only ritual I did, and this was my prayer. Open the plastic

wrapping, take one out, hand it to you, but we don’t smoke, you definitely don’t.

But during these days in the cabin, we smoke. We both smoke. We’re both smoke.

My hands on your waist, you lie down, and we do what we do. We fuck in a cabin,

jump around to stupid songs, read books that we’ve been saving the whole year. Of

course, we’re ambitious, and in these days, in the cabin, we can do all the things

we have wanted to do the whole year. And we both know we can’t, but we don’t

quite believe it (not yet).

Next year comes around, and I rent a cabin somewhere (the same place, maybe,

probably, because we’re creatures of habit). I buy a pack of cigarettes and pray to

the only gods I’ve known, my addictions. We smoke, we fuck, we listen to songs,

and we read. Rinse and repeat, we’re now stuck in this cycle where each year, we

nonsmokers leave our lives for a few days, to inhale, as part of a ritual.

“It can’t be that bad, right? I mean people survive for decades while smoking.” It

can’t be that bad, right? I mean people survive for decades. People have been

doing it for decades. People have been addicts for decades.

At the end of each episode, our cabin is left as it was before we came. For the

next couple to come in and take part in their own ritual, whatever it may be, likely

involving sex and cigarettes, and maybe even coffee, until they realize they are like

smoke. We are like smoke.

Until they realize

(they are, we are, all addicts, everywhere).

Bojagi Bench

Brandon Kento Saisho, RISD ‘16 Mahogany, quilted silk, upholstery foam, plywood and tung oil Ayoosh Pareek ‘12 does not: smoke, but is: an addict.

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Buildings

Amy Chen, Brown/RISD ‘17 Fones Construct

Typhoon SummerJacqueline Gu

here lies a classroom with four concrete walls and a concrete floor that always looked rained on because of the children who watered it, like a plant they needed to revive, every morning took the watering can and teacher look I cleaned our classroom, a classroom full of head shoulders knees and toes and the big bad wolf blowing down houses too soft to stay up, that echoed with hollers before lunch and secrets after dark, the whine of mosquitoes an ever-present lullaby, where someone with gangly limbs and coarse hair made a promise to someone who cared, something about someday, something about Boston; a room that stored pages and pages of loose ends, full of confessions, sticky like the air that was hot and wet and frequently broke into rain, where ten lost college-aged kids learned how to fall in love with something intangible, a room in a school that saw the days slip by quietly, without fanfare, until its inhabitants packed their bags one rainy night and just like that the cord was cut, the thread snapped—a room that exists now only in a handful of photos, where everything inchoate continues to ghost around the periphery of memories baby-breath blue, throbbing, still hurt to touch, still hurt to wake

Visiting the Mushroom God

Veronica Ni ‘16 Digital

Jacqueline Gu ‘17 isn’t at all nostalgic for mosquito bites.

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Of the flowersAndy Li

How to greet the rain

Grace Sun Brown ‘16 Silk Screen

Andy Li ‘17 loves to write about his favorite thing in the world (food) and turn it into something so ugly that it’s at least a little pretty to the ears.

A bouquet of flowers sifted from the centers of my chestLymphous calla liliesA spicy sweetBut still buttered with salt-weightThe languor of center fleshsickles of the blood-coagulated dandelionsdark red diamond daisiescirculating like continentsabove the pink ashMy collarbone wrinkles downInto the glowing deepnesses I hold onto a vertical suffering

Stretch the drapery of muscleTautly upholsterupon the heavy air aroundDensity like breath of leather,And I sink backLike the dying cornucopia

Slowly pullYoke the backward bloom of a bursted orchidAnd can’t wrest the fresh exhaustMushroomcasing of my gazeGlaze the pastburned skinAnd I am charted uponInto cast cremation

The plates of my chest cryAnd of the flowersAn assorted rebirthOf the new deathBackwards-sinking rosesAnd the fallOf the nose liquidinto the bloodbathI callevery sunlight.

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the thunder is made of glass and we are made of lightJoshua Shiau

and the instrument is now bringing them into alignment.

over mouth over liquid over rock pouring through the phone line

atomized into instance into palm into metal into vibration & me

I heard a small voice saying:

you have no choice but to swallow your own seeds

plant, root, and rip from the ground the stringy mass,

and with a curved blade sliver curls of violet and green and milky

heartflesh and leave them, rolled in air

soft & resting above her ear

Bayou

Joshua Shiau RISD ‘15 is footsure.Digital Photography

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Egg (Yoshioka Minoru) translated by Simone Kurial

Yoshioka Minoru

Egg

At a time when even the gods are absentAnd not even the shadow of a living thing is presentNot even the wafting of the smell of deathA summer noon of deep despondency – From within that condensed spaceCloud-like images are torn asunderThings that stick and ooze are being made to overflowIn a place blanketed in silenceSomething is bornA birth that evinces the presence of a lifePolished by the dust and the lightA single egg, constituting the grand earth.

Yoshioka Minoru is one of the most well-known and respected Japanese poets of modern and post-modern styles. With no formal education, he nevertheless began writing in traditional poetic forms at a young age. His later poetry freer in verse and more abstract in theme and style reflect his experiences as a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army and his subsequent internment in a POW camp following Japan’s surrender in 1945. His poetry, embraces without traditional restraint, the visceral and surreal nature of his subject matter. In this poem, Yoshioka’s unique style is evident in his juxtaposition of desolation with congestion – viscous images culminate in an almost unbearable humidity, finally breaking to reveal the suggestion of a life within the chaos of a world that has forsaken even the gods.

Only two previous translations of this poem by Yoshioka Minoru are readily accessible.

吉岡実

卵

神も不在の時　いきているものの影もなく　死の臭いものぼらぬ　深い虚脱の夏の正午　密集した圏内から　雲のごときものを引き裂き　　粘質のものを氾濫させ　森閑とした場所に　うまれたものがある　ひとつの生を暗示したものがある　塵と光にみがかれた　一個の卵が大地を占めている

Splurge

Crystal Pei RISD ‘16 Digital Simone Kurial ‘15 took the road less traveled by, and now she’s lost.

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From my youth you

showed your affection in

two ways.

There was the ordinary, campfire

“I love you”

and the homeland, the sweet-sounding

“Mahal kita.”

When you said the first,

my toes would tingle.

When you said the second,

my ears would laugh,

for the latter surely fell off the tongue

more easily.

I thanked God, then,

when I picked up the phone and

heard you talking to your lover,

unfaithful,

twenty years later.

And you whispered the first.

I thanked God you spared me the second

for my own wife.

I will never be you.

Mahal kita.

To MotherAnonymous

Prayer for serenity

Margaret Hu, Brown ‘18Pencil and color pencil

Anonymous believes that pain is best dissipated through the cultivation of berries.

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S the last egg Elaine Hsiang

the mountains wake me up again

two hours early. i hate that my

body is adjusting without me.

i hate that the kitchen fills

itself with popcorn every time i

fry my breakfast in butter. i hate

that a little buzz at 11am will never

be socially acceptable under the age

of 60. i hate self-proclaimed poets

who call their readers “dumplings.”

i am not a prayer of pleated dough.

i once had a dream of being

evacuated by the u.s. embassy

but of course that’s the easy way out.

yesterday i carried a new friend’s luggage

down six flights of stairs and tripped

up one thinking about the weight of mine

being foreign has a way of teaching me my

body is different. my body has a way of

saying goodbye. my body a way of saying

hello again.

Choice

Haejin Park, RISD ‘15 Digital

Elaine Hsiang ‘15, when decaf’d, becomes an uncomfortably grumpy coffee snob right around 11 AM.

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Perhaps more out of luck and habit than anything else, I happened to be able

to watch events develop in Hong Kong this summer until the eruption of the

so-called “Umbrella Movement” at the end of September. After graduation,

I returned to Hong Kong, where I witnessed the annual July 1st March, a

tradition since 2003, when half a million took to the streets to protest the

implementation of national security legislation perceived to curtail civil

liberties. This year’s march was the biggest since it began. What would

otherwise be a thirty-minute walk from Causeway Bay to Central took over six

hours to complete. In the tropical summer heat and sudden downpours, the call

from those gathered was clear and simple: “Let us have a genuine choice for our

2017 elections”.

When the National People’s Congress handed down their decision on August 31,

very few had expected it to be as restrictive as it was. Even pro-establishment

and pro-Beijing politicians were caught by surprise.

Occupy Central quickly announced a rally that night where thousands

participated, vowing to begin the “era of resistance”. Yet even then, it

was unclear how many would actually heed Occupy Central’s call for civil

disobedience. I watched as Occupy Central fought to capture the city’s support

during its Black Cloth March on September 14. Smaller in scale than previous

marches, I doubted whether such a relatively small number of activists could

outmaneuver the police, who had trained for months now to deal with their

disruption.

It was then that students in Hong Kong began to organize the Class Boycotts.

I was inspired by the creativity and ingenuity shown as students ditched

classrooms to go outdoors and listen to the hundred or so lectures organized

by academics who had volunteered their services so that the students could

continue learning. Lectures ranged from topics as diverse as “A Feminist

Critique of Democracy” and “The Mathematics of Social Justice”. The Class

July 1st March: This year’s march was the biggest since it began in 2003 September 14: Occupy Central fights to capture the city’s support in the Black Cloth March

A Visual History of the #UmbrellaMovementphoto essay by Larry Au

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Boycott began at the Chinese University of Hong Kong campus on September 22

and continued in Tamar Park until September 26.

On September 26 around 10 pm, the students decided to reclaim Civic Square,

the small public space by the Central Government Complex that had recently

been fenced off. A gut feeling told me that things could go south. As supporters

on the scene rallied around the cry “Protect Our Students,” they placed

themselves between the students and the police by blocking the road that led to

Civic Square. The police attempted to penetrate the human barrier by pushing

through with riot gear and using pepper spray. While the police were overly

aggressive and clearly disorganized, the students and their supporters remained

calm and peaceful, knowing that even a slight shove back towards the police

could serve as excuse for arrest and retaliatory force. They would hold out until

around 4 am when the police finally retreated.

The mood was elated as people recognized that they themselves and those

immediately around them were willing to risk arrest in order to be heard—the

essence of civil disobedience.

Yet, in spite of this willingness to be arrested, at around 6 pm, the police

decided to release tear gas into the midst of those gathered—including young

children, members of the press, the students themselves, and elderly citizens.

I had left the streets just half an hour earlier and did not return. Over 80

canisters were fired that night at members of the public, who pleaded with

police on their knees with their hands up in the air. All they had were umbrellas,

saran wrap, surgical masks, and rain ponchos to protect themselves from the

onslaught of chemical weaponry. The international media captured the chaos

that ensued.

I managed to sneak one more look at the occupation sites the next day on

September 29 before flying out that night to London.

What I will say is this: Regardless of the outcomes, the Umbrella Movement

has taught the world so much. First, it has brought to the fore of our local and

global consciousness, many of the problems that exist in Hong Kong: that of an

unaccountable system of government and a debilitating economic inequality

that has deprived an entire generation of opportunity. Second, it has shown us

that protest can be virtuous and must be conducted according to principles

of nonviolence. And third, we have seen how seemingly apathetic or uncaring

publics can be brought together as a community—united in their response to

police brutality and injustice.

While over a month has passed (on the day of writing), I and many other

overseas remain sleepless over events back home. Even though we are

detached and removed from the immediate context of Hong Kong, we remain

deeply connected to the networks of affect that those in the diaspora found

themselves suddenly implicated with.

September 26: Students reclaimed Civic Square, awaiting arrestSeptember 22: The kickoff of the Class Boycotts on at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

September 28: Around 4 pm when citizens decided to occupy Gloucester Road in their attempt to get to Civic Square

Larry Au‘ 14 is studying Global Governance and Diplomacy at the University of Oxford.

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Hello My Name Is Michael Ee, RISD ‘15

Mixed media interactive installation

Hello, My Name Is (2014) invites viewers to take a name sticker to label a face. Over time, the names accumulate, hiding the faces that emerge from the shadows. This installation has been staged in America and in Singapore.

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Poetry written by Asians in the Americas began long before European settler

colonials conceived of a coherent “America.” Trade across the Pacific brought

writers and writings of Chinese and Filipino origins. Coolie labor introduced

more than improvisational cuisine and urban life; many wrote letters to loved

ones back home, sang epic songs passed down through generations, and kept

journals observing the triumphs and tragedies of life in the United States. These

artifacts constitute an archive of Asian American poetry.

Since 1945 and the repeal of Asian exclusion laws effective in 1965, the archive of

Asian American poetry has grown with incredible rigor. First- and fourth-genera-

tion Asian American poets of primarily East and South Asian origins crossed into

the mainstream, boasting work that drew from both Western and Eastern influ-

ences. They were U.S.-born, expatriates, refugees, and political exiles. All went

beyond the imperative to expand the meanings of “being American” during their

particular times and places. They attempted to expand the various humanities

available to Asians in the Americas.

Today, the province of Asian American poetry continues to expand. New writers

from the diaspora are demanding a seat for Asian American poetry at the table of

power. Asian American women, queer, trans*, working class, and undocumented

writers are reimagining the territory of Asian American poetics. They argue that

a decolonial Asian American poetics—a poetics constructed outside the white

gaze, the white patriarchal and WASP imaginary—is, in fact, the new American

poetics.

This decolonial Asian American poetics is concerned at once with a poetics

of innovation as well as a poetics of witness and justice. It does not, however,

explain or seek to create oversimplified generalizations. It uses but does not rely

on the master’s language, theoretical frameworks, and barely accurate analytics.

Instead, it bastardizes these multicultural, Orientalist, and pseudo-academic

approaches in order to create something entirely new. It does, for lack of better

words, what poetry should do.

The Asian American poets who have succeeded in this task benefit from decades

of human and civil rights movements championed at the top and grassroots lev-

els. Organizations like Kundiman and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop work

tirelessly to push their demands forward. The increasing number of YouTube

From “Beats” to ResistanceSome notes on Asian American poetics

Paul Tran

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poets, neighborhood writing programs, Asian American Studies initiatives, and

opportunities for Asian American writers at any age to embark on their writing

journeys make possible this vision for Asian American poetry; that we not only sit

at the table of power, we bring our ancestors, our families, our kinfolks, our loved

ones, our desired worlds, our friends and communities and partners in solidarity

to the table as well.

Brown University was where I resolved to become an Asian American poet. It is

also a place where many Asian American poets have honed in on their crafts and

talents and decision to write another kind of universe. The following list is more

than a record of some of the influential Asian American poets in my life. It is a call

to action to the current and next generations of Asian American poets at Brown

to step into the light, to open your mouths, to push your pen beyond the wall of

what you dare to dream possible, to hold it all no matter how searing the weight

can be. And we’ll do this together.

Ai, Dread (W.W. Norton, 2003)

Jennifer Chang, The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia, 2008)

Cathy Linh Che, Split (Alice James, 2014)

Franny Choi, Floating Brilliant Gone (Write Bloody, 2014)

Tarfia Faizullah, Seam (Southern Illinois University, 2014)

Sarah Gambito, Matadora (Alice James, 2004)

Joseph Legaspi, Imago (Cavankerry, 2007)

Li-Young Lee, Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2009)

Eugenia Leigh, Blood, Sparrows & Sparrows (Four Way, 2014)

Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (W.W. Norton, 2003)

Suji Kwock Kim, Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003)

Sally Wen Mao, Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James, 2014)

Hieu Minh Nguyen, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody, 2014)

Srikanth Reddy, Facts for Visitors (University of California, 2004)

Lee Ann Roripaugh, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois University, 2009)

Mitsuye Yamada, Camp Notes & Other Writings (Rutgers University Press, 1998)

R.A. Villanueva, Reliqueria (University of Nebraska, 2014)

Ocean Vuong, Burnings (Sibling Rivalry, 2011)

As ever yours,

Paul Tran

Brooklyn, New York

October 2014

Paul Tran ‘14 is the author of the forthcoming book, Still Life, and can be holla’ed @speakdeadly or iampaultran.com.

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The Family

Anny Li ’15 walks these streets as if they were written pages.

Mabel Fung ’15 dreams and full circles.

Haejin Park RISD ’15 wants to live in her paintings.

Christina Choi ’15 thinks of all the stories that we could’ve told.

Betty Kim ’15.5 lights another grapefruit candle for the night.

Grace Sun ’16 dances in the produce section.

Moma Wilwayco RISD ’16 rocking heels and crushes hearts.

Lisa Lee ’17 hopes that the flowers will at least smell good as she descends down a dark and stormy path.

Mia Gold ’17 dreams of a world with more honey and less bee stings.

Yvonne Fong ’18 is a Pacific Islander who has never learned how to swim.

Cravings

Ellen Shi RISD ‘15 Opaque Watercolor

Perishables

Soyoon Kim Brown ‘18 Oil on Canvas

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