Gut feelings: Indigestibility as an archive of surplus Otherness
My mother always told me to bleed discreetly. I have taken heed of this warning in my pursuits, biting my tongue before the words can spill over. But the wound festers, and now I find myself bleeding on everything I touch, so to speak. I want to admit the wound for the little girl I was, picking at this scab, begging to be believed. So I return to those nostalgia-steeped snapshots of girlhood, and interspersed between there’s the crispness of a particular, recurring bodily mechanism: vomiting. I didn’t know at the time, but nausea- its psychological and ideological loadedness- would critically recalibrate my relationship to just about everything. Indeed, when it comes to primal bodily sensations, Moveable Feast is deeply indebted to my illness, for the set of experiences it granted me.
Abject vessels: Laura Aguilar’s renegotiations of Chicana identity
Between two flags- an American and a Mexican one- a bare-chested woman is held captive: her body is bound by a thick cargo rope, snaking around the neck like a noose; her clenched fists tethered, pendulous breasts bulging over. Her head is hooded by a Mexican flag, whose key motif- an eagle devouring a serpent atop some prickly nopal- covers her face. Below the waist, she is wrapped in an American flag, half stripes, half stars. Born from the interstice between ostensible thesis and antithesis- between the U.S. and Mexico, subordination and desire, oppression and resistance- this is the mise-en-scene of Three Eagles Flying (1990), a photographic self-portrait by the late Chicana artist Laura Aguilar.
Grief and solace conjured aromatically: 'Crying in H Mart' review
In the first chapter of Crying in H Mart, we find Michelle Zauner mourning her mother, Chongmi, amid the aisles of H Mart brimming with banchan and rice cakes. Her grief is both summoned and solaced by the aromatics of Korean cuisine that emanate from either side- on one hand, soothed by the familiar pungency of fermented black beans, and on the other, inflamed upon remembering there’s no one left to consult on “which brand of seaweed we used to buy”. Among humdrum shoppers, we witness a poignant moment that cuts deep into the diaspora, capturing the predicament of accessing one’s estranged cultural roots when the only lifeline has been severed.
From honorary whites to yellow peril: Reflections on the Golden Globes’ treatment of ‘Minari’ in a climate of heightened anti-Asian violence
On March 1st, Lee Isaac Chung’s ‘Minari’ won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes— a kind of pyrrhic victory that saw Asian-Americans once again awarded a meritocratic star of white approval. Some two weeks later, eight people, six of whom were women of East Asian descent, were murdered by a white mass shooter in three Atlanta-area spas. The proximity of these events firmly demarcate the poles of the Asian diasporic experience— a constant oscillation between the exalted stature of ‘honorary whites’ and that of perpetual foreigners travailing at the margins of society.