#like for her to say I didn’t have the real first gen immigrant experience when I literally am one really rubbed me the wrong way

[angelsrecs]

YOUR BEST AMERICAN BOY by hatsuna

Completed | T | 23k

Main tags: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi, Getting Together, Alternate Universe- Asian Americans, High School, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

“What unites both generations [OF ASIAN AMERICANS], Eng and Han suggest, is a kind of linguistic lack, a missing vocabulary—a paucity of stories that they might tell themselves about where they are going, and what it would mean to feel whole.”

Kiyoomi Sakusa has spent the last seventeen years believing he is boring. He has never met anyone inclined to challenge this belief.

c/w: self-harm, blood, implied child abuse

—

The main reason I love this fic so much is because sakusa is so relatable in this fic. One of the central themes of this fic is the “Asian American experience” and cultural dissonance. I’m a second (and 1/2 I guess? My mom moved when she was a kid, my dad was born here) generation Chinese Canadian and it was like sakusa was written just to remind me of my experiences.

This bring me into my first favourite scene:

“But when we were talking just now, you said Kiyomi, which is wrong. You're missing a vowel. You're missing the other 'o.'"

"Am I?" Kiyoomi asks, the shame returning, the pebble in his belly expanding into a stone.

"Yeah, you sure are." Atsumu's eyes are far away, but his voice reaches a hand down Kiyoomi's throat and tugs.

It comes up green.

I don’t know any Chinese—mandarin or cantonese—like I should. When I was a child I was put into Chinese school; my Saturday’s were spent learning mandarin (because my parents thought it would be more useful for my future) instead of the Cantonese my parents knew. When I was in grade 1, full of resentment of having an extra day of school unlike my other friends, when my mandarin homework was too difficult for my parents to help me with, I begged my parents to let me stop. As a last ditch effort they put me into the Cantonese equivalent of my grade level and I just remember being so confused and hopeless that class. I never had to go again after that. Now I can’t even write my own name anymore and during family gatherings I say hello and look to my parents to translate for me when they inevitably as the usual How old are you now? How’s school going? When the subject comes up on why I don’t know Chinese I tend to blame my parents Why didn’t you speak it at home when I was younger? Why did you put me in mandarin classes? but in all honesty it’s my fault for giving up. I think about that a lot. Back to the point, I had some other Chinese friends ask what my Chinese name and when I said it there were some laughs about what it sounded like (wash hair). I’m pretty sure it’s because of my pronunciation (because canto and mandarin shouldn’t be that different); anyways, this scene really struck home.

I don’t know anything about OCD other than what was put in a chapter of my into to psychology class, but I think hatsuna does an incredible writing Sakusa’s OCD. I appreciated how they included definitions in the diagnosis scene, as well as how we see his experience full frontal during the fic.

Also I’m a sucker for words as a motif so when humanity/being alive is repeated throughout this fic it felt a punch to the stomach (this is a good thing) every time.

Kiyoomi remembers the rush of heat he felt in his cheeks at this declaration—the unshakable understanding that he was human. It simmered in his stomach for a long, long time. 

Because a name means you are real. A name means you are real. 

[movies] are a form of proof that yes, we were human, and yes, we were here.

Another thing I loved in this fic is the way hatsuna writes relationships, platonic or romantic.

I loved how the author also explored sakusas relationship with his mother (oh god here comes another tangent). My mom is a 1st Gen immigrant and while she didn’t move on her own (let alone move for me like in this fic), if I think about her childhood too much I get kinda weepy. She moved because of the Vietnam war and to keep it short, I know I’m extremely privileged to be in the position I am. She doesn’t talk much about that time (to me or to my dad either I’m pretty sure), but I heard one story from my aunt is how she fell off the boat when travelling from Vietnam. My mom has always been afraid of water.

One of the things I get on my fyp the most on tiktok is clips of people’s podcasts (sorry they’re kinda good and I’ve found some nice ones this way) and I remember 2 clips really vividly; they were from 2nd gen immigrants talking about their parents and the sacrifices they made and the guilt & gratitude that comes with it. I think that’s more of the angle this fic takes.

She’s out cold before Kiyoomi can tell her that he knows. That he knows monsters and martyrs are two sides of the same coin, that perhaps mothers are the closest thing humans will ever get to angels. 

Regarding the relationship between sakusa & atsumu, I wouldn’t say this is a slow burn, but we get these wonderful snippets of their development with this snapshot style of writing which takes me to my other favourite parts of this fic

The chuckle his partner lets out flutters like butterfly wings; it kisses him on the cheek. And just like that—all liquid gold and lavender—it dawns on Kiyoomi that Atsumu embodies happiness. Miya Atsumu is joy itself.

“What word were you assigned for the project again?” Kiyoomi starts exporting his video. “Happiness,”

"Love," Maria repeats, her eyes still glued to her true-tone screen. She's rereading her script one last time, checking for spelling errors before she submits it. "I thought your word was love."

Note: I cut out a few section of this last scene so it’s more succinct

Author does such a good job balancing the romance aspect and the more.. character study aspect (not quite sure how to word it). Like I said this isn’t quite a slow burn because I don’t feel the type of tension that’s associated with the tag, their development is more like a flow of water that builds up to the confession scene between the two.

For anyone else who has felt like a part of them has been missing due to being raised outside of their home country, YOUR BEST AMERICAN BOY will lay you bare in the best way possible.

#haikyuu!! #fic rec

[themeatlife]

Oscar Cram Session - Watching the 2023 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees

I don’t remember the situation in years past, but this year feels like a unique opportunity.

Weeks ago when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their nominees for the Oscars, I was surprised at how many I’ve actually heard of this year.  And so out of curiosity, I looked up how many were available on streaming.  To my surprise, a large number were available on some sort of streaming service.  The Academy Awards just happened to land on the opening weekend of my kids’ Spring Break where we didn’t have any planned activities.

So I hopped on the TV and started watching.  I had already seen Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once, so I watched the six remaining that were nominated and streaming.

Here are the Best Picture nominees for this year’s Academy Awards along with where they are showing:

All Quiet on the Western Front (Netflix) Avatar: The Way of Water (In Theaters Only) The Banshees of Inisherin (HBOMax) Elvis (HBOMax) Everything Everywhere All at Once (Showtime) The Fabelmans (In Theaters/VOD) Tar (Peacock) Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount+) Triangle of Sadness (Hulu) Women Talking (Amazon Prime Video)

Here’s what I think will win and my reviews as well.

The Frontrunner:

Everything Everywhere All at Once the Meat Life Rating - 8.5/10

This film will likely win. The title is pretty emblematic of what the movie is.  A comedy, an action movie, a family drama, an immigrant story, a multiversal sci-fi epic.  Indie darling production company A24 lands another award winning release that is very much a product of the social media meme culture and the TikTok clip era.  Heavy genre influence as well.  But at the heart of it is the struggle between a 1st gen immigrant mother and her 2nd gen American daughter.  Star studded performances from film legends Michelle Yeoh (Best Actress Nominee), Jamie Lee Curtis (Best Supporting Actress Nominee), and James Hong, a breakthrough performance from Stephanie Hsu (Best Supporting Actress Nominee), and a wonderful comeback for Ke Huy Quan (Best Supporting Actor Nominee).

The Nostalgia Picks:

Top Gun: Maverick the Meat Life Rating - 9/10

What can I say?  This is my favorite but I know it won’t win.  My parents told me that Top Gun was my first movie theater movie when I was 3 but that I cried the whole time because it was loud.  But 5 years later me and my brother would play the movie on VHS basically on a loop for years.  This Maverick release was an even better end product in every way compared to the original but the soundtrack.  The story is enough of a standalone that it holds up well if you didn’t see the original, but it is so much richer if you have seen the original.  Tom Cruise is in his bag.  Miles Teller really does look like Goose’s son.  Great to see Val Kilmer.  And the real aerial footage is a spectacular sight.  All in all a theater experience worth the contemporary price of admission.

Elvis the Meat Life Rating - 7/10

I’m not emotionally attached to Elvis or his music.  I knew of him and heard a bunch of his hits but I wouldn’t consider myself super versed in Elvis Presley’s life or catalog.  From an outsider’s standpoint, Austin Butler totally immersed himself into the Elvis persona in portraying the title character.  Tom Hanks’ accent choice was odd.  I don’t think this was at all historically accurate, but this era of biopics don’t focus on accuracies but rather capturing the vibe.  And if you’ve seen a Baz Luhrmann movie, it’s all about the vibes.  Sidenote on Luhrmann, he’s kind of a one trick pony.  Super stylized is his thing, and all of his films kind of have the same look and feel.  In any event, the movie was entertaining for sure.

Tremendously Acted:

The Banshees of Inisheran the Meat Life Rating - 7.5/10

There is a reason that both leads are up for acting awards.  Colin Farrell, up for Best Actor, and Brendan Gleeson, up for Best Supporting Actor, play two gentlemen that were close friends until Gleeson’s character pulls away.  Kerry Condon was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress.  Other details would spoil the film.  Banshees is equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking.  And the landscape of the Irish shoreline of Inisheran as the backdrop are tremendously shot.

Tar the Meat Life Rating - 7/10

Cate Blanchett acts her ass off as Lydia Tar, a major conductor at the peak of her powers in the male-dominated industry before her world starts falling apart.  Tar is a commentary on power and the corrosive effects of such power.  Blanchett is a tour de force.  The entire film is shot following Blanchett, so there aren’t any scenes without her, and for good reason.  And the character’s Porsche Taycan is awesome.

The Uncomfortable Watches (In A Good Way):

All Quiet on the Western Front the Meat Life Rating - 8/10

A unique look at the Great War.  We have had a bunch of World War I based films, but rarely a look from the German side.  This film is a touching story of a young man Paul Baumer played by Felix Kammerer and his journey through the stalemated trench war with his comrades in arms.  There are moments of laughter and bonding that make the tough war moments much more heartbreaking.

Triangle of Sadness the Meat Life Rating - 7/10

I don’t know if satire quite describes this cringe comedy.  There are several layers of story here to analyze whether it is the haves vs have nots social commentary, or the gross out puke and poop humor toward the end of the boat scenes.  Even the opening date scene with the restaurant check scene is very cringe-inducing.  Loads of uncomfortable laughter here.

Women Talking the Meat Life Rating - 7/10

I don’t understand the Mennonite community fully.  But I do know that in these separate religious communities are a tough for women, especially when it comes with handling sexual assault.  Women Talking is a moving film about a group of Mennonite women discussing whether or not to leave their community and the heartbreak that either staying or leaving would lead to.

I know eventually I will see both Avatar: The Way of Water and The Fabelmans eventually.  I’ll give my opinion on those as well.  Enjoy the Oscars and the movies nominated as well!

[wavesmp3]

yessss the cousins in bangalore day had the cutest relationship it made me miss my cousins 😭😭 ahh gotchu gotchu, makes sense!! i basically grew up on bollywood so i have so many opinions/thoughts regarding that but i only got into south indian cinema a few years ago so i know like . 10 actors at most ?? and oooh i see !! i’ve unfortunately been to karnataka like once ? bc i always go to mumbai when i visit :((( i wanna visit kerala so badly tho like i’ve seen so many pics and it looks stunning! i feel you tho i used to have the indian map memorized but now i can barely remember where mumbai is ahaha.

and no i totally get what you’re saying about being white-washed . like . i personally grew up in a very desi household with my culture literally ingrained into me so it’s just a big part of my life now BUT frankly it’s a miracle i maintained that growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood bc it’s not easy . when ppl around u look down on your culture at all times and are outright ignorant and racist it’s inevitable that you start to hide parts of yourself and in turn become white-washed so to speak? so while it’s unfortunate i don’t think it’s the fault of the individual by any means! plus there’s a difference between looking down on your culture and not being in touch with it. the bashing of whitewashed poc def needs to stop bc it’s more often than not bc of the environment and assimilation and all that jazz 🙄🙄 it’s quite counter productive to bash and rather shouldnt you try to “remedy” by helping them learn about their culture rather than looking down on them? OKAY now i’ve gotten carried away but basically i completely agree with u !!!

(also i’ve heard of that movie and it sounds super interesting!!! i’ve been meaning to watch it actually)

okieee so like I know you didn’t ask for any recs but here are some of my fave malayalam movies: manichitrathazou, swapnakoodu, and classmates. no pressure to watch any of these lol I just thought I’d mention them, most are older movies cause they’re what my parents would put on when I was younger. and yes kerala is honestly so gorgeous, I haven’t been in so long, but me and roommate talk about going to kerala specifically all the time cause she’s from punjab and she’s like shawna take me lol

but yesss. I know I said I wasn’t gonna talk about this but uh here we go. I mean honestly youve summed up everything I could say. I have distinct memories of growing up and wishing I was white. like people were never racist to me (that I knew of) but it was this sense of isolation. looking around a classroom and not seeing one other person who looked the way I did was very alienating. so I think, especially when you’re younger, it’s so easy to fall into this trap of subconsciously distancing yourself from your culture. but then the older I get, the more I learn to appreciate my culture instead of feeling this shame and in turn repress it. and ive had a lot of people tell me that because I’m so removed from my culture it makes me less indian or desi than them, but that’s really not how it works, like at all. it’s as you said, learning and coming to love your culture later in life should really be encouraged instead of looked down upon. like maybe i know less of the language and less of the music and less of the movies, but that doesn’t invalidate my experiences as a first gen immigrant and as a poc. and that most definitely doesn’t make me any less Indian. im still allowed to learn about and appreciate a culture that’s literally mine.

also us and them was good lol I do recommend

#asks #yea I got carried away too LMAO #but don’t worry now that I’m in the tags I’m about to get even more carried away #like idk if this is coming out but I feel a lot of like disdain when it comes to this topic because I am so removed from my own culture #and I’ve literally had a friend tell me once that I didn’t have the ‘real’ first generation immigrant experience #and I’ve never brought it up with that friend again because I doubt she even remembers tbh but I should #she said that because I didn’t have to translate bank documents for my parents #and yeah I can totally agree with her and say that sucked but just because I didn’t have to do that for mine doesn’t mean that I didn’t #have my own unique and very real experiences as a first gen immigrant #like for her to say I didn’t have the real first gen immigrant experience when I literally am one really rubbed me the wrong way #and other friends too; like I rmemeber once a friend mentioned like a sweet or something and me and my sister didn’t know it #and they went that’s how we know y’all aren’t actually Indian . and it was meant as a joke but words still have power and it’s just not true #idk I just think a lot of too has to do with how hard my mother tried to help up assimilate to American culture yknow #like she went out of her way and we poured all this money into building a second outdoor kitchen to our house just so that her kids wouldn’t #go to school smelling like curry and I never made the connection growing up but then I get older and my mom makes a comment about how my #friends house smells and how she made sure her kids never smelt like that #and all those jokes about indian food and it’s smell and all these micro aggressions that media may think is harmless is so incredibly not #!!! #okay I’m def off topic now #I just have a lot of thoughts but my thumbs are tired lol

[isabeljkim]

LN: Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation Of The Self

DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE READ THE STORY HERE.

People assume that Homecoming is autobiographical or reflects my emotions in that the main character’s perspective is my own. I think this happens a lot when someone writes Immigrant Narratives, and I have a hard time saying “hey people shouldn’t do that” because I also think that a lot of time the application of the self into the story is true. But when people have talked to me about Homecoming, they’ve assumed a specific background/state of mind for me which isn’t necessarily accurate. 

It’s a pretty personal story for me in that I dropped a lot of cosmetic details about my history into the story, but not a personal story for me in that I don’t think it reflects any sort of immigrant angst that I feel, only sort of a clean desire to explain to those who have non-diaspora lives that diaspora is complicated and people don’t always feel the way you think they should feel about it. My goal with the story was to really just drive home the thesis that diaspora is messy, you don’t get to choose who you become, the line between foreigner and homeland is thin, America is like a worm that gets into your brain, please experience being uncomfortable for 6000 words, I am not here to play.

I feel a weird need to disclose that I’m not technically an immigrant. Everyone who reads this assumes I am, but I was born in NJ, and my parents lived in the states for 20 years before they had me…but I spent a lot of my childhood in Korea because my dad got a job in Korea right before I was born. I spent the first ten years of my life shuttling between California and Korea because he was a professor at universities in both countries, though I went to school in Korea. I call myself 1.5 gen, haha. I’m an edge case. 

This story was one of those cases where I wrote something kind of sad and I thought “this isn’t that sad” and everyone I showed it to was like “dude this is sad as shit” and I was like “oh is it sad?” because I considered the story more about the tension between the decisions about your life that you get to choose, versus the ones that are chosen for you, and I didn’t feel that was particularly sad as much as it is one of the clean realities of life: a lot of the choices that create who you are get made for you. 

I wrote this story because I felt that I hadn’t read any immigrant/second generation narratives that talked about the tension between the fact that we live in a global world and it’s not hard anymore to return places, held against the fact that you can never actually return to somewhere you last left, and the compounding fact the person you are has changed in the intervening time so that they would be unrecognizable to the self you left behind. 

I felt that there wasn’t a story for Guys Like Me, who went to Korea most summers after moving to the states until they stopped and then eventually realized that they had turned into someone who can confidently say “I’m from New Jersey” rather than tentatively say “I’m from New Jersey?” and what that means about loss and change. 

I also wrote this story because I thought “haha wouldn’t it be fucked up if immigration worked like github instancing?”

I don’t know if I’m going to write more things about Korea Stuff. This is my first bigboy publication (but check out my game at Sub-Q!! It’s good!!) and I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a diaspora writer/asian things specifically by the market. I am just some guy who likes wizards and lasers. I am kind of an ambivalent asian. i just go here. You just think I go here because I’ve got the eyes and hair and skin tone. 

The folktale about the knife, fisherman, is a bastardized version of a folktale I heard in elementary school, which I couldn’t find online even though I searched for it quite a bit. There’s a lot of stories about “guy goes to the fae court under the sea, comes back, oh shit, time has passed,” but I made up all the stuff about the knife, the killing of the self, etc. Based on a real story though! That’s real! 

I named Soyoung after my childhood best friend, who I’ve lost touch with for the last decade on account of her living in Korea and me moving permanently to the states. Don’t read too much into that. Claire Soyoung Ko if you’re out there…..

I accidentally named Jungwon after one of my cousins because I forgot it was his name because I always call him by his American name and now I can’t show him the story because it has his name in it. I swear this wasn’t on purpose.

In the first draft, Soyoung was bisexual, but I couldn’t fit that fact in the final draft. Know in your heart that this is true and canon, though.

The grandfather’s apartment, the Shinsegae department store basement, and the grandfather’s gravesite are all based on my actual human grandpa’s apartment/grave/places near it, and it was really just an exercise in nostalgic laziness that I described places I was pretty intimately familiar with. (If you want to know something meta that’s a little sad and strange related to the story: my family is talking about what to do with my grandfather’s grave now, because it’s too far from most of the family for them to visit. We’re trying to figure out where to take my grandparent’s ashes. I learned about this a month after my story was published and felt some kind of way).

Homecoming really is the best example I’ve written of how a story is sad or happy depending on where you end it. I ended it at the saddest moment. Soyoung’s life ends up pretty good! Soyoung ends up happy mostly, in the way that happiness is a mutable state for most people.

I cannot stress enough that Dr. Crouton, best cat, does get sent for and Soyoung DOES get her cat back. This is fucking crucial.

I always think about doing more with this story, because I think it’s an interesting concept that says a lot about migration/diaspora/immigration stuff, but I hesitate because I don’t know if I’m the best writer to write a story about this. 

#linernotes

[yournameyn]

Feeling Deeply

Genre: Fluff so much fluff. Arranged Marriage fic.

Pairing: Namjoon x OC

A/N: Aaaaaa this is the first fic I'm posting ever ever. It's basically a way to follow the red thread of my desires. OC is named Brishti. She's Indian. She's Bengali & curvy & an introvert. This whole fic is 90% going to be a slow burn fluff fic about two introvert nerds getting to know each other. Seriously there's like hardly any real angst, maybe slight angst about okay when are these two going to bang - if you look very carefully but basically its just slooooow fluuuufff. Hopefully you all like it. Please let me know what you think.

Current Chapter: Remember this is all happening in the 1960s. OC & Namjoon are both really well off first gen immigrants. Nowhere is this the general representation of immigrant experience. Just a special exception because I want to write fluuuuffff. A bit of how this weird marriage took place. Lots of character details.

Previously in Feeling Deeply: Preface-ish

CHAPTER 1

The doorbell rang. Brishti got up to answer it. She handed the cheque to the movers. She was proud to have chipped in. Namjoon hadn’t had a problem with it. Brishti had tried really hard to react as though that was a very normal thing to have happened in a marriage (it wasn’t, not in the marriages she’d seen). Namjoon had taken part in picking out the furniture too - something that was always delegated to the woman. In fact, both of them had been clueless about how to decorate a home. All the same, they’d put together the basics. Today, they had received and unpacked all of their furniture - a two seater sofa, two tables - one for him, one for her & a set of four chairs. And a bed. It had been four days since the wedding.

“Brishti…” Namjoon sighed softly, without her knowing.

He seemed to be drunk on her beauty & her words. He was just noticing how her skin reminded him of the colour of the dark chestnut wood in the warmest evening glow.

Many of his relatives were upset he’d chosen a dark-skinned woman as his wife, a woman who was four years older nonetheless! He knew what the gossip-mongers would say, since he was one of the most eligible bachelors in their social circle, back home in Korea - ”She’s 30! Indian! I didn’t know the Kims had such bad money problems!” Even thinking about the snide comments they would be saying made him livid.

He was thankful his parents only wanted him to be happy. Happily married, that is. Happily single was not really an option. Only two weeks ago, Namjoon was approaching 27 and being severely pressured by his parents to get married soon. They were so tired of their son’s fickle mind that they were even prepared to accept a white woman for their daughter-in-law. When his parents heard about Brishti, they were overjoyed that she belonged to the same continent as Korea.

Namjoon would later learn the strange events that landed his would-be Indian bride in the pile of photos sent by his parent-appointed-official Korean matchmaker-cum-defacto-grandmother.

Brishti had avoided marriage like the plague & had tried to keep her freedom. So much so, the shame she’d brought on had forced her parents to cart her off with her brother to London, claiming they’d found a suitor for her there. And so it fell to Bikram, Brishti’s elder brother - who wanted to frolic in London while trying to be a lawyer - to get her married & send word (and a few photos) of his sister’s wedding as soon as possible.

To be in London, to be here in the swinging sixties, Brishti was happy as can be - she was freer here than she had ever been. She cut off her hair to a pixie-cut the first week of being here. Just this would have caused a month-long conflict at her home. Here, she could finally put to use the education she’d received intended as certificates for the trophy wife she was supposed to be. Here, she could dream.

When the novelty of the new place wore off a bit, Brishti missed the forest. She was from Bengal & had practically grown up in the Sunderbans. And that language, the language of forests, that was truly her mother-tongue. There, in the forest everything was equal. A mushroom & a tree, an elephant & an ant - all worked together to create something bigger than the sum of their parts. Out here in the human world, Brishti had noticed a lot more parasitic creatures.

There weren’t many forests in dreary London. Libraries, however, were aplenty. The next best thing was to be surrounded by books. Brishti began dreaming of a life around books. She wanted to work.

When she approached her brother about wanting to apply for an apprenticeship at The British Library, he scoffed at Brishti’s dream. So, a bargain was struck, Brishti would shut up and marry someone that would let her work (just wording it like that enraged her) in exchange for the permission and travel allowance to be an apprentice librarian at the British Library.

Bikram had rushed to his parent-assigned-defacto-Bangla-grandmother-cum-matchmaker but it seemed that she had been rushed to the hospital right before his arrival. Not willing to take any chances, Brishti’s brother had approached the only other matchmaker-cum-asian-grandmother in the building - Namjoon’s. It had taken him an hour and a bribe of 50 pounds to convince the halmeoni to include his ‘wrong-age, wrong-nationality, wrong-colour, wrong-figure, wrong-attitude’ sister’s photos in her pile.

Namjoon saw her in the pile of photos labelled ‘trash’ in Korean - the black and white photograph of Brishti, with the big bright black eyes. And the antics of a woman who clearly didn’t want to get married - she was huffing angrily in the picture, but was about to break into a smile, as if the photographer was teasing her, trying to ease her into taking her picture. There were three pictures, in one of which, Brishti was trying to swat the lens with the book in her hand. Namjoon had studied the picture carefully to find that the book she was reading was Anna Karenina. ‘How fitting’, he had thought then.

He’d told the matchmaker and his parents right away that this is the girl he wanted to meet - the first of all the photos ever shown to him. This was the one right he’d fought for with his parents - he gets to have the final say. His parents had agreed to let him have an almost-arranged marriage. Mostly because of how proud of him they were.

It irked him a little, how proud they were - of their son who had chosen to be a lawyer instead of his thirteen-year-old self’s dream - to be a poet. He knew they meant well. They meant for him to have a stable, settled life. He knew he was a grown man now, still, it scared him to think how they would react if they knew he still wrote poetry and intended to publish, someday, if he ever found someone he could actually read it to. That it was still his dream.

Namjoon got back to the present when Brishti said “Done!” as she handed Namjoon’s pen back to him. She smiled a little smile at him. He felt her smile getting warmer toward him since the first time he’d met her, over a week ago.

Wanting to keep the conversation going, Namjoon asked her, “Is there anything you’d like to ask me?” Half expecting her to ask - ‘How did you decide so soon that you wanted to marry me?’ or ‘Did you ever see me before we met?’ but she turned around to face him & simply asked a question he’d forgotten people could ask each other-

“How are you?”

Just then, it seemed like the universe had conspired for him to meet his dream again - A simple question that carried a hug. Namjoon smiled wide because he found himself married to a poem.

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Oooooh god you read it?! Thank you so much! Please please let me know what you thought! Get into my messages about it! I would love nothing more than to hear what you felt about this!

#bts kim namjoon #fanfic #namjoon fluff #namjoon arranged marriage #namjoon x oc #arranged marriage #slow burn #slow burn fic #fluff fic #bts fanfic #bts #indian oc #red thread fics

[inmyarmswrappedin]

So, because Fatou’s season ends today and, as far as we know, Druck hasn’t been renewed yet, I want to go over the things I feel the team did well in this season and the things I hope they take with them when they sit down to write the next season (which I’m manifesting will be Ava’s).

I think that s5 and, perhaps to a bigger extent, s6, were the team’s attempt to address fan feedback for and criticisms of s3 and s4. So I have hopes that, after possibly the most scrutinized season of any Skams, they are still willing to read even more feedback and sit down once again to craft a couple more seasons (possibly even 3 or 4 more seasons!).

So, without further ado, things that were done well! (Do I have to add “in my opinion”? Do I??)

I liked that for both s5 and s6, the thorough-line for the season wasn’t made obvious or shared in a press release, but rather it was up to fans to connect the story threads for themselves.

I loved that the team sought to address one of the biggest criticisms of s3, that is, that Matteo was given so many symptoms of a mental illness, but it ultimately went unaddressed in the narrative. They did this by giving Nora a dissociative disorder, and Fatou dyscalculia. (Matteo has been headcanoned as being mentally ill and having a disability.) It allowed the teams to develop both fan theories into full-blown seasons and give each of them the importance they deserved.

I have said this already, but I really appreciate that the team chose misunderstood, misrepresented and underrepresented mental illnesses and disabilities. I feel like s5 and s6 will be referents for many years, because they really took the time to portray a dissociative disorder and dyscalculia in a down-to-earth, unhurried way that isn’t meant to shock and awe, but simply allow us to understand why and when Nora and Fatou will struggle. Druck got the viewers to anticipate when Nora and Fatou would struggle, and that’s the first step in being able to anticipate and accommodate the needs of the Noras and Fatous of the world. I really can’t overstate how important this is and what a difference it makes in a real, tangible way. These seasons aren’t meant to be enjoyed for voyeuristic reasons, but they will legitimately help people.

One of the biggest criticisms of s4 was that Amira and Sam didn’t connect as women of color. In fact, it seemed like in s4 Sam was treated as another white friend, when in s2 both she and Amira were the victims of Kiki’s racism. The team addressed this by giving us Ava and Fatou’s friendship, which I want to say might be the first friendship between main characters of color where their race is a substantial reason for their bond. (There are the Sanas with their Jamillas, but the Jamillas aren’t main characters, and then there are friendships like Jo and Megan and Zoya, or Imaan and Liv, or Luca and Yasmina, but iirc in every case their bond as women of color isn’t made explicit.)

Another criticism of s4 was the way Kiki turned into the world’s most understanding white friend offscreen. The team addressed this with the Ava and Mailin storyline, which I think was wonderfully and subtly set up in s5, then built on with the biology test leaked answers.

On the topic of race, I think a major criticism of s3 was that David’s ethnicity wasn’t acknowledged (to the point where a white actress was cast to play his sister gvhvhv). The team has made up for this with Josh (more in the s6 sm than in s5, but I still count it) and with Kieu My. Fatou and Kieu My bonded over being first/second gen children of immigrants, and in doing so, they acknowledged that these characters aren’t white and have different experiences than white Germans.  

The first 6 episodes of this season were some of the finest writing in the Skams. The storylines all connected and built on each other. The motifs were just so good and beautiful and fitting. The themes were all clearly defined and easy to follow.

The tortoise plot was one of the most fun and imaginative storylines in any Skams, it connected Fatou and Ismail in a believable way. And not to rave about a fucking tortoise, but animals can be really uncooperative and that tortoise delivered every fucking clip. Druck has a reputation for being one of the most depressive versions of Skam, but the Maike/Burger plot was just plain fun.

I feel like some of the old gen’s instas were a bit self-indulgent. I’m thinking specifically of Matteo’s memes and how they they weren’t necessarily the kind of memes a gay dude born in 2001 would pick, but someone a decade older. I think this is much better done with new gen. Fatou’s memes reflect her age and her sexuality, and not just that, but Ava, Mailin, Kieu My, Josh, etc. all pick memes and even focus on different aspects of recent news, based on their gender, race, personalities, interests, etc.

I appreciate that the team found a way to fit a sex scene between Fatou and Kieu My to add to the small catalogue of wlw sex scenes on Skams (I’m including the scene in lovleg or we’d only have two lol). While I understood the reasons eskam opted not to include one, I thought there were ways to feature a sex scene that didn’t sexualize the actresses and didn’t require nudity. Cases in point: the lovleg scene, and this scene in Druck.

And it also needs to be said. This is the first original season with a main of color, and the third season overall (after Liv and Imane) where 10 episodes are given to a character of color and no one else. Of the three, it’s certainly the season that loved and respected its main the most. The bar is so low it’s in hell, but Druck did clear that bar!

With all that said, let’s talk about the things I would really want the team to address in following seasons:

The thing I most want them to fix might be small or unimportant for a lot of people, but I think it’s at the core of why the season has been unenjoyable or certain plot points haven’t come across the way the team wanted, for many people. I am talking about the overly expositional nature of the writing.  It appears as if the team approached the writing of the clips with the intention of hitting each beat as noted in their agreed upon outline, and absolutely nothing else was to be added. This is an issue both in s5 and s6. It’s just less noticeable in s5, because s5 is setting up stuff for Fatou’s season, and possibly even seasons that haven’t been written yet. The fact that absolutely every second counts makes for a stressful watching experience for me, because the narrative tension is always heightened. Whereas with Skam, the narrative tension would build throughout the clip. Take the Pride scene in Skam, for instance. The clip allows for Isak and Eskild to get increasingly more agitated as they butt heads. I feel like if this Druck team had done the Pride scene in s5 or s6, the clip would’ve started with both Isak and Eskild already on edge, and cut much of the dialogue that got them there.

On the topic of naturalistic dialogue, this season doesn’t have it. Here is an example from ep 10 clip 2, Wieder vereint/Reunited 11:37.

Fatou: I’ll get a certificate too and bring it over to you. And I checked it, I only have to change one course and my schedule will work.

Teacher: Miss Jallow, you are not the first one to come to me with an epiphany. We could fill entire school weeks with the lessons you missed. In addition, Doctor Steinberg told me about your, well… activities. You don’t have a lot of arguments on your side. 

Fatou: But I’ve spoken to all of the teachers and they said they are okay with it. 

Teacher: You seem to have friends among the teaching staff. Mrs Pavlovic put in a word for you. Okay then, do it and go before I change my mind. [translated by @kieu-tou! Thank you!] 

Like. This is the bare bones version of a dialogue. This should be the first draft, not the final version. The coordinator goes from absolute no to yes, with just one line from Fatou. The coordinator gives reasons that would necessitate more than one sentence of counterargument, like Fatou’s absences and the Biology test leaked answers. The coordinator even says Fatou doesn’t have a lot of arguments on her side, and yet it takes Fatou one line to change her mind!

And of course we viewers don’t want or need a lot of time with the coordinator. And particularly at this point in the season, no one would enjoy a naturalistic dialogue with the coordinator of all people.  But my point is that this is an issue with the dialogue all this season (and last season as well, but this season has been more scrutinized), the reason I picked this example is because of how easy it is to see here.

Which brings us to the pacing of the clips, and specifically the Friday clips. Because the script goes straight to the information the team wants to convey to the viewers, skipping the build up to it, many Friday clips have fallen flat, felt abrupt, and have been, tbh, unsatisfying. Again, I had this issue in s5, but as that season went on, I felt like the team had a better grip on Friday clips. But then they did it again in the first Friday clip this season, and so I think this is something the writers really should work on. The first Friday clip in Isak’s season closes on Isak being sandwiched by Emma and Even on a bench, visually setting up the love triangle, or more accurately, the personifications of who Isak should want to hook up with and who he really wants. But in order to get there, we’re shown a good amount of info, from the way Vilde, Eva and Sana are handling Noora’s absence, to Chris and Kasper, Even hovering around Isak, Emma trying to impress Isak, Isak escaping and, like, draping himself on the walls because he’s so over it all. Isak playing a game on the bathroom to stall for time. The paper towel maneuver to immediately give us a sense of what a weirdo Even is. A conversation between Isak and Even that gives us some clues about Even’s shame, as well as establish interests in common (like weed), and this is all before Emma even joins them! Just think of all the stuff we learn about who Isak, Even, Emma, Eva, Vilde or Sana are as people, before we get to the point of the clip! Fatou’s season simply didn’t have that. Compare it with the first Friday clip of Fatou’s season where the cashqueens quickly talk about the leaked answers, one of the major storylines this season that only gets a couple lines, before Fatou says she doesn’t want to talk about school (Fatou’s struggles with school, another major storyline), and then we’re onto the point of the clip, which is that Kieu My likes girls too. AND FADE TO BLACK. When people say they want longer clips, what they mean isn’t artificially inflate the clip length or add more plot stuff. Just let us watch the characters interact with each other so that we get a feel for how they relate to each other. I know I wish we’d have gotten more of Ava and Fatou interacting with each other before things turned to shit, and Ava with the other girls, so that I know why they all like and value Ava so much. I wish we’d have gotten more of Kieu My talking to the cashqueens about, like, why she didn’t make use of the biology test answers, instead of getting it on a chat. Or food combos they don’t like. So it makes more sense that later on Kieu My actually thinks she and Fatou are friends.  And every line doesn’t have to count. In Skam España, the characters are constantly talking and not everything they ever talked about ended up being relevant. When one of the characters lied about her house undergoing renovations to hide the fact that she was poor, the characters joked about Italian marble and put on bad Italian accents and made that Italian hand gesture. None of this was important to the plot because those renovations weren’t real to begin with, but they made viewers feel like these were real friends joking around, instead of characters needing to hit every storyline beat in a clip.

I have this joke with my friends about Druck always going 🤪🤪 in the last third of every season, in which a season that was very tightly written and cohesive suddenly pulls something inexplicable and pretty much impossible to resolve in 1-3 episodes. Hanna’s season suddenly switching to Mia, Björn creeping on Mia in episode 9! of a total 10, David getting outed in episode 8 and then disappearing for a whole week, Amira’s season pivoting to Mia and Hanna. It has happened in every season except Nora’s, so I thought the team had learned its lesson, but then the forgotten date with Ava happened. To be clear. It really makes no sense that Nora would have hung out with Ava several times since Tuesday, and the topic of the cashqueens being officially introduced to Kieu My wouldn’t have come up. it’s just not realistic.gif I feel like at that point the writing for the rest of the reason became super contrived to keep Fatou miserable and apart from Kieu My and Ava to artificially delay the reunions until episode 9 and 10. Why add a cheating insinuation and the main checking her partner’s messages in episode 8 if you know you won’t be able to properly resolve it? Why make Kieu My mock Fatou’s “uhm” if it’s not going to be addressed in their reunion clip? Kieu My had taken the initiative for a lot of the relationship, so it’s okay for Fatou to take the initiative when it comes to making up. You don’t have to add things that can only be resolved through an expositional info dump. (Please no more exposition than it’s necessary! I think we’ve established that at this point lol.) In the case of Fatou’s season, this is even sadder because I feel like Kieu My’s intimacy issues could’ve been the reason to drive them apart for two weeks, rather than the Maya/uhm stuff. This could’ve also been resolved through Fatou and Kieu My explicitly negotiating their boundaries and how they want to be comforted and how they want to comfort each other, which I thought was the issue with Fatou rejecting Kieu My’s attempts to help while wanting physical touch, while Kieu My didn’t want to be touched but rather seen.  

There are going to be many thinkpieces on why a myriad of stuff didn’t work for people, so I’m going to keep this simple and address one last thing. I think that choosing to focus on Nora’s mental illness and Fatou’s disability is a great choice that doesn’t complicate the themes too much, but Druck (and all the Skams, but I’m invested only in Druck succeeding at this point) still struggles with being intersectional. This is the major reason why the Ava/Mailin storyline ended not with a bang, but a whimper. There just wasn’t enough work done to connect Fatou’s struggles not just to her disability, but also to her race (and even her sexuality). I think that if people really want (and lbr, it’ll be mostly poc who will put in that effort and work), they can see how Fatou’s race affected the way other people and especially adults reacted to her, but this wasn’t made explicit. If Ava and Mailin are going to argue about racism all season, why not connect that with Karin firing Fatou from Aquarius? As it stands, Karin fired Fatou because of a disability neither of them knew Fatou has, and that was the resolution to that storyline. Why not make it explicit that the Physics teacher had preconceived ideas about Fatou because Fatou is black? Why wasn’t Fatou’s disability addressed in the meeting with the coordinator? Why didn’t Fatou express to Mailin that Fatou, too, had issues with how Mailin was acting wrt racism? It felt like, with the way the season was putting so much emphasis on racism, all these threads were going to be connected. In the end though, it almost felt as if only Ava is affected by racism (aside from Mailin mentioning Fatou in the last episode). It’s not like talking about how racism affects Fatou is going to make the topic redundant for Ava’s or Ismail’s season. As a light-skinned black lesbian with a disability, Fatou’s life is going to be impacted by racism in a different way than Ava’s will, as a dark-skinned black fat straight cis girl, or Ismail’s, as a Turkish-German possibly Muslim possibly non binary person. All these experiences are specific enough, and different enough, that they can be touched upon in different seasons without becoming redundant. The fact that Fatou’s season almost seemed to forget at times that she is a black lesbian, doesn’t bode well for Ava’s and Ismail’s season to acknowledge all their struggles.

The bottom line is that this season really was great and did a lot of good, and I feel like the writing just needs to be tweaked a bit for further seasons to be even better and more enjoyable overall. I am very pleasantly surprised by how the team took s1-s4 fan feedback to heart and worked to implement suggestions, and so I really trust them and hope they keep working on the show. It’d be a shame if Druck wasn’t renewed, with this team at the helm.    

#druck #this post is 3K+ words in word I'm so sorry #but I really hope it makes its way to the writers and is helpful

[aion-rsa]

Scarface: Where Tony Montana Went Wrong

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“All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for no one,” Tony Montana declares in the 1983 gangster classic, Scarface. Yet Al Pacino’s antihero breaks both in his quest for money, power, and women. And just as he is on the brink of winning the trifecta, he is blown away like so much dust up a nose.

Did he lose because the Cuban mobster didn’t heed the advice of his first crime boss? Or is it because he just couldn’t stand to see his sister and his best friend wearing his-and-her pajamas? In truth, Montana’s fall can probably be traced back to when he learned to speak English by “watching guys like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.”

Directed by Brian De Palma, and written by Oliver Stone, Scarface is a remake of Howard Hawks’ vastly influential 1932 mob movie, so Montana’s explosive descent was preordained. Tony Montana continued Pacino’s run of criminal icons, which included Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon and the ultimate crime family head, Michael Corleone in The Godfather films. The actor supplanted Paul Muni’s Tony Carmonte as the recognizably scarred face of the title role. Pacino would go on to play Carlito in Carlito’s Way and Lefty in Donnie Brasco, but while each hoodlum brings a new facet to his rogues gallery, none of his gangsters ever achieve their ultimate desires. They almost all reach dizzying heights, and everyone of them sees the dream slip through their fingers. Still, Montana experiences perhaps the greatest fall of all.

The original 1932 film took place during Prohibition when crime was a viable means of survival. De Palma’s adaptation happens in the Reagan era, a time when lucky opportunists could get their lips around the spigots of cash before it got a chance to trickle down. Tony’s economic theory is much more succinct: “You know what capitalism is? Getting fucked.”

Scarface is a rags-to-riches-to-self-destructive fireball story, and nothing succeeds like excess. Montana’s first crime boss in America, Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), has weathered the climate change from President Carter to the Gipper, and warns Tony to never “underestimate the other guy’s greed.”

In the original Howard Hughes production, Tony was an immigrant from Italy. In the Cold War era film, Montana is a refugee from Cuba. Their shared first mistake is to believe in the American Dream.

The World Is Yours

These words are flashed in both films and hit each of the two criminal aspirants as hard as the “give me your tired, poor, and hungry” promises carved under the Statue of Liberty. Scarface opens shortly after the Mariel boatlift, the 1980 exodus which followed Cuba’s economic crash. Montana seeks asylum, telling immigration officers he is a political prisoner who doesn’t agree with his country’s politics and owns nothing under communism. He says even American prison is better than his life on the Caribbean island. The officers note his criminal past, the telltale tattoo on his arm, and the scar on his face, which despite their insults was obviously not caused by oral sex.

In exchange for a Green Card, Montana and his friend Manny Ribera (Steven Bauer) assassinate Gen. Emilio Rebenga, who tortured the brother of the crime boss Lopez. Tony settles in sunny Miami. And when he gets out of the kitchen and into the heat of crime, he hits the ground running. “The World Is Yours,” after all. All you have to do is take it, and Montana has both hands out.

Frank warns his protégé, “The guys who last in this business are the guys who fly straight – lowkey, quiet; and the guys who want it all – chicas, champagne, flash – they don’t last.” But Montana is a meteor, bound to burn up in the atmosphere. He gets caught on the orbit of Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), agreeing to supply cocaine from Bolivia independent of the other drug lords. Within a few years, Montana is doing so well, the feds target him for tax evasion.

Tony’s Betrayal of Frank Lopez

Montana’s betrayal of Frank Lopez is crucial to his downfall. Frank is the father figure who initially took a chance on Tony. He let him rise through the ranks, even as he tried to bite off more than he could chew. Frank’s biggest mistake is not making sure his underlings follow his sage advice. He also ignores one of his own commandments. Lopez underestimates Montana’s greed. He trusts Tony to accompany his trusted second-gun Omar Suarez (F. Murray Abraham) to Bolivia to meet with Sosa, and continues to let Tony operate after the druglord hangs Suarez from a helicopter.

The deal Montana makes behind Frank’s back is a major step toward the fall. The vow Tony takes never to betray Sosa ultimately leads to the last splash. Montana breaks his word to both of these men, and they bust his balls as a result. When Tony returns to Miami, Frank is suspicious over Omar’s death and his returning soldier’s independence. As Montana begins to build his own cocaine empire, Frank orders a professional hit.

For gangsters, the only good cop is a bad cop, and it is advisable to grease the wheels which move crime. Mel Bernstein (Harris Yulin) demands his take early in the film at the Babylon Club, which has the perfect cocktail napkins for bribery notes. Bernstein was willing to overlook the murders of Rebenga, “Hector the Toad,” and “that bloodbath at the Sun Ray Hotel.” Tony should have taken him at his word when the cop said he could clean up Tony’s Lopez mess.

Before Tony eliminates Frank, he is hungry. The money and drugs are not a distraction. After he begins to accumulate power, he lets his public profile rise and indulges in conspicuous consumption. Montana keeps a chained-up tiger in front of his compound just to let everyone know how powerful he is. There are real life precedents for this. Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar imported hippos for his private zoo. Brooklyn mobster “Crazy” Joe Gallo kept a pet lion named Cleo in the basement of his headquarters. The scenario was also probably inspired by Miami’s most notorious drug lord, Mario Tabraue, whose predilection for wild cats was featured in the Netflix documentary Tiger King. But the most conspicuous acquisition Montana leveraged cut Frank the deepest.

It’s always a mistake to go after the boss’ girl. James Cagney’s Tommy Powers knew this in The Public Enemy (1931). James Woods’ Maximillian “Max” Bercovicz skirts this in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Montana sets out to steal Frank’s trophy wife, Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfeiffer), from the moment he lays eyes on her, though he waits for the height of his reign to claim her. He does it as much to emasculate his former boss as he does it out of desire. It’s a betrayal equal to having Manny whack Frank while he pleads for his life.

The new couple is married by 1983, but with a marriage always on the rock.

Don’t Get High on Your Own Supply

Montana’s downfall is aided, abetted, but most of all mirrored in his descent into addiction. He probably took his first sniff from Elvira’s stash, but even as Montana bemoans, “I got a junkie for a wife,” he doesn’t get wind of his own problem. “Another Quaalude, and she’ll be mine again,” he reasons as the trophy wife climbs off the pedestal and up on a shelf.

Montana is in deep drug denial when Elvira leaves him after he openly complains she can’t have children because she is polluted with the yaya he’s been peddling. He should at least entertain the notion when she openly wonders if he would even be alive to raise their child.

In American Gangster, Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas knows enough not to dip his nose into the supply. And while Pacino’s slide into the junkie aspects of his character is physically more subtle than Ray Liotta’s bug-eyed Henry Hill in Goodfellas, the results are just as devastating. When Montana was crushing the competition and bagging the Sandman, he had discipline. His mind gets muddled as his drug use spirals out of control. He makes rash decisions, dips into schizoid delusions, and succumbs to white powder paranoia. He can’t see his way through the haze to find alternatives. He walks right into the undercover cop’s money laundering bust.

The drugs dull his instincts. If Tony wasn’t high at the security command center, he would have seen Sosa’s soldiers encroaching his compound over the cameras. He had 10 bodyguards on the property, he could have positioned them defensively. The only thing his ultimate hit man is hiding behind is a pair of killer shades. He never should have been able to sneak behind Montana’s back. Tony also wouldn’t have gotten rid of his most trusted weapon.

Over and Underestimating Little Friends

Tony Montana’s right-hand man would have been the best, first defense against the Sosa attack. What Tony does to Manny Ribera is his worst action. The two are virtually brothers. Their bond goes beyond being partners in crime, it tightened in the “Freedomtown” concentration camp, and solidified in the Miami chainsaw massacre. It is because Manny is Tony’s most trusted soldier that he will never be good enough for Tony’s sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Tony’s saving grace is he believes he is doing all this to ensure a better life for his sister. Gina is supposed to represent the innocence he sacrificed, but she is also an unattainable sin.Tony’s mother doesn’t try to separate her children merely because her daughter might be swallowed in the criminal life; she is curbing what she sees as Tony’s unnatural urges. 

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Even if Tony doesn’t see Manny as a rival for his sister’s affections, he still sees him through the eyes of a fellow criminal, and a womanizing one at that. Tony is just like his mother, who rejects him. Tony brands his friend, and ultimately seals his fate with it.

The problem is Ribera wasn’t made to be a gangster. He is a loyal and efficient consigliere and soldier for Tony’s crew, but he would have been happier slapping his name on knockoff designer jeans. Besides the bubbling incestuous tension exacerbated by the coke haze, Tony doesn’t want to see his best friend happier than him, and denies Gina a real chance at the happiness he wants for her.

It’s the one thing Tony can’t buy for her. Gina and Manny fully expect Tony to be thrilled by their marriage. They were going to surprise him with the news. Tony’s incestuous protectiveness speeds his downfall. He murders Manny as a punishment. Gina is shot by Sosa’s men. Montana loses the two most important people in his life, and his inability to control his lusts destroy them all.

“Say Goodnight to the Bad Guy”

The biggest contributory factor in Tony’s downfall is his humanity. In The Godfather, Sonny Corleone advises his brother Michael not to take things too personally in business. When Lopez gives Montana the mission of delivering a bundle of cocaine to Columbian dealers, the rising mobster takes things very personally. The deal goes bad when Montana’s friend Angel Fernandez is murdered with a chainsaw in a scene so aurally graphic (watch it again, there’s no violence shown, only heard), it almost got the film an X rating.

It was allowed in the film in the name of education, Stone pointed to a DEA report which detailed the exact scenario. Tony teaches the Colombians a lesson in humanity. Not content with leaving with the cash and the coke, he kills every single gang member who had anything to do with Angel’s death.

Tony also lets his conscience be his guide when he’s working the GPI on a hit. Faced with serious jail time for his tax evasion arrest, he makes a deal with Sosa, who is also under fire. Montana agrees to fly to New York and assassinate a journalist before he can give a speech on Sosa’s organization. A bomb has been planted in the journalist’s car, and Tony is in charge of tailing until the perfect detonation point. But when Tony arrives on the scene to assassinate the journalist, he notices the man’s wife and children are with him. Montana not only breaks his word, the promise to protect his powerful partner, but he murders Sosa’s right hand man, Alberto, rather than kill the children playing in the back seat.

“I Always Tell The Truth. Even When I Lie.”

Tony Montana may have been the ballsiest and most charismatic of his machismo mob, but he wasn’t the brightest. He acknowledges his intellectual shortcomings, “I come from the gutter,” he admits. “I know that. I got no education, but that’s okay. I know the street.” But he doesn’t read signs. He can’t tell a freeway from a dead end. Frank Lopez may be a blowhard, but his words of wisdom could have been carved in the cement. 

All the concrete Tony brags about has gone to his head, making his skull thicker than Pacino’s accent. Montana is brash and unbending, narcissistically adherent to only his own advice, and his own worst counsel. His anger blinds him, the battery is running low on his foresight, and he’s so flashy his enemies can see him coming from miles away. And he can’t see them when they’re standing close enough to breathe on the back of his neck. 

Final Massacre

Of course the most obvious reason Tony ends up the way does is because he fights off an army by himself. He’s got quite an arsenal, and the coke probably makes it seem like a good idea at the time, but the decision to stay and fight is vastly miscalculated. Even if Tony had survived the last assassination attempt, Sosa’s men would always be hunting for him. It would have been a short hunt. Tony Montana would have died of a heart attack from all that coke he snorted.

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[neptrabbit]

So. Here are some of my personal thoughts on ith movie. since this post is LONG, most of the thoughts are leaning towards criticism & ofc it contains spoilers so imma put my bad takes under cut. they’re my personal, subjective opinion, so it’d be normal if you agree/disagree. anyways, you’ve been warned.

The opening song

stage performance & movies are two VERY different media, so unavoidably they had to make many changes to adapt the musical to big screen. One thing they were trying to adapt was the breaking the fourth wall narration in the opening song. they changed the setting of a lot of these lines to Usnavi telling a bunch of kids in an unknown future timeline abt Washington Heights. I personally am not a fan of this decision. the cut between the two different timelines in that 8 min release got me pretty confused & taken out & that feeling did not change much when i was watching the movie either. in the course of the movie, suddenly cutting to future timeline breaks the flow & consistency of the narrative for me, esp since the future scenes rlly aren’t that long. Ik it's for the reveal in the end. I still don't like it.

Choreography

the choreography & cinematography by themselves are hella fantasitc. there’re VERY pretty scenes and choreography, esp during songs. from top of my head i can name a few: the reflection of dancing in the opening song, the running scene in It Won’t Be Long Now, the pool scene (with Vanessa floating on a life saver in the middle) in 96000, THE FUCKING ENTIRETY OF PACIENCIA Y FE, the dancing in The Club, the horizontal dancing scene in When The Sun Goes Down, etc. But a lot of the scenes, esp those that involve group dancing, seems a bit out of place when they seem to take place in the real world rather than on stage. This is prolly another demonstration of the difference in the media of stage performance & movies. I had a hard time to suspend my disbelief, and the movie trying to place some of the dancing in the actual narrative rlly didn’t make it better for me.

(at first I thought for some reason the pool scene in 96000 was everyone’s imagination coming together & was looking forward to it. I did not expect it to actually take place in a pool in the movie & they even used a whole sequence of them going to the pool to show them going to the pool to set it up. So is the dancing in the intro. i did not expect an overhead shot to reveal that it actually happened. Moments like these gave me serious pauses & made me unable to rlly appreciate the fantastic cinematography & choreography.)

bc of the reason i stated & the fact the movie is so centered around these songs & the plot gets cut by the narration from the future, this movie kinda strikes me as a series of well-made music videos connected by loose plots & themes rather than an actual movie.

Plot change

as we all are aware, they made several choices regarding the plot. 

changing nina’s reason to leave Stanford from unable to take care of school & jobs to provide for her living at the same time to experience of racism. i’m personally not a fan of this change - i am not implying that racism is not an issue that poc experience daily. It’s just, I expected a more nuanced discussion on racism & identity in a movie centered around a socially & financially marginalized minority group than a few lines of “my roommate lost her shit so her & RA searched me”, “the school board thought i was a waitress at diversity dinner”, “the waiters looked at me in the looks that question if i am with them”, and “i felt lonely and without a community there”. They are pretty superficial considering their impact in the story. tbh the line “when i was younger i’d imagined what would happen if my parents had stayed in Puerto Rico” did a much better job to capture the identity crisis that first gen immigrant children go thru and gave me more emotional impacts than all the horrible things stanford did to nina. 

deleting Hundreds of Stories and putting Paciencia y Fe right before abuela’s death. i understand it’s a narrative choice bc they decided to reveal that abuela won the lottery later & make it that Usnavi had saved to move to DR in the beginning. in the changed lyrics of Paciencia y Fe we also had a peak of abuela’s struggle of deciding whether to leave or stay in Washington Heights. which is nice. but putting that song right before abuela dies rlly makes her conflicting feelings unimportant to the story... maybe the leave or stay refers to her dying, but she doesn’t rlly have much of a choice either way, does it. she’s just.. kinda like some characters in anime.. whose tragic backstory is narrated right before they die to get the readers emotional... but in a pretty song sequence... the choreography & lighting is very pretty tho. gotta give credit where it’s due.

Sonny’s subplot. i rewatched the movie and realized that there was some foreshadowing of his illegal status in the beginning when Daddy Sonny was talking to Usnavi, but tbh it was quite easy to miss.. so i was a bit surprised when they brought up Sonny’s subplot when there was only 45 min left of the movie. that was not enough time to fully develop this plot, esp given that time is used for other subplots too. we know Sonny is very aware of the politics & is sorta an activist, but him wanting to be like Nina & wanting to get into college wasn’t established earlier, so that part following the protest scene feels a bit flat.

Other things

I’ve seen the discussion of the film’s lack of rep of Afro-Latinos, but I am not the most qualified person to talk abt the experience of Afro-Latino community. I’m keeping my ears open and learning on this subject. 

I liked that they made Daniela & Carla a couple and was excited when i heard the news. The movie itself was not rlly explicit on their relationship tho - there were scenes of Carla pulling Daniela outta bed in the beginning & their dancing. but tbh the fact that they added a third Salon lady, Cuca, who’s always hanging around, makes D&C relationship harder to notice. Im not gonna say blink and you’ll miss it, but it’s pretty easy to miss. obv their relationship has nothing to do w the main plot, but eh. wished it was more explicit.

Tl;dr: i think they have a lot of interesting ideas that they didn’t explore fully so the movie feels a bit all over the place. this goes for Vanessa’s hope to become a fashion designer, Nina’s experience of racism & identity crisis, Sonny’s illegal status. Loved Daniela and the songs tho. Piragua song’s funny as hell. A bit sad they didn’t paint abuela in the finale :(

i am familiar w the source material & liked it a TON but i don’t like it enough to feel nostalgia.. so i can’t go in there with a fresh mind & see it without comparing it to the original, and neither do i hold so much affection for it that i can happily ignore the defects. so honestly i’m probably in the group that has the worst experience watching it

also: pls lmm i beg u pls don’t make a live action adaption of hamilton, pls

#ith movie #ith spoilers #my bad takes

[allthislove]

I wanna come back to the affirmative action thing, because I’ve been thinking about it for a while and the shit bothers me, okay?

Racial intelligence is a myth. Positive or negative, this is not a real thing. I’m going to talk about the Model Minority Myth and bit here, and also how Black people, especially Black Americans, are seen as inherently stupider than other people.

On one end of the spectrum, you have Asian people, who do well academically. People talk about them like they’re inherently better at school, or smarter than other people.

On the other end, you have Black people, who are thought of as bad students, stupid, incapable of succeeding in school without the assistance of affirmative action.

Neither point makes much sense, because they ask the person listening to imagine that neither Black nor Asian students have individuality. They can’t succeed or fail because of their own merits, but that their success or failure is because of some thing encoded into their DNA. 

In reality, this is socialization. Before I get into this, I wanted to remind the world that Black women are the most educated demographic in America, today, and so what I’m about to talk about is (thankfully) changing, but let’s take a look at what factors help create both of these myths. 

Asian families, especially immigrant families, tend to push education. It’s almost a virtue. Getting good grades became important for some Asian immigrants because they wanted their children to have their best chance. Immigration is hard. Many immigrants (not just Asian immigrants) come here and have to completely start over. Degrees they earned in their home countries sometimes become useless, here, especially if they’re not fluent in English. They often came to this country and had to initially work very menial, hard labor or dirty task jobs that Americans didn’t want. So, they pushed for their children to do well academically, so that they could become something better when they grew up. 

So, right from the start, Asian parents are pushing for their kids to do extremely well in school.

What happened to Black kids, then? People never seem to tell the full story, here, but when I thought about it, it was obvious. I’m working on a play, right now, about Black people in the American South around the time of the first World War. The main character is a young Black woman who “finished” school at the 8th grade level because there wasn’t a school that taught Black people after that in her area. This wasn’t just some random thing I made up for my play. This is the situation that Black people lived in for a very long time, after Emancipation. While some HBCUs were being founded (thought many of them were initially just seminaries or agricultural schools) many parts of the country just didn’t have places where Black people could learn after a certain point. Couple that with a country that really doesn’t give a crap if Black people get good educations and education just never really became the most important thing, for us. 

Black people valued a lot. We valued our stories. We valued our culture, which we built ourselves because most of our original cultures were stolen from us. We valued music. But, we never got a chance to be socialized to value education, because education was not available to us. And then when it was, it was often subpar.

So, right away, you have two completely different situations. One group, largely immigrants who have everything to lose and access to education; education being one of the main reasons to even come here. One group, brought here on slave ships, enslaved, freed, and then kept from good education for decades, if not an actual century. 

The other factor in Asian academic excellence is that, especially at the college level, you have the top students coming to the US specifically to study at American universities. So, already, you’re skewing the numbers.

Anyway. So, Black people weren’t socialized to treat education with the reverence that many immigrant families do. So, once we started to get better access to education by the mid 1960s, most Black people just didn’t find it to be a virtuous thing to have good grades. Good or bad grades are just a thing. Don’t get me wrong. Black parents still get happy when their kids get an A, and upset when their kids get an F. But it was never treated as this all-encompassing thing. It just is what it is. 

Couple that with, you know... a lot of socioeconomic factors that a lot of Black people still live in, and grades and scores just aren’t that important. 

The thing is, that is shifting. A lot. Like, almost the sharpest course correction Black Americans could have. As I mentioned before, Black women are the most educated demographic in America, now. Why did this happen? I’m not exactly sure. A lot of people credit the emergence of images of Black success on TV in the 80s with shows like The Cosby Show and A Different World with sparking this shift. More Black kids saw that it was possible and therefore more Black kids went to college. The thing, though, is that that’s still mostly Millennials and Gen-Z. Meaning barely 1 generation of Black people have started to become more educated. Which also means, like... we haven’t had the time to see what the impact of this is going to be.

The Model Minority Myth for Asians is decades old. Black people even being able to go to PWIs is shorter than the Model Minority Myth. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is... Black people aren’t more educated because education went easier on us than other people. We’re more educated because we’re capable, and we never were not capable. 

Again, affirmative action makes sure you’re not overlooked because of your race. It doesn’t magically create a spot for you just because you’re Black, and especially not because you’re Black in spite of you being undeserving. And the other thing Affirmative Action doesn’t do is change your grades. If a Black student earned a 4.0, they earned the same 4.0 as and Asian student with a 4.0. Black students succeed or fail on their own merit, not because they’re Black. 

And as for poverty... poverty is incredibly difficult to escape, no matter your race. I’m not the best person to speak on Black poverty, because I’m not poor and I grew up comfortably middle class with two college educated and professional parents, so yeah, but I can say that because I grew up like that, it was far easier for me to go to any 4 year college and earn any degree I wanted than it will be for some poor kid living in the projects with a single parent with a GED. I’m not sure why people act like Black poor people are an example of why Black people are inherently bad or stupid. First of all, you can be incredibly good and incredibly smart and still live in the projects and be poor. Second of all, the existence of bad people in the Black race doesn’t mean that all or even most Black people are bad. Third of all, nobody is stupid, and if they seem “stupid” to you, something else is going on. A lack of education. A cognitive disability. Something. “Stupid”, like “crazy”, is a dismissive, and often ableist, word, and basically means nothing. 

And since I brought up the Model Minority Myth, I think I should mention that it’s also very harmful to Asian people, especially students. One, it’s dehumanizing, and makes people hold Asian people to impossible standards that obviously every Asian person can’t meet. And two, it misses the experiences of Asian people who didn’t come here for academic reasons, many of whom don’t have the same “education as a virtue” thing that many specifically East Asian or Indian immigrants have. Like, people who came here as refugees instead of exchange students. Many of those people find that they get left behind by the myth, teachers offer them less help because they’re Asian and are supposed to be “smarter than everyone else”, and they end up falling into a sort of gap. Many of them drop out, and the cycle of poverty continues. And I guess a third, big problem is that it makes colleges and universities judge Asian applicants more harshly and hold them to a higher standard than everyone else, which means that unless you’re a high flying Asian overachiever, you might have a harder time getting into college than your white or Black friends. 

So, anyway, what I’m saying is that assigning a certain intelligence level to someone based on their race is bad and like... America really has a big problem with race and we need to fix it.

Also, we need to do better, as a whole, about understanding why we have the misconceptions that we have. It’s really frustrating, for me, to constantly feel like I have to prove I’m not stupid to strangers because they all assume I am because I’m Black. Or at least less intelligent than they are. And to have to defend my two degrees constantly because old Duck Dynasty looking white guys think I didn’t earn them because of affirmative action. To have to constantly explain that a Black person’s A is the same A as anyone else in the class, because, while teachers do sometimes grade on a curve, it’s not given racially. And that if you answer a question correctly, it’s correct. And if you solve an equation correctly, you solved it correctly. And that the answer doesn’t change for Black people, and that the work isn’t easier. 

And I think people know that it doesn’t make sense, because when you think about it logically, it doesn’t make sense that one group of people is inherently stupid or that another is inherently smart. We understand individuals. We know lots of people, each of us. We know someone who isn’t bright at all, we know someone who is incredibly smart, we know some people like this who are the same race as each other, and even the same race as us. We know they’re different because they’re individual people, and that they don’t represent our entire race. So, why, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, can we not... as a society... yet understand that race effects our conditions, but does not dictate the type of person we are in the slightest?? Good, bad, smart, pretty, not smart, ugly, short, tall, funny, boring, brave, scared, energetic, whatever the hell... THESE ARE TRAITS THAT MAKE UP INDIVIDUALS, NOT RACES. Race is a lie we tell ourselves to explain why certain people share certain physically features and/or geography. Nothing more. We have built entire societies around this lie, and like... I’m not naive enough to think that race will no longer be a factor any time soon. Some people are far too hung up on their racism for us to truly move on as a society. But I also know that, for us to begin the process of moving on from it, we have to be honest about how it has shaped our society and stop this thing of blaming people for the conditions the society forced on them and how it affected them through the generations. 

This was a lot, and I’m not sure if it’s clear, but yeah. All of this shit is more complicated than you want it to be, and people don’t fit neatly into little stereotype boxes. You have to get that shit out of your head and learn to both see individuals AND understand how history shapes our present reality. 

#racism #the dreaded affirmative action conversation #the model minority myth #BLM #BIPOC #BIPOC thoughts

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: How COVID-19 Will Shape the Class of 2020 For the Rest of Their Lives

They call it commencement because it’s supposed to be a new beginning.

College graduation is one of life’s last clean transitions, a final passage from adolescence to adulthood that is predictable in ways other transitions rarely are. Relationships end with breakups or death, jobs often end with quitting or firing, but college is one of the only things in life that ends with a fresh start. Except when it doesn’t.

One morning in March, Clavey Robertson took a study break and climbed onto the roof of his dorm at the University of California, Berkeley. He had spent the past year working on his senior thesis on the erosion of the social-safety net since the Great Depression, and he needed to clear his head. In the distance, Robertson could see a tiny white speck: the Diamond Princess cruise ship, carrying crew members infected with COVID-19, lingering in the San Francisco Bay.

Photograph by Hannah Beier for TIME

Hannah Beier, a photography major in the Drexel University Class of 2020, has been virtually photographing her classmates in quarantine. She directed this series of portraits over FaceTime.

Two months later, Robertson’s transition to adulthood is in limbo. He skipped his online commencement and he’s living in his childhood bedroom, which had been converted to a guest room. His parents have lost their travel agency work, and his own job prospects have dried up. “No longer am I just a student writing about the Great Depression,” he says. “Now there’s a depression.”

College graduation is often marked by an adjustment period, as students leave the comforts of campus to find their way in the raw wilderness of the job market. But this year’s graduates are staggering into a world that is in some ways unrecognizable. More than 90,000 Americans have died; tens of millions are out of work; entire industries have crumbled. The virus and the economic shock waves it unleashed have hammered Americans of all ages. But graduating in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic will have enduring implications on the Class of 2020: for their memories, their earning power, and their view of what it means to have a functional society. For these young adults, the pandemic represents not just a national crisis but also a defining moment.

Hannah BeierJoshua McCaw, Drexel University Class of 2020, in his childhood bedroom in Brooklyn

Even before COVID-19, the Class of 2020 came of age at a time of fear and uncertainty. Born largely in 1997 and 1998—among the oldest of Gen Z—the Class of 2020 were in day care and pre-kindergarten on 9/11. Their childhoods have been punctuated by school -shootings and catastrophic climate change. Their freshman year at college began with President Donald Trump’s election; their senior year ended with a paralyzing global health crisis. “We stepped into the world as it was starting to fall apart,” says Simone Williams, who graduated from Florida A&M University in an online commencement May 9. “It’s caused my generation to have a vastly different perspective than the people just a few years ahead of us or behind us.”

Researchers have found that the major events voters experience in early adulthood—-roughly between the ages of 14 and 24—tend to define their political attitudes for the rest of their lives. And the Class of 2020’s generation was -already disaffected. Only 8% of -Americans -between 18 and 29 believe the government is working as it should be, and fewer than 1 in 5 consider themselves “very patriotic,” according to the 2020 Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics survey of young Americans. They are at once widely skeptical of U.S. institutions and insistent on more government solutions; they’re disappointed in the current system, but hold out hope for a better one.

Hannah BeierBrooke Yarsinsky, Drexel University Class of 2020, celebrating her birthday in her family’s kitchen in Marlton, N.J.

For the Class of 2020, COVID-19’s lasting impact may be determined by what happens next. If the rising cohort of young workers are left to fend for themselves, mass youth unemployment could lead to permanent disillusionment or widespread despair. A forceful, effective response that invests in the rising generation of American talent could restore their faith in the system.

It’s not clear to the Class of 2020 how the pandemic will play out. They just know it will change their lives. “Everything” is at stake, says Yale history major Adrian Rivera. “It’s this pivotal moment where we’ll never forget what’s done,” he says. “Or what isn’t done.”

School is often a refuge from the gusts of history. But the events that rupture the classroom routine, from President Kennedy’s assassination to 9/11, tend to be the ones that stick with students forever.

The coronavirus disrupted more class time, for more students, than almost any other event in U.S. history. It started with a scramble: The University of Washington announced on March 6 that it was cancelling in-person classes for its 57,000 students. Then Stanford University followed suit. Over the next few days, campuses from Harvard to the University of Michigan announced they’d be transitioning to online learning. Soon, hundreds of other colleges and universities followed.

Hannah BeierBen Scofield, Drexel University Class of 2020, on his bed in his new apartment in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn

By Friday, March 13, an eerie silence fell on campuses across the nation. “Something about that day was really weird, because every time my friends and I would say ‘See you later’ or ‘Catch you after break,’ I just had this sinking feeling that I wasn’t going to see them,” says Vincent Valeriano, a member of Iowa State University’s Class of 2020. “Saying goodbye felt like it carried a lot more weight than it used to.” He ended up watching his online -graduation -ceremony at home, in his pajamas.

For underclassmen, the shortened semester was an irritating disruption. For seniors, it was a total upheaval. “There’s no way for there to be closure,” says Sam Nelson, who recently graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri. “I know in real life, closure doesn’t exist, but this is one of the last moments for young people to say goodbye to young adulthood and move into the next phase of their lives.”

The Class of 2020 hugged their closest friends and mourned their lost semester, but scattered back home without so much as a goodbye to many people they’d lived with for years. Acquaintances who laughed in hallways or shared inside jokes in seminars simply disappeared. Fraternities and sororities canceled their formals and philanthropy events, attempting Zoom happy hours that didn’t come close to the real thing. For some couples, casual hookups quickly escalated into long-distance relationships. Others quietly packed up their feelings for college crushes and left without saying a word.

Hannah Beier for TIMESarah Pruitt, Drexel University Class of 2020, at home with her mom in Colchester, Conn.

The loss of a milestone like an in–person commencement had a special sting for some families. Arianny Pujols, the first natural-born U.S. citizen in her family and the first to graduate from college, still did her hair and makeup as if she were walking across the stage at Missouri State University. She and her family held a small ceremony in her grandfather’s backyard, and then she stood on the sidewalk in her cap and gown waving at cars with a sign that said “Honk, I did it!” Brenda Sanchez, 22, whose parents are immigrants from Mexico, says they will miss both her graduation from Humboldt State University in California and her sister’s college graduation the next day. “My parents didn’t go to school. They didn’t graduate,” says Sanchez, who is herself an immigrant and is protected from deportation by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. “Your heart breaks a little. You did work hard, you did earn this degree, but you’re not going to see yourself walk across that stage.”

Instead of graduating into their future lives, many Class of 2020 seniors feel like they’ve gone backward. “We were ready to be in the world as young adults—not good adults, maybe clumsy adults, but some kind of adult,” says Ilana Goldberg, who recently graduated from Tufts University in an online ceremony. “We’re not in the system anymore, but we’re not far enough out of it to have our footing in the world.”

Hannah BeierLauren, Parsons School of Design Class of 2017, and Dylan, Marist College Class of 2017, quarantining in Lauren’s family home in Woodstock, VT

Eric Kolarik, who was supposed to be sitting at his University of Michigan commencement ceremony in early May, is instead back home in Traverse City, Mich., raking leaves, helping his mom with the dishes, doing the same chores he did in high school. “I’m 22 but I’ve assumed the life of 15-year-old Eric again,” he says. “You feel like a failure to launch.”

If only they knew that a stolen senior spring is the least of their problems. The Class of 2020 is falling through a massive hole in the U.S. social-safety net, into a financial downturn that could define their lives for decades to come. Graduating seniors have lost on–campus jobs that got them through school. Many haven’t been working for long enough to qualify for full unemployment. If they’ve been listed as dependents on their parents’ taxes, they don’t get a stimulus check. They haven’t had time to build up significant savings.

Hannah Beier for TIMEDestiny, Drexel University Class of 2019, at home in Palmyra, PA

“I’m not sure they’ve fully processed what 25% unemployment, disproportionately affecting younger Americans, will actually mean,” says John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. He recalls that during the last recession, the Class of 2009 scrambled to scoop up opportunities, “like a game of- -musical chairs.” The Class of 2020, by contrast, is essentially frozen in place by a pandemic that has trapped much of the nation inside their homes. “There almost are no opportunities in any sector,” Della Volpe says. “It’s like suspended animation.”

More than 1 in 5 employers surveyed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers in April said they were rescinding their summer internship offers. The overall number of postings on the online jobs platform ZipRecruiter have fallen by nearly half since mid-February, while new postings for entry-level positions have plummeted more than 75%, according to ZipRecruiter labor economist Julia Pollak. A year ago, less experienced job seekers were enjoying brisk wage growth and rosy job prospects. Now, Pollak says, “it’s particularly hard for new graduates.

Sanchez, who worked two jobs and started her own eyelash-extension business to help pay for school, has applied for more than 70 jobs in recent weeks without success. Williams, who dreams of working in the entertainment industry, had no luck with at least 15 jobs and struck out with fellowships that are no longer taking applicants; now she’s cobbling together gig work. Robertson had planned to try to get a job in labor activism; these days, he’s considering graduate school instead.

Hannah BeierJillian Yagoda with her boyfriend Benjamin Halperin, both in the University of Maryland Class of 2020, in the apartment they share in College Park, Md.

It’s not just dream jobs that have disappeared. Historically, many young people take positions in the retail or restaurant industries as they find their path. According to Pew, of the roughly 19 million 16-to-24-year-olds in the labor force, more than 9 million were employed in the service sector. Suddenly, a significant chunk of those jobs have evaporated. In April alone, the leisure and hospitality industry lost 47% of its total workforce, with 7.7 million workers newly unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Which means the economic crisis has hit the youngest harder than any other age group. More than half of Americans under 30 say someone in their household has lost a job or taken a pay cut because of the corona-virus crisis, according to Pew, and the youngest workers are more likely than older generations to say that the pandemic has hurt their finances more than other people.

Graduating into a bad economy can affect everything from future earnings to long-term health and happiness. Researchers have found that beginning a career in the teeth of a recession can depress earnings for 10 years, and trigger broader impacts for decades. One study from UCLA and Northwestern found that the young people who came of age -during the early 1980s recession had higher mortality, and were more likely to get divorced, and less likely to have children. Till von Wachter, a UCLA labor economist who has spent years studying this issue, has a name for these young people who enter the labor force at the worst possible moment: “unlucky graduates.”

Hannah BeierSisters Camilla Nappa, Drexel University Class of 2020, and Sophia Nappa, NYU Class of 2022, isolating at their father’s home in St. Louis

Rather than brave a job market battered by COVID-19, some in the Class of 2020 are seeking refuge in graduate school. But that presents its own conundrum. As of 2019, nearly 7 in 10 college students graduated with student loans, with an average tab of nearly $30,000. Going to graduate school can mean –taking on even more debt. “I’m having to take out grad loans, but I can’t work to pay them off,” says Sean Lange, who plans to enroll in a master’s program in public policy after graduating from New York’s Stony Brook University in an online ceremony in May. He’s not even sure he’ll get his money’s worth for the $18,000 annual tuition. Especially if his classes end up being taught online.

All of this—the forgone memories, the abrupt goodbyes, the lost opportunities—will stay with the Class of 2020 forever. “The coronavirus pandemic is the biggest cultural event since World War II,” says Jean Twenge, a psychologist and author of iGen, who studies millennials and Gen Z. “It’s going to have a huge impact on -everyone, but young adults in particular.”

Hannah BeierMagda, Drexel University Class of 2022, with her family in Lynbrook, NY

Even before COVID-19, much of Gen Z was disappointed in the government response to the issues facing their generation. These are the students who joined the March for Our Lives gun-safety movement amid near weekly school shootings, and went on strike over inaction on climate change. They were too young to be swept up in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, but old enough to gravitate toward Bernie Sanders’ message of progressive revolution in the 2016 primary. Those who were old enough to vote overwhelmingly opposed President Trump in that year’s general election. They favor student debt reform and universal health care. They are the most -racially diverse generation in U.S. history.

Their skepticism of public institutions is largely fueled by a sense that the government is doing too little, not too much. A study last year by Pew Research Center found that 7 in 10 wanted the government to “do more to solve problems.” The divide is generational, not political: more than half of Gen Z Republicans say they want the government to do more. (Less than a third of older Republicans agree.)

Near mandatory use of social media has already contributed to sky-high levels of depression and anxiety among Gen Z, according to Twenge. She analyzed data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and found that the number of young adults reporting symptoms of major depression had increased 63% between 2009 and 2017, with a marked turning point around 2012, when smartphone use first became widespread. The pandemic has likely only made them more anxious and disillusioned. Pew found that Americans between 18 and 29 are more likely than older ones to feel depressed during the pandemic, and less hopeful about the future than the senior citizens who are far more vulnerable to the disease caused by the virus.

Hannah Beier for TIMEKathryn Murashige, Drexel University Class of 2020, in the sunroom of her childhood home in Kennett Square, Pa.

Which helps explain why young activists view this as a now-or-never moment for their cohort. They know that the pandemic will shape their futures, even if it’s not yet clear exactly how. “Either we will end up with a generation that is far more resilient than earlier generations,” says Varshini Prakash, a leader of the Gen Z–powered Sunrise Movement, “or it could be a generation that is far more nihilistic, and far less likely to engage in our politics because they’ve seen the institutions fail them at the times they really needed it.” The youngest cohort of Americans “could be traumatized for life,” says Robert Reich, a former U.S. Labor Secretary who is now a professor of public policy at University of California, Berkeley. “They could turn economically and socially inward. They could lose faith in all institutions, and they are trending in that direction anyway.”

In other countries, like Egypt, Tunisia and Spain, widespread unemployment among educated young people has led to social unrest or radicalization, mostly because of a sense of betrayal. They think, “we thought there was some kind of bargain, a social contract, that if we play by the rules we get a job at the end of all of this,” says Heath Prince, a research scientist at University of Texas at Austin. So far youth unemployment in the U.S. is mostly correlated with drug addiction and right-wing extremism, Prince says, and hasn’t tipped into the realm of mass uprisings. Then again, -unemployment hasn’t been this high in nearly 80 years.

“My generation isn’t feeling like they’re being spoken to or listened to, and at the same time, a lot of us are becoming economically disenfranchised,” says Robertson, the University of California, Berkeley, graduate who studied the New Deal. “I definitely think a lot of us have lost confidence in the government.”

The only way to address an unemployment rate reminiscent of the 1930s, according to some scholars, students and activists, is a federal government response that echoes the scale of 1930s reforms. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal included major initiatives to get young Americans back to work. Six days after he took office in 1933, Roosevelt proposed the Civilian Conservation Corps: within four months, the federal government had hired 300,000 young men to plant trees and maintain parks and trails. Three million young people were ultimately employed as part of the program. In 1935, Roosevelt created the National Youth Administration (NYA) as part of the Works Progress Administration, designed to give young Americans work-study and job training. (A young Lyndon B. Johnson got an early political break as an administrator of the NYA program in Texas.) The Americans employed by these New Deal programs grew into the selfless, patriotic army that fought World War II, now known as the “Greatest Generation.”

Some Democrats say the COVID-19 pandemic calls for a similar approach. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has called for a “Coronavirus Containment Corps,” to expand the public-health workforce and employ an army of contact-tracers to help fight the spread of the virus. (Warren, an admirer of the New Deal, noted the CCC acronym is no coincidence.) Senator Chris Coons (D., Del.) joined with Senator Bill Cassidy (R., La.) to champion a national service bill that would expand Americorps and fund 750,000 jobs to help train new health care workers to fight COVID-19. And proponents of a Green New Deal, like Prakash and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, are working to shape the environmental policy of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Given Republicans’ skepticism of big government programs, none of these ideas are likely to make it through Mitch McConnell’s Senate or onto President Trump’s desk. But the political landscape has already shifted the universe of the possible, with Republicans agreeing to recovery measures—such as sending $1,200 stimulus checks to eligible working Americans—that would have been unthinkable only months ago. And if Democrats reclaim the Senate and the White House, broader reform could be closer than it looks. Young people who are skeptical of government’s ability to solve big problems say their faith can be restored. “I have no faith in this Administration and this government,” explains Lange, the Stony Brook public-policy student. “But I believe in Big Government.”

Eric Kolarik spent his last semester at the University of Michigan working on a paper about the 1918 flu pandemic. Now, with classes canceled and his job search on ice, his copy of The Great Influenza is on his childhood bookshelf, alongside his old high school copies of The Crucible and Of Mice and Men. “There will be a sort of unity that the Class of 2020 has with each other, and it’s not fond memories,” he says. “People will say, ‘You’re the Class of 2020,’ and everyone will know what that meant.”

The pandemic has marked the end of one phase for this unlucky cohort. The recovery could mark the beginning of another.

Cover photograph in collaboration with Melissa Nesta

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

[mrsrcbinscn]

Franny Sor Framagucci Robinson Character Sheet 

Dear Mom and Dad, I'll send money, I'm so rich that it ain't funny It oughtta be more than enough to get you through - (x)

Archetype — The Creator 

Birthday — January 17, 1980

Zodiac Sign — Capricorn

MBTI — ENFJ-A (The Protagonist — 93% Extroverted, 56% Intuitive, 60% Feeling, 60% Judging, 83% Assertive)

Enneagram — Type 3w2 — The Charmer

Temperament — Sanguine 

Hogwarts House — Slytherin Primary, Hufflepuff Primary model, Gryffindor Secondary

Moral Alignment —  Lawful Good

Primary Vice — Pride

Primary Virtue — Charity or Diligence 

Element — Air

Song —  A Better Son/Daughter by Rilo Kiley

Overview:

Government name  —  Darareaksmey Francine Sor Framagucci Robinson Name  —  Franny Robinson/Franny Sor Robinson Mother — Sophea “Sophie” Sor

Father — Adrien Framagucci (stepfather, legally adopted her), Peter Boyd (biological father)

Mother’s Occupation — Restaurant owner 

Father’s Occupation — Construction worker

Family Finances — grew up in poverty, insanely wealthy now

Birth Order — Youngest

Brothers — stepbrothers Gaston and Art Framagucci (mother legally adopted them, if you say ‘step’ Franny will kill you), claims no others but has biological half brothers from Peter Boyd; John-Curtis “JC”  Boyd, Timothy “Timmy” Boyd

Sisters — claims none, but has biological half sisters by Peter Boyd; Sarah Boyd, Stacy Boyd, Shyann Boyd 

Other Close Family — spreadsheet

Best Friend — Daniel Maitland, Molly Vaughn (deceased)

Other Friends — Lora Lopez, Serghei Anton, Delia Weiss, Vanessa Pham, others

Enemies — most men on principle 

Home Life During Childhood — It was a good childhood. Working the restaurant was normal to Franny so she didn’t realize it was abnormal at first. Her parents tried not to let the kids realize how poor they actually were. 

Town or City Name(s) — Payne Lake, Georgia

Any Sports or Clubs — In high school she was in drama, show choir, orchestra, National Honor Society, and on the quiz bowl team

Favorite Toy or Game — Franny honestly loved hide and seek well into her teenage years because she was small enough to fit it the weirdest places to hide, and in the 80s and 90s in a small town in Georgia there wasn’t much to do so her friend group played Extreme Hide and Seek. Everyone wears all black like some kind of cult. Turn off all the lights in the house. Go crazy. 

Schooling — K-12 in Payne Lake, Georgia ; B.A.s. in Musical Theatre Performance and Jazz Studies at NYU; M.A. in Jazz Studies at Pride U

Favorite Subject — Anything that wasn’t math or chemistry 

Popular or Loner — Popular, has always been magnetic 

Important Experiences or Events — Her first time on stage, getting enough scholarship money to justify going to NYU, quickly growing to love the nerd she hit up to buy her waffles and never letting him go, the accident that changed her life, marrying Cornelius Robinson, finding the magic singing frogs, adopting Wilbur, discovering the severity of her fertility issues in 2008, 

Nationality — American-Cambodian (born American, given Cambodian citizenship in 2019)

Culture — Franny identifies most strongly with Cambodian, followed by broadly Southeast Asian sometimes with Buddhist attached, and that’s tied with ‘Rural Southern (USA)’ sometimes with POC attached. Franny feels pretty detached from “American Culture” in general. She more closely would identify with Southern USA culture in general than with general American with no modifiers. She also feels a little detached from Asian American culture in general because even though she grew up right outside of Atlanta and is familiar with Atlanta, she didn’t grow up in one of the big hubs of Asian American culture like LA, San Francisco, or NYC. White American and Black American culture surrounded her, and the Asian cultures surrounding her were immigrant or first-gen cultures that hadn’t really developed an American flavor yet. Franny understood more about Vietnamese and Thai culture than she did about general Asian American culture for a long time, because immigrants straight from Southeast Asia were the only Asians she grew up around. And she grew up in the 80s and 90s where Asian representation was yellowface and Long Duk Dong. She didn’t meet any Asian Americans who didn’t speak or at least understand their heritage language until college. And the experience of POC as a whole in the South is very different to the experience of a white person, so sometimes Franny feel disconnected from her white southern neighbors and more closely relates to black or non-white Latinx southerners in ways she doesn’t relate to white southerners, or Asian Americans from LA or NYC. 

Religion and beliefs — Buddhist

Languages spoken— Khmer, English, Vietnamese, French, Italian, (less fluently) Portuguese, Spanish, (can understand some) Thai, Lao, (impressive tourist) German, Dutch

Physical Appearance

Face Claim —  Elodie Yung

Complexion — Tanned skin, pale brown 

Hair Colour — Black

Eye Colour — Brown

Height — 5’5

Tattoos — Yes, a few. Wilbur’s adoption date over her heart, most notably

Piercings — Lobe, upper lobe, tragus, helix, and cartilage on both ears, and an anti-tragus on her left ear. And a nose piercing she got in college

Common Hairstyle — typically keeps her hair long and done nicely but she cuts it and donates it from time to time so will also rock short hair

Clothing Style — vintage-inspired but not proper vintage

Mannerisms — Biting the pads of her thumbs, gesturing wildly, narrating her actions sometimes in song, if she’s looking for scissors she walks through the house making a scissors motion with her fingers

Usual Expression — she’s got resting bitch face 

Health

Overall (do they get sick easily)? — No, her immune system is the real MVP and when she does get sick she’s like ‘I’m dYING’

Physical Ailments —  Infertility 

Neurological Conditions — Depression, Cyclothymia (rapid cycles of depressive and hypomanic episodes)

Allergies —  none 

Grooming Habits — Typically rinses her body daily, uses soap on the armpits daily, but proper washes her body every other day. Washes her hair every two or three days as needed, but if she was extra sweaty that day it gets washed. Waxes leg hair and eyebrows. 

Sleeping Habits — she generally gets a decent amount of sleep but it isn’t usually all at once. She’s a champion power-napper, and if she has three days cleared she’ll often sleep mainly all at once except have like a 2-3 hour period of wakefulness and productivity and then go back to sleep for two more hours, then take an hour nap later in the day.  

Eating Habits —  She’s a grazer. She doesn’t usually sit down and eat three times a day she’ll sneak like five small meals a day

Exercise Habits —   works out at least three days a week somewhat because she’s really sensitive to when people comment on her body so she’s afraid to give people a reason to say a negative comment. Like. She’s body positive, big supporter of you don’t gotta be skinny to be beautiful or healthy. But when people say things like “oh Franny you got a little jiggle in those thighs” it’s never said like a good or neutral thing. She had a lot of body image issues throughout high school and college, and came dangerously close to developing an eating disorder freshman year at NYU but kind of logicked herself from the ledge  

Emotional Stability — generally emotionally stable, like for someone with her mental illnesses she does great 

Body Temperature — runs hot 

Sociability — A social butterfly

Addictions — None; did abuse adderall in college but when she quit cold turkey she didn’t like. Suffer cravings. She wasn’t addicted, but she did abuse it to the point she realized “oh I need to...stop”

Drug Use — occasional use of drugs to make her trip, like acid, shrooms, but this is very rare, she doesn’t do it at home, usually if she’s on the road with other musicians or has gone to LA or NYC or London for a few days to have a songwriting session, the group will sometimes partake. Even then not every time. Used to experiment with drugs more in college, but still it was never...a TON. 

Alcohol Use — More than occasional less than frequent

Your Character’s Character: 

Bad Habits — swearing, next to no filter, temper when it comes to perceived injustices, tends to overload herself 

Good Habits — Keeps a detailed planner, is a maniac about drinking lots of water, is vocal about her needs and boundaries 

Best Characteristic — her warmth! She really is friendly and easy to get along with and wants to be nice. But she will not be walked over and will not allow her kind, marshmallow husband to be walked over so she will flip a switch to protect herself or her boys. 

Worst Characteristic — unforgiving

Worst Memory — it’s a tie between her experience with sexual assault, and the time her biological father’s wife found out Franny was his biological child, and came into her mother’s restaurant when she was visiting with her pretty new HUSBAND, and Nancy Boyd proceeded to beat up Franny and her mother

Best Memory — Adopting Wilbur! It WAS marrying Cornelius but sorry Neil it’s her baby boy now

Proud of — Her husband, she is so proud to be Cornelius Robinson’s wife. She proud to be her mother’s daughter. And she’s proud of her accomplishments in music and philanthropy 

Embarrassed by — Nothing, she’s great

Driving Style — Oh, aggressive. She’s an offensive driver. Cusses. 

Strong Points —  she doesn’t quit, she’s the walk through hell and keep going type of person

Temperament — generally she’s pretty even-tempered. It’s easy to set her off in an instant though if you’re being racist, sexist - any type of shitty person tbh, or being shitty toward her husband or son, but for the most part she’s pretty chill. She deff has crazy bitch energy just under the surface though and you can tell

Attitude — Franny’s not particularly bitchy, but you know, she can be

Weakness — can’t do basic math, very overly self-critical, perfectionist

Fears — Something happening to Wilbur tbh. That’s her greatest fear, losing her son. 

Phobias — Franny does not throw up. She refuses. She will literally feel nauseous and horrible all day to avoid puking. It makes her so anxious, she will nOT. 

Secrets — None really? Like she doesn’t blab her life story to everyone but Cornelius knows everything about her. She has no secrets from her husband. 

Regrets — Not adopting more children when she and Cornelius got married knowing they both wanted a big family; ever meeting up with her biological father 

Feels Vulnerable When — She cries in front of people. Franny hates doing it. She’d rather die tbh

Pet Peeves — when people are rude to wait staff 

Conflicts — She sometimes feels a surge of resentment for her husband during her depressive episodes because she kind of feels like she’s pulled most of the weight in their marriage from Day 1 as far as running the home, and feels like although he purported to also want a big family he never even offered to take HIS turn pulling back from work so they could adopt a second child when it became clear it wasn’t gonna happen for them biologically, but then Franny hates herself for that because Cornelius is the kindest, most loving, most wonderful husband and father and she feels so privileged to call herself his wife and...yeah they just need to have a long talk about it tbh

Motivation — to be the best at everything she does; to force space for herself where she and people like her have previously been excluded, to be so great that you can’t ignore her

Short Term Goals and Hopes — have a baby, but she’s 40 now and knows its not gonna happen 

Long Term Goals and Hopes —she’s...kinda done everything she ever set out to do other than have lots of children

Sexuality — Bisexual, leans toward women, but had more experience with men because compulsory heterosexuality in the US in the 90s and early 2000s, and genuinely fell in love with a man are has been with just him for twenty years now

Exercise Routine  — Doesn’t spend much time on cardio because she gets enough cardio walking around town and Pride U. Mainly works on her core, legs, and strength training so if a man tries to grab her she can kick his ass

Day or Night Person — Would be nocturnal if she could be

Introvert or Extrovert — Extrovert

Optimist or Pessimist — She’s naturally pretty cynical but she’s worked for like twenty-five years to have a more optimistic outlook on things. It’s 50/50 now I’d say 

Likes and Styles:

Music — there isn’t really a genre she doesn’t like - like her initial fame was in jazz, but she has an equal affection for jazz and bluegrass/classic country/folk music. She also is in an indie band, Seoul Hanoi’d. And like rap music - usually old school Atlanta rap, but she likes Kendrick Lamar and some other current rappers.

Books — She likes to read or listen to audiobooks about pretty much any subject except music and musicians.

Foods — Cambodian food!!

Drinks — She likes sweet tea, aaaand her alcohol of choice is Anything

Animals — Possums :3 She wants a pet possum so bad, she follows pet possums on instagram and cries at their cute posts

Sports — She played tennis in high school, that’s the extent of her sports knowledge

Social Issues — all of them. Climate change, racial justice, intersectional feminism, VACCINATE ALL THE CHILDREN UNLESS THEY MEDICALLY CANNOT BE, de-mining, Green New Deal, punch Nazis, hey maybe don’t put children in cages, Myanmar can you please not do that genocide you’re doing that would be swell, poor people deserve access to healthcare and education, housing-first approach to homelessness, the good stuff 

Favorite Saying — “Hoes mad”, usually said dismissively when she receives a death threat after a political tweet, or after a racist one for just being an Asian woman in the public eye

Clothing — Franny prefers skirts, dresses, and jumpsuits/rompers to shirt + trousers

Jewelry — She never takes off her wedding ring. She’s married af

TV Shows — Schitt’s Creek, Kim’s Convenience, a lot of Canadian TV she really thinks is funny

Movies — She’s a big nerd that loves a good documentary or otherwise educational movie

Greatest Want — More children, including one biological child because her mother always talked about pregnancy and childbirth like it was the most humbling and empowering experience she’d ever had, and Franny wants that. But she’s 40 and knows she won’t have that. 

Greatest Need — a baby lmao

Where and How Does Your Character Live Now:

Home — In a big-ass house in the wealthiest part of town, maybe even the biggest house 

Household furnishings — Not overdecorated. A lot of people live there, but Franny’s very much the lady of the house, and even more so than her husband is the head of the household. She’s not a dictator, like her mother-in-law and other relatives have added their touches to the home decor, but it is very much Franny’s Home with notes of the others. She’s very particular about her kitchen, but is very flexible with the rest of the common spaces. 

Most Cherished Possession — Family photographs of her mother and her family before the Khmer Rouge. Franny bears a striking resemblance to her Aunt Kesor, who was the older sister her mother had idolized, but who died during the Khmer Rouge years. Franny only knows of the resemblance from photographs.

Neighborhood — The rich people part of town 

Town or City Name — Swynlake, England

Details of Town or City — lol

Married Before — Cornelius is her first and only husband and unless he cheats on her she’s never ever leaving that man

Significant Other Before — nobody important 

Children — Wilbur Robinson, wants/wanted more

Relationship with Family — Close! Both to her in-laws, biological maternal family, and stepfamily

Car — 2020 Nissan Qashqai

Career — Singer, song-writer, musician, composer, musical actress, actress, university music professor

Dream Career — Musical actress

Dream Life — Married to Cornelius, with lots of kids, living her best life

Love Life — Happily married to the love of her life, her sunshine, the jelly to her fish, Cornelius Robinson

Talents or Skills — music, cooking, acting

Intelligence Level — High? Like she can’t do basic math but everything else. She’s a musical genius, is good with languages, and is pretty perceptive

Finances — Loaded

Your Character’s Life Before Your Story:

Past Careers — restaurant worker, event staff

Past Lovers — nobody worth mentioning 

Biggest Mistakes — “I don’t make mistakes”

Biggest Achievements — Grammys, induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, being the first Cambodian person to win a Grammy, International Bluegrass Music Association awards, ASCAP awards, and being awarded the national medal of the arts by Barack Obama in 2015 

#&&...hc #meet the robinsons

[wearejapanese]

Higa was one of more than a dozen American soldiers of Japanese ancestry who were involved in the Battle of Okinawa, which some historians have called the "cruelest battle of the Pacific." It was a costly battle. More than 12,000 Americans and some 95,000 Japanese--60,000 of whom were Okinawan civilians--were killed.

For Kalihi resident Takejiro Higa, the Battle of Okinawa would pit two "parents" against each other.

Higa was born in Waipahu. At the age of 2, his mother took him, his brother Warren, then 5, and 8-year-old sister Yuriko to Okinawa to meet their grandparents. His father remained in Hawaii and operated the family store. Three years later he went to Okinawa to accompany his family back to Hawaii.

Higa was 11 when his parents died within a year of each other. His grandparents, with whom he and his mother had lived, died the following year. For the next four years, he lived with an uncle.

As his 16th birthday neared, Higa began thinking seriously about returning to Hawaii. New immigration to Hawaii had been halted in 1924, and Japan had begun sending young, able-bodied men to settle in Manchuria in its efforts to control Asia militarily.

When Higa turned 16 in April 1939, he wrote to his sister in Hawaii, asking her to sponsor him back to Hawaii "before the Japanese army grab me." "Personally, I didn't want to go Manchuria. If I had to leave Okinawa, I'd rather go back to Hawaii where my sister and brother and other relatives were."

That July, 14 years after leaving Hawaii as an infant, Takejiro Higa went "home."

Less than three years later, Japan and America were at war.

In early 1943, despite reservations about his lack of proficiency in English, Higa volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. His brother volunteered, also. Warren made the cut; Takejiro didn't.

Several months after the 442 had left for training at Camp Shelby, Higa received a letter from the War Department, informing him of its plans to organize a unit of Japanese language soldiers, the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), to serve in the Pacific warfront. Was he willing to serve?

"It put me in terrific turmoil, psychologically, because, if it's Japanese, it's understood I'll be sent to the Pacific warfront," he says. What if he came face to face with someone he knew - a relative, a classmate. "It may not happen, but it was possible," he said.

It left him torn between his personal anxiety and his desire to serve his country. After days of soul searching, Higa decided to volunteer for the MIS. This time he made the cut.

Higa was accepted into the MIS and underwent eight months of language training at Camp Savage, where he studied not only the language, but technical and military terminology based on a Japanese Military Academy textbook. He graduated in July 1943.

At his sister's request, Takejiro was assigned to his brother's team, an action that required War Department approval. The practice had been banned after five brothers serving on the same cruiser were killed when it was torpedoed in the South Pacific.

"In my case, my sister wanted me to be with my brother because of my lack of proficiency in English. She felt that two brothers serving together would cover each other and help each other," Higa explained.

Approval was granted.

The brothers returned to Hawaii in the summer of 1944 and were assigned to the 96th Infantry Division. After two weeks of jungle training on Oahu, their jobs as soldiers officially began when the 96th was sent overseas.

En route to their destination, Yap Island, they learned that the island had been secured. So the 96th was diverted to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in New Guinea and then dispatched to Leyte lsland in the Philippines.

The captain said he heard that Higa had lived in Okinawa for many years. In what area, he asked. Higa pointed to the general area of his grandfather's village in Nakagusuku.

Next he pulled out an aerial photo of Okinawa's capital, Naha City. "I couldn't recognize it at first," Higa says. "It was completely destroyed.".

The captain then pulled out another photo. Higa recognized it instantly as his grandfather's village, Shimabuku, which, up until five years ago, had been his home. "My hair stood up! For awhile I couldn't even open my mouth; I was so choked up."

Higa looked at the photo through a special three-dimensional glass capable of picking up minute details. "I instantly recognized my Grandpa's home and from there, finger-traced all of my relatives' houses." To his relief, their homes were intact.

The captain then pulled out a shot of a typical country hillside in Okinawa. Higa glanced at it and then looked back at the captain with a "so what?" look. "Godammit, look carefully," shouted the captain. "We think the whole island is fortified!" The captain had mistaken traditional Okinawan burial tombs for fortifications. "I suddenly realized the wrong impression the captain and other intelligence officers had." Higa proceeded to give the officers a crash course in Okinawan culture.

He explained that Okinawans view their burial tomb as their permanent home. Thus, they try to build them on a hillside with a good view, overlooking the ocean. He also explained that the crater-like holes intelligence officers had observed in the comers of fields were composting pits used by farmers, not machine gun nests.

"From that time on, he (the captain) said, 'Sgt. Higa, you're going to assist us right through here.'" Higa was sworn to silence. When he returned to division headquarters later, his brother asked him what he had done during the day. "Don't ask me, because I've been told not to say anything," Takejiro replied.

Unbeknownst to him; Warren had informally volunteered his brother's first-hand knowledge of Okinawa to the division brass in the event of an Okinawa invasion.

All the signs--the aerial photos, the questions--pointed to an Okinawan invasion. Higa says he knew of the plans at least five months before the actual strike. The only thing he didn't know was the exact landing date.

Higa proved a big help to Corps headquarters because the area in which they landed was about a mile from where he had grown up.

"It was a horrible feeling," he says. "Ever since the first day I saw the picture, every night I used to dream about my relatives. Every night . . . never miss," Higa said, his voice breaking. "I dreamed about my uncle, my cousins, and even schoolmates."

But as an American soldier, he had a duty to perform. The last thing he wanted to do was harm his former countrymen, but he didn't know how he could do that without violating the military code of conduct.

"Deep inside I was torn," he says. "That feeling is hard to describe. Unless you yourself experience it, you don't appreciate it."

By late December, Leyte had been secured. In March 1945 the soldiers in the 96th Division boarded a troop ship. On their second day at sea, they were told their destination: Okinawa.

Higa was often called to the radio shack to translate radio transmissions they had picked up from Okinawa. Most of the time they were music programs with some Okinawan language sprinkled in the broadcast.

The Okinawa offensive, code-named "Operation Iceberg," began April 1. Early that morning the soldiers lined up on the deck.

"When the outline of Okinawa came up, I instantly recognized the hills. I couldn't help but choke up," Higa says almost 50 years later, fighting back tears, his voice breaking.

Only five years had passed since he left Okinawa, and his heart was being tugged in two opposite directions. "I'm an American G.I. I have a duty to perform, and yet I have a cultural obligation to Okinawa. I was really torn between loyalty and patriotism versus personal feeling . . . . I can tell you I had tears in my eyes."

It was different for his brother Warren, he says. True, he was Uchinanchu and Okinawa was the land of his ancestors. But he had not established an emotional attachment to the island in his three years there. "In my case, I grew up there. Although I've been back in Hawaii over 50 years, even to this day, the little country roads and small ditches and taro patches that we played in seem more like a real homeland to me than Honolulu."

Higa recites an old Japanese saying: "Mitsugo no tamashi hyaku made. . . The spirit of a 3-year-old child will last a hundred years." "What you learn in your small kid time, you'll never forget."

Because of his first-hand knowledge of the area and the Okinawan dialect, Higa was assigned to the division's advanced unit. They landed at the Chatan beachhead on the western side of the island.

Higa remembers his first image on land. "There were farm houses all on fire, farm animals all over the place, all dead, some of them burning."

The soldiers began moving towards higher ground. While walking through a narrow road, Higa saw something move in a small roadside dugout. "My heart stopped beating." Higa jumped back and took cover. Slowly he began walking toward the dugout. With his carbine trained, he ordered loudly, "Come out, whoever you are! Come out!"

Higa was so scared he can't remember whether he spoke English, Japanese or Okinawan. "I meant to speak Uchinaguchi (Okinawan dialect), but I have a feeling it was a mixture of everything," he laughs.

After returning to Hawaii in 1939, he had made a concerted effort to not speak Okinawan and to learn English. In the excitement of the moment, he says he wouldn't be surprised if what he uttered was a mish-mash of Japanese, Uchinaguchi, English and pidgin.

There was no response to his order, so Higa began squeezing his trigger. Suddenly he saw a thin human leg appear. "'Njiti (come out) mensooree (please)!" he ordered in Uchinaguchi.

An old woman, thin and frail, her clothing covered with dirt, crawled from the dugout. With her was a little girl, about 5 or 6 years old--her granddaughter. Higa began questioning the old woman. She said her family had escaped to the north; however, because of her weak leg, she had remained behind with her granddaughter.

Higa recommended that they be taken to a civilian refugee camp. "To this day I'm very grateful that I didn't pull the trigger." At point blank range, he knows he wouldn't have missed. "If I ever shot that old lady, I think I'd go crazy, knowing that she was a civilian. . . "

Higa has tried locating the granddaughter, who by now, would be nearly 60 years old. The old woman has probably died by now. "In all probability, the kid might have been the first Okinawan civilian prisoner," he says.

Soon after arriving at Chatan, what Higa had hoped would never happen, did. While scurrying around, looking for potatoes to eat, his former teacher, Shunsho Nakandakari, had been caught and sent to a civilian refugee center. Because of his tall, conditioned physique, he was suspected of being a Japanese soldier trying to pass himself off as a civilian. Higa was sent to interrogate the prisoner.

"I recognized him instantly, because he was my teacher for seventh and eighth grade. I looked at him, 'Sensei . . .' He turned around, looked at me and recognized me. 'Ah, kimi ka (oh, it's you)!'" Teacher and student were at a loss for words. "We were so choked up," Higa recalls.

He told the escort officer that Nakandakari was a teacher, not a soldier--and that he should be allowed to remain at the refugee camp.

The division continued to advance. One day, they set up camp inside an Okinawan kaaminakuu ufaka (turtle-back burial tomb). The concrete tomb offered lots of protection. In no time captured documents began arriving. Higa was assigned to translate some Japanese maps. He worked around the clock for three days straight, without any sleep, burning a gas lantern at night. A dark curtain concealed their whereabouts from the enemy.

Lined behind them were jiishigaami, or ceramic containers, which contained the bones of the deceased. Higa said he was uneasy about working in someone's final resting place. The Japanese put up virtually no resistance in the first two days, Higa recalls. Okinawa took such a beating because one Japanese division had been pulled and sent to Formosa, leaving Okinawa under-defended, said Higa. By the close of the second day, the island was cut completely in half. The Marines went north and the Army proceeded south. The 96th Division was [missing text] enemies.

Higa estimates that in two weeks, the 96th lost about a third of its combat strength, with the Japanese losing an equal number. Nakandakari sensei later told Higa that the Japanese army was effective for only 50 days of the nearly three-month-long Battle of Okinawa.

The Japanese troops were pushed back to the south after their line at Shuri, Okinawa's ancient capital, had been broken. The headquarters of the 96th was moved one last time, to Yonaha.

In May, shortly before Okinawa was secured, two men were brought in. Their uniforms were tattered and they were hungry. Higa was ordered to interrogate them. He offered them some biscuits and D-rations, a hard chocolate candy bar, which is equivalent of a complete meal.

The prisoners refused to eat. "Why won't you eat?" he asked. They said they thought the rations contained poison. "Baka yaro! (Stupid!)" Higa shouted at them. He began nibbling at the candy bar to show them that it hadn't been laced. Relieved, they began gobbling down the candy bars.

The two had been captured in a cave. When they refused to come out after repeated calls from U.S. soldiers, the engineers had sealed the cave and planted dynamite. The two frantically dug themselves out. The American soldiers were waiting when they surfaced. The men surrendered and were brought into headquarters.

After giving them time to compose themselves, Higa began his interrogation. Their answer to his question about the school they had attended, Kishaba Shogakko, made his ears perk up--for Higa had attended the same school.

Without revealing his identity, he began asking more specific questions, drawing on his memories of school. "Each response led me to believe that these guys were my classmates." Finally he asked whether they knew Nakandakari sensei. They were shocked. How would this American G.I. possibly know Nakandakari sensei? Higa looked them square in the eye. "I'm an American Military Intelligence Service language school graduate, noncommissioned officer. I know everything about you guys. Don't lie to me," he ordered sternly.

Higa decided to put them through one final test. "Do you remember one of your classmates named Takejiro Higa from Shimabuku?" he asked. They were shocked.

"How do you know him?" they asked. "I told you I know everything about you guys. Don't lie to me," Higa repeated.

One prisoner said he heard Takejiro Higa had gone back to Hawaii. They hadn't seen each other for so long and didn't know where he was, nor if they would recognize him today.

By then Higa was positive they were his classmates. "I looked at them straight in the face, and in Okinawa-go (Okinawan dialect), said, 'Godammit, don't you recognize your own classmate?'" They looked up, shocked beyond belief, and began crying.

"Why are you crying?" asked Higa. They said they were crying for joy. After answering his questions they thought they were no longer useful and would thus be executed.

"Now, knowing that our own classmate is on the other side, we believe our lives will be saved. That's why we're crying, because we're happy."

Higa couldn't restrain his emotions any longer. "The three of us grabbed each other's shoulders and had a cry." Higa says he still gets "chickenskin" whenever he recalls the reunion.

He never saw the two again. What he regrets most is that he can't remember their names. So far, his search for them has been futile.

Higa interrogated suspected imposters at the civilian compound at Sashiki-Chinen for the remainder of the Okinawa offensive. One of them was a Japanese colonel. The incident is testament of how valuable Higa's personal knowledge of Okinawa was to America.

He nabbed the colonel after his claim to be from Yamachi village turned up a series of inconsistencies. And how did Higa know? He had grown up in neighboring Shimabuku village.

Finally in perfect Uchinaguchi, he asked, "Who the hell are you?" The prisoner was stuck. He couldn't understand a word of what Higa had said. He then proceeded to tear apart the prisoner's story.

"Ah, shimatta! (Dammit!)" exclaimed the colonel, who thought he would get better treatment in a civilian refugee camp than in an Army POW camp. And he might have gone though undetected had Higa not been assigned to interrogate him. Higa concedes also that he might not have detected the charade had the colonel claimed to have been from a village Higa was unfamiliar with.

Higa remained in Okinawa for the duration of the battle - early August - when the 96th Division returned to the Philippines. En route, they learned of the bombing of Hiroshima and. Nagasaki which ended the war. The division reached. Mindoro on Aug. 15, the day Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to a close.

Warren Higa had accumulated enough points for an immediate discharge. Takejiro, however, was sent to Korea, where he interrogated Japanese evacuees for almost four months. He had wanted to remain in Okinawa and serve with the Occupational forces, but his request was denied because the 96th was being reorganized.

The Okinawa Takejiro Higa left behind when he boarded the transport ship back to the Philippines in 1945 was very different from his memories of Okinawa in 1939. "Everything was burned out, especially in the south. . . . The worst ground battle of World War II took place in Okinawa. Just about everything was busted up. You couldn't recognize anything."

And there were changes from 1945, when the war ended, to 1965, when Higa returned to Okinawa for the first time since the war's end. The landmarks were all different. What he had seen as targets 20 years earlier were gone.

Higa did not see Nakandakari sensei, whom he bad interrogated, until his first visit back to the island. Today, the bond formed in childhood and strengthened in war remains tight.

Higa visits Nakandakari whenever he goes to Okinawa nowaday. At 83 years of age, his former teacher--and prisoner - is still spry and healthy. "'Take one bottle of whiskey and I go visit him," says Higa, smiling broadly. "We have oodles of things to talk about."

In retrospect, he says he's glad he was sent to the Pacific warfront--and to Okinawa. Innocent people were killed; that is the nature of war. But if his personal knowledge of not just Japanese, but of the Okinawan language and culture saved even one life, Takejiro Higa is content Today he can tell the story of going to war--and finding his peace.

#Takejiro Higa #Story #Experience #Uchinanchu #Uchinaaguchi #Okinawa #Hawaii #Okinawan

[howtotrainyouragents]

Agent H’s Book Reactions

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

Dimple doesn’t share her parent’s dream of an arranged marriage for her- that is, until she meets the boy they picked, Rishi Patel.

-So for anyone who may not know this: My mom told me about this famous Bollywood movie from the 70s called, Bobby, which spawned the teenage romance genre of Bollywood. It’s actors were Dimple Kapadia and Rishi Kapoor, so I think this book is supposed to be a reference to that :)

-Do you understand how long I’ve waited for a story with Indian protagonists?? DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW LONG I’VE WAITED FOR A STORY WITH INDIAN PROTAGONISTS?? MUCH LESS A ROMANCE ONE????? I’M LITERALLY WRITING A NOVEL FOR THIS VERY GOSH DARN REASON. I CANNOT EXPRESS MY LEVEL OF EXCITEMENT RIGHT NOW

-This is without a doubt one of the most cheesiest books I’ve ever read, but I don’t even care and won’t even bother trying to critique it because I’m just crying tears of joy over how beautiful and relatable this book is. 

-Also, like Dimple has curly hair(!!!!), glasses, likes science, and is passionate and prickly and speaks her mind so like #relatable

-The really incredible, beautiful, elegant way that it handles both Dimple and Rishi’s opinions about being first gen Indian American and immigrant parent’s expectations. You understand and relate to them both and both have their place in life. And in the end it’s all about “We get to decide the rules. We get to say what goes and what stays, what matters and what doesn’t” without disregarding your heritage or parent’s wishes

-Also, I love that we have reconciliation moments with Dimple’s mother and Rishi’s father without it being like “the parent has a secret that makes them relate” or “parents are always wrong and need to change”. Like no, parents are just going to be themselves, but most of the times, they loves us enough to try and understand and support us even if they disagree. I kinda wish that they went into the Rishi-His father change of heart because again #relatable, but that may be too much for this genre. Again, I just appreciate it how real it is

-The romance was so effin’ cute. And I think they complement each other so well. They’re best friends and they’ll tease and bicker but also are totally sweet and supportive and love dovey (a little too much maybe? but eh, Idc)

-I didn’t care as much for the Ashish-Celia storyline, but I’m all here for the the drama and the awfulness of the Amberzombies.  I’m so happy they subverted Isabelle as the mean rich girl, Hari can suck it, Celia is bi, YAY Ashish and Rishi have a better relationship, and I love the tidbits of the other classmates like Jose and Tim

-So, I’ll be honest, I have a prejudice against Indian men due to a personal, limited, negative  experience with them.  But this book really has radically changed my prejudice, and I will be eternally grateful for that. Also, Rishi is adorable. Move over, Dev Patel, There’s a new Indian crush in town

-It’s so cute and funny how Rishi calls himself Patel when self-scolding. Good bit of characterization. Actually, both of their characterizations are amazing. 

-So, Hindi isn’t really spoken in my house and after my grandmother died, it’s pretty much stopped. But my mom and I have agreed to start working on speaking it together. I showed her this book and she used it to teach me :) 

-My ONLY complaint is that POVs switched back and forth so often it gave you whiplash

#i'm in love #diverse books rec #diverse books #indian #indian ya #agent book reaction #ya lit #when dimple met rishi #sandhya menon #book recs #agent h #asian lit #asian ya

[automatismoateo]

After 4 years of believing and doubting, it's time to say goodbye to Christianity: Stuff I want to share before I graduate as an international student, leaving the US soon. via /r/atheism

Submitted November 16, 2020 at 01:51AM by fattybirdie (Via reddit https://ift.tt/3lyxGmU) After 4 years of believing and doubting, it's time to say goodbye to Christianity: Stuff I want to share before I graduate as an international student, leaving the US soon.

Excuse me for my poor written English. I will highlight my reasoning and other stuff worth discussing for your comfort.

In 2016 I moved in to a dorm with a randomly assigned roommate, who is a good, devoted Christian man. I was invited to RSOs, parties and churches. They gradually grew on me. Never thought one day I would took religions seriously, I mean who wouldn't once think like that? But college life proved me wrong.

I became a true believer, at least for a period of time. I would share the gospel w/ my parents (Oof mega cringe), lead in Bible studies, preach to my friends and such. Both shallow and long-lasting friendships had been built; I've also went on the stage in sanctuary, to translate for the message or play in the band.

Ironically, things began to go down at nowhere else but a prayer meeting. Group prayers often make me uncomfortable because I was never used to pray for exams and grades etc. since it felt like asking God to give us whatever we want. In that early spring my junior year, when people, as usual, are praying for a fast cure on their sickness and basically everything will go as they intended, I think to myself, what does it mean to be healthy or ill in God's observation? Don't we all suffer because we have sinned in God's judge? If this fundamental principle in Christianity is true, then aren't you sick because essentially you deserve it?

This trail of logic had been whipping me ever since. We believe that God's all mighty and no matter how much pain or sacrifice won't be sufficient to make up our sins except for Jesus, who IS God in his smurf account. How does praying even make sense, when God is in ultimate control, and he absolutely doesn't need your approval to take everything away from you?

An obvious response is "Well but God didn't do that to me!" Sure, but that validates neither God is real nor God is loving. In colonization, World wars, slavery and many other disasters, happened and happening across all over Earth and expanded over history, God allowed that on countless people; these people watch their families butchered like animals, tortured, their lives' work doomed, their land and homes burning, and eventually their own heads removed. Maybe we should pray for who are facing these? Nope, never mentioned one single time among religious people surrounding me. To them, these terrible things and their problems behind does not and probably will not apply, but tragedies certainly exist for people they never knew and never cared. Even when I believe in a God who loves all, I actively refuse to study human's misery, unwilling to give what I possess; the only one I satisfy and please was me and me alone.

Recalling all these threw me back to the beginning: why would I chose to believe in the first place. I believed Christianity makes people better. I gazed upon figures like Mother Teresa, who acted upon faith, love, and changed the course of many lives. However, looking at my faithful peers and myself leave me with nothing but disappointment. We barely improve. Certainly we became more familiar with what the Bible says, some of us claim they read it twice per year. Some of us never reflect; they simply became more used to reading a daily verse and completely forget about it the next day. Some of us never grew up; they just keep seeking for attention from a book, catching on the slightest clues that they are loved. Some of us turned more political and dictatorial; they did become better at finding what's in the Bible that supports their ideology though, congrats. We worshipped and sang praises in the church wearing layers of disguises, claiming to love our neighbors in the way we love ourselves. Walking out of that building we didn't even try to conceal our hatred against each other. A girl in the youth group told me she would speak to anyone in the world except another girl in church. New-coming exchange students despise those 2nd gen immigrants, and vice versa. So much teachings about putting God in heart and the efforts learning them go straight to waste.

Perhaps, as some of them also depicted, without Christianity they would be worse. First of all that just gives me another reason to run away from them if true. Secondly, assuming causation in a situation never happened is playing the role of God, in the most unpractical way. Besides, I've got tired arguing over the good/bad debate. It's same thing. Directing people's attention to only the merciful, moving stories and conclude that God is kind, is the equivalent of focusing on the bloodshed, killing for "reasons we are not God so we cannot know" and conclude God is brutal. Thus, one cannot infer that his/her religion is good because they didn't become worse; otherwise, we can follow this logic and state the same religion is harmful if someone's life was tripped by it. As far as I know any documented religion conducted both.

We all need to realize very clearly that God is not with us. At this moment, some people in the world are having the best day ever, some people are at the lowest they can get; they cannot feel for the other side. We long for justice, love and peace, while deliberately destroying them; It's all about human; there's no traces of God and his miracles. However, according to some believers, God choose them as his own people and they claim God is truly with them and performing Godly stuff here, while others cannot perceive, especially if you don't believe it. Well, then I don't even know which is more pathetic, that God is hiding behind some people or, what they stand for and believe in is never real. Your personal experience determine who you are, not the objective truth. On top of everything, every one of us is biased, and our belief could totally be either true or false. Practicing a religious faith seems to make people neglect that.

So what do I believe now? I believe that no one deserves to be sick, and we should recognize and abandon hypocrisy. Problems need to be solved, instead of being prayed and postponed. God exists or not, it doesn't matter any more. I cherish the time spent with Christian friends and families. I'm thankful that many churches and people still hold a place for me, and I do not regret once being a Christian. It's just that we step onto different paths now, though it would make a lot of people unhappy. I talked frankly to friends at churches, and words spread fast. Predictably, in the last remote meeting, I notice the girl mentioned previously, talking to everyone on purpose excluding me. Even her way of disturbing people haven't improve.

"The cycle ends here. We must be better than this." --Bald guy snapping a God.

Wish you are having a good day and enjoyable meals ;)

#reddit

[notsoivorytower]

This month, we spoke with Ph.D. candidate and Anzaldúing It podcaster Jackie Cáraves. An L.A. native, Jackie talked to us about navigating life and the ivory tower as a QWOC, first-yen college student, and first-gen grad student in the borderlands. She shares her insights on the LGBTQ Latinx Community, impostor syndrome, code-switiching, and QWOC survival. Follow Jackie on IG @getitgirrl and @anzalduingit !

Hey Jackie! Tell us a bit about yourself and your academic journey. What is your field of study and what does your current research focus on?

I grew up in East Hollywood in Los Angeles with a single mother on welfare and two older brothers. My dad left when I was 18 months old and I’ve only seen him a handful of times throughout my life. As a unit, my mom and my older brothers Martin and Rudy are extremely close. We went through a lot together. My brothers really influenced my journey to academia. Martin showed me that it was possible to go to college by attending UC Berkeley after high school. My brother Rudy tried to provide for us by joining a gang, which really made me question why he had to go through that trauma as a necessary part of our racialized poverty. It made me want to understand the systems that put us all in those really difficult situations. When I went to UC Santa Cruz, I was inspired by my feminist studies classes and latino studies classes. In those classes, I learned about intersectionality and about my own family’s experiences in a systemic way. When I read the works of these chicana feminist scholars, I saw myself and I wanted to be just like them. I wanted to create knowledge and bridge academia and community.

I am currently a PhD Candidate in Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. My research focuses on the experiences of Trans and Gender Non Conforming (GNC) Latina/o/xs. My work really aims to highlight the ways in which Trans and GNC Latina/o/xs embody resilience and so my dissertation will mainly focus on family, chosen family, and spirituality as sources of resilience. I was connected to Bamby Salcedo, the president and CEO of Trans Latin@ Coalition, through a friend. After Bamby and I had developed a repoire, Bamby asked me to work in community with Trans Latin@ Coalition to co-produce the first report about health in the Trans Latinx community. Our report, The State of Trans Health, was published by Trans Latin@ Coalition last year and involved surveying 129 members of the Trans Latinx community all over Southern California. Based off of the work that Bamby and I did, I am conducting more in depth interviews with Trans community members about their methods of resilience.

Can you speak to your experiences as a QWOC in academia? You certainly seem to be vocal about attempting to break down the Ivory Tower. What are some obstacles / inequalities / disadvantages you've encountered and how did you deal with them?

For me being a QWOC in academia has come with imposter syndrome. My mom was only able to obtain an elementary school education. I am a first generation college student and a first generation grad student. So, my background only fills me with doubts about whether I can be an academic and a scholar. As I entered the MA and PhD, I became very uncomfortable being in those spaces, often feeling like I didn't belong or that I wasn't supposed to be there because I somehow felt I wasn't qualified to be there. I felt like someone was going to find out I was truly unqualified and kick me out of the program altogether. Even being in a program like Chicana/o Studies where my peers and professors are all People of Color didn't make it easier. Because ultimately academia is still academia and there is a culture of competition and performance that exists.

Academia is isolating, competitive, and based on production. My cohort is the first Chicana/o Studies Cohort at UCLA and I think we are keenly aware that we are the first. Being the first cohort is special because we are really building the culture of our program. We have tried together to build community, mentorship, and support each other. However, building this culture took time, so the first few years were especially difficult. Now, however, I think my main sources of affirmation and validation are my cohort members and my adviser. We are trying to break down, as much as we can, the sense of competitiveness and alienation that academia puts on grad students.

I also want to use academia to do community work. It is really hard to be authentic in a place that is so competitive and so based in what you “produce.” The ways in which I try to break that is through my scholarship and through my teaching.  

You focus on Latin American Studies and have been a big advocate for LGBTQ visibility. Can you tell us more about your goals for implementing your studies within the larger LGBTQ Latinx community?

Being in Chicana/o Studies and Latino Studies, I’ve learned a lot about race, class, and even gender. However, there is a dearth of social science literature that focuses on queer Latinx experiences. We see a lot of that scholarship, specifically chicana lesbian feminist scholarship, be relegated to the humanities. My goal is to bridge the literature and center current Latinx struggles. We have a lot of conversations now about intersectionality but a lot of our conversations have only one or two dimensions and we don’t include queer or trans identities in those conversations. They should. Centering the queer and trans community can help us understand heteronormativity, another structure that oppresses all of us. At least that’s what I want to bring to a university and academic setting.

In terms of the larger Latinx community, I want to use the resources of a university and my own social capital to collect information and make it useful for community members who are trying to empower and elevate themselves. For example, when Bamby and I did this study together last year, we knew what kind of data the study would produce because of our lived experiences. But we wanted to show the results in a printed, digestible way for grassroots organizations to bring to funders, politicians, and community organizers.

After listening to your recently launched podcast, "Anzaldúing It," we knew we had to feature you on Not So Ivory Tower. We appreciate you speaking on your experiences as a QWOC in L.A., touching on issues like being a child of immigrants, welfare, toxic relationships, and self-care. Can you tell us more about this project?

Thank you for listening to the podcast! It brings me so much joy to be talking about the podcast and to be in a place where we are now putting together the 10th episode! The idea of a podcast started with a conversation I was having with my best friend, Angelica Becerra. Earlier this year, I brought up the idea of doing a podcast to Angelica. I suggested it to her because we always come together and have these conversations on our own. What we talk about on the podcast is really how we talk to each other in real life and how we heal and bring joy to our lives. We learn a lot from each other and I just wanted to start recording these moments of our lives that have really felt cleansing and soothing for both of us.

In the podcast we talk about our personal lives, academia, and those things that help us get through: spirituality, astrology, our families (both chosen and not) and food! We never thought that we would have so much interest, but we are so happy and excited that people are listening and that people seem to be taking joy in listening. This podcast is a way for us to stay connected to the world, ourselves, and our community. Especially in times like these, I think we need these brief moments of laughter, love, and honesty, almost as a respite from the news. We are super excited about sharing with you!

In one episode, you talk the roles code-switching and accents play in academia. This seemed like a perfect reflection of Gloria Anzaldúa's writings on performing multiple identities to survive. Can you speak more on your experiences with this?

As I’ve mentioned in the podcast, code switching is something that I have had to learn since I was little. As first generation students, child of immigrants, we learn this from a really early age. We switch from English to Spanish whether we are at school or at home. I also was in very white spaces from middle school and onwards and I learned the different borders I had to cross with my language whether it was with friends, teachers, or at home.

In academia I’ve had to learn a new language. I’ve had to try to find an academic voice that still remains true to who I am. I’ve tried to hold on to the way I speak and not assimilate. I try to keep the way that I speak from growing up in the hood and not try to erase where I come from.

Even though we are talking about language, I’ve also “code-switched” with my gender presentation and with my queerness. Code-switching is often about performance of your different identities and for a long time, I performed femininity because I thought that was what was expected of me. I’ve learned to live more authentically in the last 2 years too in my gender presentation. So in that regard I’m trying not to code-switch in my queerness.

What advice would you give a young QWOC just starting out on her academic journey? Are there any strategies, support systems, or tools that you think would help them navigate academic spaces better?

I would say, find those people that you feel safe with, share with them what you’re going through, and know that you’re going to have to be vulnerable. Community, friends, and family are essential for productivity. Also, don’t look for academia to validate you. It is important to remember that you are not a machine and productivity is not the only marker of your worth. Mental health is a real thing! Go to therapy, ground yourself in spirituality, get the support and help you need. It is important to laugh, love, and heal and try your best to remain true to yourself through this process.

#WOC #wocinacademia #qwoc #qwocinacademia #ucla #podcast #latinx #translatinx #academia

[qtakesams]

I Studied Abroad in Fall 2019. Here’s How the Pandemic Changed My Perspective.

It’s funny how time changes things, and how we change time. Some years drag, some fly by. For example, my 2019 was easily the best of my life. Even when I had breakdowns, felt lost, or the path ahead was unclear, it was still exhilarating. I learned much more about myself than I ever previously had and proved to myself I can make friends anywhere I go. When I landed in the Philadelphia airport on December 21st, hugging my parents for the first time in four months, I felt like I was on fire. A fire that could only be put out the more I shoved my passport through immigration.

           Fast forward to August 2020. I’m a few weeks shy of the year anniversary of my getting on my first international flight, feeling scared shitless as the States disappeared out from under me and Europe came into view. It feels like a lifetime ago, and also a few moments. The friends I made that semester only exist in my phone for the time being. I can pull up world cams of the best touristy spots I visited and see them vacant. It’s a weird feeling, and it makes my abroad semester feel even more like a dream that I think it would have. Knowing the States found about the Coronavirus in China the same weekend I flew home makes me feel like my life is dangling by a thread that once nearly snapped.

           It feels impossible to plan my life ahead, which is really not good, since my life is supposed to just be “beginning” next year. Grad School? A real job? A fellowship? Taking the GRE? Will I ever successfully move out of my parents’ house? They’re questions I almost can’t answer right now. As a spontaneous person who likes to feel comfortable, I feel more like I’m hammocking off a cliff.

           A good friend of mine is graduating a semester early so he can take a gap semester before law school. We went abroad the same semester, so we both feel a bit like we unintentionally trashed two years of college. Of course, my abroad semester was the best of college thus far and I wouldn’t change anything about it. Yet, part of me wonders where I’d be if I’d gone for a shorter time, or when my friends went. I’d still be heartbroken about something these days, but for different reasons. If I’d known my sophomore year, before I could drink legally or really settled into my major, that it would be my last full, normal one of my undergrad years, I would’ve soaked it up more. The late-night conversations with friends, parties, rush of syllabus day, getting to the café before it closes. Small things that build the thread of college until you have a quilt. My quilt feels a little incomplete. Learning to appreciate and sew the quilt until it keeps you warm is a hard lesson to learn. One that has left me a bit chilly.

           I can’t look at this pandemic and say it really has negatively affected me. Of course, I struggle a bit. I feel sad and heavy and stuck, watching people become sick or lose their jobs or struggle in ways I have not. As for myself, I’m still being fed. I have a house to live in, where I have my own space. My parents didn’t lose their jobs. Nobody I know has actually become sick or died of COVID (which I find remarkable and am grateful for). I am healthy, strong, and happy when I choose to be. Happiness is a choice, but I know that decision is easier for me than others. Because of this, it feels almost selfish to let myself grieve what I’m missing, or what I know I’ll miss futuristically. Of course, they’re small things: concerts, breakfast dates, travel, parties, movie theaters, lectures, museums, etc. Small things that make up the bulk of our lives.

           Yes, I miss these things deeply. The sensations they bring, from flying through security at big festivals to hearing the music behind my favorite production company’s logo when the theater lights go down, are treasures I find hard to replace. Yet, there’s something fantastic about having to recreate life for yourself, by yourself. If only for a moment.

           Prior to March, I hadn’t lived at home for a lengthy time period since the summer after my freshman year. I realize this was only two years, but so much happened in those two years. Life changed so quickly in so many ways.

           During January and February, when the Coronavirus still felt like it was on the other side of the planet and subsequently somebody else’s problem, I spent an hour a day rifling through the Internet. LinkedIn, New Pages, anywhere offering ideas on what I could do for the summer to avoid going home.

           The previous year, in 2019, I’d spent a total of about 4 ½ weeks living at home. This total is a combination of popping in and out of my house at various moments to move belongings, catch rides to the airport, etc. It was awesome. If anything, it was a taste of what it might feel like to be a travel writer or a journalist in the future. Always on the go, somewhere to go, the rush of a big adventure never far beyond the horizon.

           That is largely what I’d hoped for 2020. Spending as little time at home as possible, bouncing through life for my last year of undergrad until post-diploma opportunities arrived. I don’t say this to mean that I dislike being home. I feel fortunate and grateful that my home environment is one to be more desired rather than avoided. That said, I have few friends in my hometown, there’s almost nothing to do that actually interests me, and I can’t really imagine any twentysomething wanting to return home after they’ve spent years traveling or living elsewhere.

           When the Pandemic became serious and universities sent their students home (for what we now know, if we know anything, is an indefinite time period), I held back tears as we cleaned my room out two months early. March became April, and May, June, July followed seamlessly. The curve fell, rose, fell, straightened, rose. A vicious cycle of uncertainty, heartbreak, agitation. With each minute, plans changed. Tickets refunded, trips cancelled, universities announcing and then refining their strategies as students angerly stand by.

           By May, the year felt trashed. Woe is me, I’m never going anywhere again, life sucks. Over Memorial Day weekend, my sister and her boyfriend came to visit us. At this point, I’d felt pretty sluggish for weeks. I live with two parents who are both professors within academia, so I have both the audience view of how universities handle the Pandemic, and the backstage information. By that weekend, I was more than tired of my inability to escape the educational problems around COVID.

           At one point that Saturday afternoon, I said something pessimistically, and my sister blatantly asked if I’d been this depressing to be around all quarantine. My parents agreed without hesitation.

           Most people I know would agree that I’m a pretty positive, chill person. It takes a lot to make me angry or frustrated, let alone depressed. Watching my entire family agree that I was noticeably off, to the point where it radiated off my person, was striking. If I didn’t start dwelling on something that wasn’t COVID-related, I was going to literally go crazy.

           There’s far more to life than increasing the speed at which it goes by. For years of my life, from academics to dating, I felt like I was constantly racing to catch up with somebody. Sometimes it was my sister, or my best friend, or even the timelines of my family’s lives. I spent middle school waiting for high school, and then waiting for college, and then waiting for life to get interesting. Then life got interesting. The sucky about this then becomes when we begin to fall in love with life, we just want more of it. We try to chase life until there is none left. Some of us succeed, but more frequently, we decide we can’t slow down or be happy until we get to the next best thing. I think this is primarily what robs us of being happy, and feeling like we can, in fact, slow down and find joy.

           After that long May weekend, I decided I needed to slow down. I needed to start digesting my abroad trip, my 2019 internship, and ultimately focus more on my daily life than letting myself scratch until more adventure soothed the itch.

           I’ve been walking my family’s new puppy through our small town every night, but instead of looking at my phone while I do it, I pay attention to my surroundings. I watch the sky, observing which direction the clouds move and how quickly. I listen to the birds and let myself feel the weight of my body on the pavement rather than running across town just to get home.

           I’ve gone back and re-read books I flew through in college or high school for the sake of assignments, and instead highlight what is interesting. I’ve gone over the “misc.” folder on my laptop, which is full of stories and poems and blog pieces I started once and fell out of touch with. I’ve finished some, edited others, logged my progress.

           I’ve flicked through the various streaming services to which I have access. Months ago, I decided that I’d use Friday and Saturday nights to watch classic movies I think I should watch before I turn thirty. Jaws, Animal House, The Birds, Blazing Saddles. The movies my parents quote constantly, that made huge cultural impacts. I watch them with a beer in hand, or popcorn, without holding my phone. The way movies are supposed to be enjoyed. I’m about to sound very “Gen Z”, but the movie experience is much better when you put your mind to the screen.

           I’ve worked on my abroad journal, reminiscing on a semester well spent and trying to piece together how much has happened and where it’ll lead. I’ve managed to catch up with old friends and do some things I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

           When we start seeking adventure, going out of our way to find it like life depends on it, we begin convincing ourselves that we can never slow down. You can’t go back to get something if you have little daylight to get where you need to go.

           When we slow down, we see clearer than we do when we run.

           I’m an inspiration, adrenaline seeker. I love when my heart is racing. I love when I see artwork or have an in-person conversation with friends over dinner and the conversation strikes me.

           What I’ve realized, months into quarantine, is that I don’t exactly need to be traveling, or even experiencing significant things, to feel inspired. Perhaps we as humans are naturally curious because finding or hearing adrenaline-inducing things is the best, easiest gateway to inspiration. But we don’t need to continuously be searching for it. It comes when it wants.

           I’ve grown to really love when something goes wrong during planned itinerary. Caught in rain without a jacket, running for a flight you’ll barely catch, eating cheese and crackers because you’re out of propane to grill dinner. I’ve done them all. In the moment, they’re not fun. They’re intimidating, uncomfortable, even a little mind-numbing. But they happen. And when you’ve caught the flight, dry out your clothes, or finally eat a well-balanced meal, the worry you once had feels like taboo.

           Thus, it’s occurred to me that, yes, COVID sucks. Quarantine is a drag. Death is misery. Changed plans are brutal. Frustration is misery.

           But it happens. One day, I’ll hug my friends again. I’ll catch a flight, buy concert tickets, celebrate a graduation with a real ceremony, and go get ice cream without a mask. And when I do that, it’ll feel real damn good.

           A Pandemic doesn’t mean life isn’t good. It’s a difficult roadblock to move. It is scary and upsetting. It teaches us to dig deeper for the good and not let that good go. It shows us where we need to improve. It tells us we can do better, and we will. Life is still good. Travel and adventure are epic, but so are lazy days and calendars.

           We will care for each other. We will slow down. We will appreciate and work together. Then, one day, when we are together again, it will be sweet like nectar.

#study abroad #covid #slowliving #Amsterdam #europe #student #travel