a story of a sandwich.

February 25, 2017

so many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear. (gay, bad feminist, "feel me. see me. hear me. reach me.", 3)

it’s saturday now, you say, where is the thursday post? as it goes, i am in san francisco this week, and, last weekend, i was hit with some bad health news, so i, again, fell prey to poor planning. which is a long-winded way to say that there is no thursday post this week.

that said, though — on tuesday, i landed in san francisco, and my cousin and i went to hear roxane gay speak. it’s always a huge pleasure to hear her; she’s funny, well-spoken, and gracious; and she doesn’t take shit, which was well-demonstrated when a white man brought up milo whatever-his-name-is and asked in that male privilege way how simon & schuster [finally] pulling his book wasn’t an act of censorship.

(for more of gay’s thoughts on that, read her tumblr post here.)

she said many things that were wise and hilarious and thoughtful, and one thing that stuck with me was something she said about symbols. she was asked specifically about pussy hats (the asker of the question had hated them), and gay responded first by saying that she didn’t get them, had thought they meant pussy like vagina and just did not see how the hats looked like vaginas until she was standing in line and saw one from behind and was like, ohhhh, pussy like cat!

she went on to say that symbols are fine, and symbols can be good in that, sometimes, we need them, but it’s important to move past them. it is not enough to wear a symbol, to embrace it without moving into action, into awareness and knowledge. symbols are not inherently bad, but neither are they good, and they are not enough.

that made me think how one of the things to do post election was to wear a safety pin on your clothing to show that you were an ally to marginalized people, and, at the time, i remember thinking that, okay, yeah, fine, maybe the gesture is nice but huh, what, why? (also, who has safety pins just sitting around? can you buy individual safety pins? or do you buy them in a pack and distribute them to friends? and, again, huh, what, why?)

i don’t disregard the meaning behind a gesture, and i appreciated the attempt post-election to make some kind of visible show of support to help mitigate some of the fear that had, overnight, taken over us in new, heightened ways. i appreciated that there was a gesture being made to show us that they, these safety pin-wearers, didn’t need to be feared, but, at the same time, i did wonder if the gesture was more for them than for us, for them to show the world what side they were on.

maybe that’s cynical of me, but maybe here is where my personal experience intersects with all this because the truth is that i don’t give anyone a whole lot of credit for embracing a symbol. in the end, it doesn’t mean that much, and it doesn’t reduce the threats being made on our bodies, our rights, our lives. also, i might be conflating things too much here, but i don’t give anyone credit for his/her intentions. i’m not interested in the intentions behind someone’s actions; i’m interested in those actions and their consequences because the truth is that it doesn’t really matter what anyone’s intentions were when her/his actions cause or contribute to tremendous damage.

we all have history. you can think you're over your history. you can think the past is the past. and then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. the past is always with you. some people want to be protected from this truth. ("the illusion of safety/the safety of illusion," 150)

i often wonder where i’d be today had i not suffered over ten years of intentional, routine body shaming.

i wonder if i might have fallen in love and gotten married. (i wonder if i’d have trapped myself in that heteronormative world, having assumed straightness for three decades.) i wonder if i might have graduated college the first time around, gone on to a doctorate program, have an established career. i wonder if i might have had the boldness to take my writing seriously and been published by now. i wonder if i’d be skinny or if i’d look the same or if i’d still have gone on to hate my body and hate myself.

i wonder most about where i’d be in regards to food — would i have gone to culinary school like i wanted once? would i have pursued photography and bought a camera and made a space for myself in food photography or food styling? would i have ventured into food writing? how much time would i have saved had i not felt so ashamed and uncomfortable for so many fucking years for loving food and wanting to know how to cook it and to photograph it and to share it?

i’m not one to spend a lot of time on the what ifs; i think it’s a waste of time to indulge in hypotheticals because it doesn’t matter what could have been when life has progressed the way it has. however, we do have to engage in a fair amount of reflection on past actions, whether as committed by ourselves or by others in our lives, in order to look into the future and change accordingly, to better ourselves and to be better people to those around us.

sometimes, that takes us to uncomfortable places. sometimes, it takes us to places of anger, and i admit that this is something that continues to make me angry: that we will tear down the people we are supposed to love, that we will defend it as being something we did because of love, and that we will never fully understand the extent of the damage we have caused and live, oblivious, to the lives that we have wrecked.

there’s a lot more i want to say about food, about bodies, about shame, and there’s also a lot more i want to say about anger and rage and resentment. there’s a lot i want to say about hopelessness and this general sense of futility, that it doesn’t matter how hard i try to heal or piece myself back together because there is always rock bottom beneath rock bottom, and there is always another blow waiting to fall.

i’m not quite ready to get into it right now, though, this most recent blow that struck me where it just really fucking hurts. i’ve been having a hard time processing it, which means i’ve been at a loss for words, because i’m currently dealing with a whole lot of fury and bitterness slithering constantly just under my skin. i admit that i’m pissed off these days, that i think that none of this is fair, and i admit that i’m letting myself have these little mental temper tantrums because it’s the only way i know how to cope in the immediate present.

one of the things i’ve been learning is not to be afraid of my feelings or of expressing my feelings. saying this is how i feel is not a confession of weakness; it’s a statement of humanity; and it’s a way of saying that here is something that is informing how i am approaching something or someone or some shitty situation. it is a way of saying that i am just a person, and i hurt and flail and cry and laugh and feel because that is what we do as human beings — we feel, we process, we act.

and, so, maybe, here is a story of a sandwich: that tartine is a bakery that i have been wanting to visit for years, that they’ve recently opened a new location with food options, that this is their fried egg and porchetta sandwich. i first saw it on instagram, and i’ve thought about it since because i love food and i live to eat and this sandwich was something for me to look forward to, for me to hope for as i adjusted, poorly, to being back in california.

this sandwich fits into the greater story of me because i have survived this far because of food, because i deal with stress and anxiety and help manage my depression through food. i make pasta; i bake bread; i make pastries. i eat. i lose myself in food, melt inside in happiness at the way a croissant shatters in that perfect way when your fingers press into it to tear it apart, the way an egg yolk bursts open and oozes down a sandwich. i smile from the bliss of a mouthful of juicy porchetta, crispy skin, egg yolk, and arugula. i love the way my fingers are buttery and smeared with chocolate after a croissant has been eaten, so much so that my fingers leave track marks on napkins, faint grease stains on everything i touch.

and it makes me furious that, now that i have finally reached a point where i don’t feel guilty or ashamed of this love, now that i have finally embraced my love for food and banished any self-consciousness in expressing it, the bomb hidden in my genetics has detonated, and my body is taking all this love, turning it into poison, and using it to destroy itself.

bad feminism seems like the only way i can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself, and so i write. i chatter away on twitter about everything that makes me angry and all the small things that bring me joy. i write blog posts about the meals i cook as i try to take better care of myself, and with each new entry, i realize that i’m undestroying myself after years of allowing myself to stay damaged. the more i write, the more i put myself out into the world as a bad feminist but, i hope, a good woman — i am being open about who i am and who i was and where i have faltered and who i would like to become.
no matter what issues i have with feminism, i am a feminist. i cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. like most people, i’m full of contradictions, but i also don’t want to be treated like shit for being a woman.
i am a bad feminist. i would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all. (“bad feminist: take two,” 318)

this is all we've got.

December 30, 2016

the snow stopped, i murmured to myself. it felt as if a long time had passed. snow erases everything. sometimes, it covers up things that can rot and disappear. for a little while, snow helps us to remember the memories we keep scattered in our hearts. and now the snow had stopped. (park min-gyu, pavane for a dead princess, 10)

2016 was a year of heartache; i didn’t know my heart could hurt like it did.

i didn’t know it could hurt so much from fear, anxiety, and disappointment. i didn’t know it could hurt so much just being who i am in a conservative setting, to look into the future and see the continued aggression and rejection, and i didn’t know it could hurt so much on account of my country.

i didn’t know my heart could hurt so much from sheer longing, not even for anything impossible but for things that seem so basic, so human.

i didn’t know my heart could hurt so much, to want so much to love someone, to want only happiness for her.

i didn’t know the human heart could be so easy to decimate, so difficult to kill.

if my heart feels destroyed, my brain feels so muddled these days. i’ve been trying to write this post since december 17, when we had snow in new york, and, now, it’s december 30, and i’m trapped in california because 2016 is the year the idea of rock bottom lost all meaning. i have things i want to say, but i’m not sure where to start, and all the anxiety from being stuck here is bleeding into everything.

all i want right now is to go back home.

i suppose, though, here’s a brief summation, that 2016 was the year of instability, of looking for and failing to find a full-time job and gain, with it, a measure of stability and assurance that i haven’t totally fucked up. it’s the year i finally met the challenge of semi-regularly producing content and trying to find a voice of my own, and it’s also the year i stopped caring about trying to fit into a specific niche or satisfy the implied requirements of what makes a good social media presence of a particular ilk.

2016 is the year i was constantly surprised by people’s capacity to love and reach out, and this means a tremendous amount to me because 2016 is the year i learned to carry anxiety with me everywhere, the year when spaces that were once familiar became treacherous. it’s the year i looked my sexuality in the eye, recognized it for what it was, and outed myself on social media, which wasn’t something i planned to do, ended up doing the night of the election because of terror, fear, and rage. 2016 is also the year i excised god from my life and walked away from faith — and the two combined means that 2016 was a year of constant tension and strain and worry.

it’s liberating to be out, but it comes packaged with a whole lot of uncertainty and fear. i also have the added baggage of having grown up in a conservative christian community, and being out means that i honestly don’t know where i stand with many people, if and which relationships are dead, what consequences my conservative christian family might face from their community because of my orientation. it might be a stupid thing for me to be worrying about, but it is there, and it is a thing that has kept me silent or talking in what feels like code, hoping people (allies) read between the lines or (non-allies) miss the hidden language altogether.

it’s been a lot to carry, trying to rebuild my world without faith and to navigate life outside the heteronormative mainstream. i feel almost like i’ve been reborn, and it has been exciting to claim this part of myself that i’d neglected and dismissed for so long — but that makes me angry, too, the narrowness of the world of my youth, the ways religion continues to repress and shame and harm with ugly violence fueled by blind hatred.

and, so, 2016 is the year i learned that silence is not an option. i ended up outing myself in a pique of rage and panic because this country had basically made it very clear on november 9 that it didn’t matter whether i was in the closet or not — it was going to come after me and my rights, anyway, so i might as well speak up, and i might as well fight.

which goes to say that we might be looking right at 2017, and i might be feeling completely muddled and broken these days, but we’ll find the words to talk about all this shit in the months to come.

my goal for 2016 was to read 75 books, and i did not meet that goal, coming in at 65 (i think). i feel like i fell short of all my reading goals this year — didn’t read 75 books, didn’t read anything in completion in korean — though i did blog more, so i did write more about what i was reading.

it’s not to say that 2016 was a bad reading year. i don’t think any year in which i read and attempt to read diversely, intelligently, and thoughtfully can be a bad reading year, but it is true that 2016 was largely an uninspired reading year. i struggled considerably with staying engaged, staying interested, not with specific books per se but with fiction in general. for the most part, though, as unpleasant as it is to be uninspired, that was still okay because i diverted a lot of my focus into reading more food writing and more cookbooks, into exploring what that intersection of literary writing and/or journalism and food looks like.

this is not a comment on the books that were published in 2016 — or that i read this year because i read some amazing books that moved me and challenged me and helped me find hope amidst the shit (my next post will be about 10 specific books). i’ve struggled with some very real fatigue this year, though, and it’s a fatigue that has almost entirely to do with whiteness and straightness, despite 2016 having been a pretty good year for writers of color. it’s encouraging to see the industry being better, trying to look beyond its white straightness, and yet …?

maybe this fatigue is an inevitable by-product of both this election cycle and this election, all the ugliness it exposed to be alive and well in this country. maybe it’s an inevitable by-product of the disappointments in my own life, of not finding a job, of struggling so much to survive, to pay the bills, to write. maybe it’s also an inevitable by-product of all my interpersonal and social anxiety.

maybe it’s all of it.

in his year in reading essay for the millions, kevin nguyen writes:

if you believe that books have the power to do good, you also have to believe that they can do just as much harm. after the election, there was no soul searching on book twitter. no one questioned the power structures of publishing. can we talk about how one of the big five publishers is owned by news corp? often the publishing of things like bill o’really’s twisted histories is justified as a means to support literary fiction. but does anyone asks if that trade-off is worth it?

it’s easy to romanticize books and to make them out to be great cultural pillars, and that’s not to say that they aren’t. it’s crucial to recognize literature’s place in the world and its ability to shape thought and, yes, do good (and to stop trying to kill humanities programs), but it’s easy to lose ourselves in this idea that, because we read, we are good, we are somehow superior to other consumers of other modes of culture.

we make a thing out of a flawed industry, even going so far as to make the big 5 out to be these great underdogs in the world of amazon and internet media, when big publishing is exactly that — big — and just as guilty of making bad decisions, of failing to adapt and make changes, of sitting around and talking about a topic (aka diversity) instead of trying to do something about it. just because publishing’s business is books doesn’t mean it’s an industry that’s not guilty of indulging and overexposing celebrity, of selling out, of making questionable compromises in the name of what — money? reputation? power?

which is not to dismiss the agents and editors and publicists and marketers and designers and the army of assistants and HR people who try to acquire great work by writers of different colors and backgrounds and orientations and bring beautiful, thoughtful writing into the world. i know that there are great people working in publishing today, and i love the work that they do, the dedication they have to literature and literary culture. as a reader, i am indebted to them, and, as a writer, i hope one day to be published by them, to place my book in their hands, to have them on my side.

and yet there is something about always having to make this kind of statement that feels odd — like, how we must always go out of our ways to say that, yes, we know that not all white people are racists and we know that not all men are misogynists or assholes who commit violence against women, not all christians are homophobic bigots. to have to make that concession is simply another way that power exhibits itself, this seeming need to protect the power-holder’s fragility and indulge its self-defensiveness, all just to be able to say that shit is bad and shit needs to change.

making a criticism is not making a blanket statement that everything in that setting or grouping is bad. things are not so clearly either/or, and contradictions exist within everything — and, as such, 2016 was a good year for writers of color, but 2017 needs to be a better one. we need more writers of minority groups telling their stories, whether through journalism, fiction, or personal essays. we need to be asking ourselves if the trade-offs are worth it, and we need to admit that books can do as much damage as good. we need to question why we read what we read, why we write what we write, why we publish what we publish, and we need to look at where voices are being cut off and shut out.

we need to ask how we can do better, whether as people who work in the industry or as writers or as readers because it will take all of us to create change and move the world to a better, more open place.

i don’t mean this to sound condescending or like a lecture, but i do want to throw the challenge out there because, again, silence is not an option, and, similarly, indifference is not an option. we don’t get to not care anymore, and, as such, i hope to see more in 2017 from publishing and the literary world. like i said, there are people out there doing great work, so i don’t think this is a vain hope.

ultimately, 2016 is the year that being able to recognize myself in literature started to mean a whole fucking lot, and i will do as much as i can in my own limited ways to bring more attention and awareness to great writing by minority writers. it is the least that i can do.

if 2016 was a year of heartache, 2017 is the year we lose each other.

early next year, i’m looking at a move to the bay area, back across the country to california, that fucking state that just won’t let her goddamn claws out of me. it’s a mess of a situation where no one wins, not me, not my family, not anyone involved, and it’s not something i’m really thinking about in any substantive way yet because to do so would be to descend into rage and desperation.

i know exactly what a move back to california means; it means a return to rootlessness and restlessness and continued self-loathing. it means not letting myself settle down because my singular goal will be to leave as soon as i can because the longer i stay, the greater the damage, and i’m already in pieces.

to some, it might sound strange and irrational because a state is a state, it’s just place, somewhere to be, who bloody cares? a cage, however, is place, too, and place is a weapon, a trap, a hell, and, as a queer woman of color, place matters a lot because place is directly attached to safety, and safety is something i don’t take for granted.

there’s that saying that a wounded animal is the most dangerous, but i wonder to whom the danger lies. is it the wounded animal that is in danger from herself? or is it the person or thing cornering her that is in danger? when you trap a wounded animal, who will she harm — you? or herself?

if there’s something to remember, it’s that things do not exist simply in clear binaries. it is possible to love someone and be disappointed in that same person, to acknowledge someone’s goodness and generosity as well as that person’s narrow-mindedness and flaws. it is possible to love someone who harms you, not in a stockholm syndrome sort of way, but in a genuine way that recognizes that we all fuck up and we are all capable of causing great harm but we can also admit that and work to heal wounds and rebuild trust.

it is possible to be so completely, humbly grateful for what someone does for you and find yourself suffocating from that same gratitude, and it is possible to care for someone and love that person deeply and trigger that person in all the worst possible ways. it is possible to believe that you are doing the best for someone and wreak so much damage that that person will flee from you just to have even the smallest chance to heal.

it is possible for things to be okay even while they’ve fractured beyond repair.

it is possible not to want to live and also not to want to die.
it is possible to listen to someone speak and not hear what that person is actually saying.
it is possible to have an open heart and draw lines and conditions that close up that same heart.

it is possible to be, to commit acts that so completely oppose each other at the same time, and to believe in a world of perfect consistency is to be naive.

when i think about 2017, i see nothing. i have no hopes, no expectations, just silence and darkness, a low thrum of hopelessness underneath it all. 2017 already looks like regression, ten steps backwards, and i can already chart it out in loss. 2016, in many ways, is ending with lines drawn in the sand indicating the limits to certain relationships, and 2017 is starting not with calm and anticipation but with my anxiety and depression keyed up as high as they can go. 2016 might have tracked the decline of my mental state, but 2017 is already tearing at the shreds, causing more damage before the year has even begun.

i have one goal for 2017, and it is to move back out east, whether to new york or boston, by the end of it because i will not live and die in california, a state that i despise and that has never been kind to me. i know where home is, and, by the end of 2017, i will be back home.

[dec 5] here’s looking for meaning at the bottom of a bowl.

December 9, 2016

but there are dreams that cannot be
and there are storms we cannot weather
- les miserables, "i dreamed a dream"

it’s friday, which means this week is at an end, which means, hurrah, we’ve survived another week. five days of posting done, something i doubt i’ll repeat again, because i do think it’s better to sit on something, let it stew, and work it over and over until it’s more than a slapdash idea.

it was my birthday on monday, and it’s something i largely let slide under the radar — and it probably would have gone totally under the radar had i not written that here. it’s been a difficult year, probably the darkest i’ve seen thus far, and it’s been a year of navigating disappointment after disappointment, of losing hope and feeling the ground fall out from under my feet (again), of continuing this race i always seem to be running against time, a race i will never win.

i guess i wanted to commemorate surviving, though, of still being here at the end of 2016 and not just letting the moment pass dismissed. i also wanted to take on a small challenge in an attempt to give my brain something to chew on, and, in this, these five days have largely been successful — i’ve finally made significant headway on an essay i’ve been wanting to write for a few months now, one i plan to pitch, the prospect of rejections and the fear of personal essays be damned.

and don’t worry — the diary-esque-ness of the last five days won’t stick around. i’m pretty sure i’ve said this before, but this space is a constant work-in-progress, and it’s been confirmed that i don’t quite enjoy that kind of posting. i prefer longer forms, so we’ll go back to semi-regular posts of more depth.

thank you, as always, for reading.

chuko serves one of my favorite bowls of ramen, and, as it turns out, their wings are damn good, too. the last time i ate at chuko, it was october 2015, and they’ve since moved into a larger space up the street, still just a few blocks away from ample hills (because ramen and ice cream go together very well). get the pork broth with the roasted pork; it’s a bowl that surprisingly isn’t salty or too heavy; and the pork is so tender, pairs well with the menma and bitter greens. it’s a bowl that’s perfect for these colder, darker days when the future is unknowable and offers no hope.

[dec 5] here's somewhere to be.

December 8, 2016

rooms. every room a world. to be god: to be every life before we die: a dream to drive men mad. but to be one person, one woman — to live, suffer, bear children & learn others lives & make them into print worlds spinning like planets in the minds of other men. (306)

some days, i run out of words, and today is one of those. (i also spent a fair chunk of time today working on an essay i’d like to pitch, which mostly explains the inability to pull together words tonight.) some days, the loss of words comes with a lack of inspiration, and, during such times, i find myself reaching for sylvia plath’s unabridged journals — so here are a few quotes, along with a few images of the new york public library.

in bed, bathed, and the good rain coming down again — liquidly slopping down the shingled roof outside my window. all today it has come down, in its enclosing wetness, and at last i am in bed, propped up comfortably by pillows — listening to it spurting and drenching — and all the different timbers of tone — and syncopation. the rapping on the resonant gutters — hard, metallic. the rush of a stream down the drain pipe splattering flat on the earth, wearing away a small gully — the musical falling of itself, tinkling faintly on the tin garbage pails in a high pitched tattoo. and it seems that always in august i am more aware of the rain. (123)

the dialogue between my Writing and my Life is always in danger of becoming a slithering shifting of responsibility, of evasive rationalizing: in other words: i justified the mess i made of life by saying i’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it; i justified my writing by saying it would be published, give me life (and prestige to life). now, you have to begin somewhere, and it might as well be with life; a belief in me, with my limitations, and a strong punchy determination to fight to overcome one by one: like languages, to learn french, ignore italian (asloppy knowledge of 3 languages is dilettantism) and revive german again, to build each solid. to build all solid. (208-9)

simply the fact that i write in here able to hold a pen, proves, i suppose, the ability to go on living. (334)

very few people do this any more. it’s too risky. first of all, it’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. it’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all. or to give your soul to god like st. therese and say: the one thing i fear is doing my own will. do it for me, god. (435)

it is raining. steady straight streams of rain falling, falling, slicking the green tarpaper roofflats, the pink and blue and lavender slates of the slant roof, looping down in runnels, taking the color of the slates and tiles like a chameleon water. falling in little white rings in the puddles on my porch. dropping a scrim of pale lines between me and the pines, filling the distance with a watery luminous grey. (512)

what if our work isn’t good enough? we get rejections. isn’t this the world’s telling us we shouldn’t bother to be writers? how can we know if we work now hard and develop ourselves we will be more than mediocre? isn’t this the world’s revenge on us for sticking our neck out? we can never know until we’ve worked, written. we have no guarantee we’ll get a writer’s degree. weren’t the mothers and businessmen right after all? shouldn’t we have avoided these disquieting questions and taken steady jobs and secured a good future for the kiddies?
not unless we want to be bitter all our lives. not unless we want to feel wistfully: what a writer i might have been, if only. if only i’d had to guts to try and work and shoulder the insecurity all that trial and work implied.
writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and removing of people and the world as they are and as they might be. a shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. the writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. people read it: react to it as to a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. it helps them, or it does not. it feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge. you do it for itself first. if it brings in money, how nice. you do not do it first for money. money isn’t why you sit down at the typewriter. not that you don’t want it. it is only too lovely when a profession pays for your bread and butter. with writing, it is maybe, maybe-not. how to live with such insecurity? with what is worst, the occasional lack or loss of faith in the writing itself? how to live with these things?
the worst thing, worse than all of them, would be to live with not writing. so how to live with the lesser devils and keep them lesser? (436-7)

[dec 5] here's a way to dress up leftovers: put an egg on it.

December 7, 2016

it was more than just missing the smell of the desert grass or being able to fall back into reskitkish. it was that people there understood. as dear as her crewmates were, constantly having to explain cultural differences, to bite back a friendly remark that might offend alien ears, to hold her hands still when she wanted to touch someone — it all grew tiring. (the long way to a small and angry planet, 271)

… out here, where she was hyper-aware of everything she was and wasn’t, truth left her vulnerable. (a closed and common orbit, 24)

last december, i went to hear naomi williams (landfalls, FSG, 2015) read in brooklyn, and she made an interesting distinction between being imaginative and being creative. she said the former is to create entirely from scratch, to imagine worlds into existence, while the latter is to take what is already existent and build from there. she wasn’t saying that one is better than the other, that one requires more and thus is more impressive; the point she was making was simply that here are two ways that creative minds work.

(i don’t think they’re mutually exclusive [and i think she’d agree that they’re not, either], and i think that we might each be inclined more dominantly to one or the other, but creating ultimately takes from both columns.)

on the rare occasion i read science fiction/fantasy, i’m reminded of this because i’m astounded (truly, seriously) by how people can create entire worlds and beings and cultures in their brains and then put those creations on paper (or on screen) for us to read and experience. seriously. mind. blown.

a few months ago, i came across becky chambers’ the long way to a small angry planet (hodder and stoughton, 2015) as it made its rounds on instagram. the cover caught my eye (i mean, look at it), so i had to have it — luckily, the story sounded interesting and like something i would love, and the book was highly praised. i promptly ordered it and loved it, then waited impatiently for the sequel, a closed and common circuit, which was published this october.

(i’m shit at synopses, so please google.)

what i liked so much about both books is that chambers shows us what it looks like to live in community with people and beings who are vastly different from us. her world is populated by humans and a number of different species of aliens, each with its own culture, its own language, its own society, and she shows us how they exist together, not always in peace and without conflict but, generally, harmoniously.

chambers also shows us about prejudice, about species-ism, which stands in for racism in her books, and she shows us that it requires work to dismantle prejudice. it requires us to come face-to-face with the ugliness in ourselves, and it requires us to step past that, to make ourselves uncomfortable, to do the work it takes to open our minds and learn to see past our judgments and -isms.

one of my favorite scenes from a closed and common circuit is this exchange between sidra and tak, an aeluon. sidra is an AI in a “human” body made of circuits and wires (called a “kit”), and she’s illegal because AIs are meant to be helpful mechanisms installed into things, not installed in forms that resemble humans. she befriends tak, an alien tattoo artist, at a party, and they become friends, sidra eventually going to tak to get a tattoo of her own — except, when she’s there to get inked, her kit freaks out and glitches because it can’t handle the nanobots being inked onto it.

tak, unsurprisingly, freaks out to find out that sidra is an AI, and they part on bad terms.

in this scene, tak comes to see sidra weeks later.

’and here, AIs are just … tools. they’re the things that make travel pods go. they’re what answer your questions at the library. they’re what greet you at hotels and shuttle ports when you’re travelling. i’ve never thought of them as anything but that.
‘okay,’ sidra said. none of that was an out-of-the-ordinary sentiment, but it itched all the same.
‘but then you … you came into my shop. you wanted ink.i’ve thought about what you said before you left. you came to me, you said, because you didn’t fit within your body. and that … that is something more than a tool would say. and when you said it, you looked … angry. upset. i hurt you, didn’t i?’
‘yes,’ sidra said.
tak rocked her head in guilty acknowledgement. ‘you get hurt. you read essays and watch vids. i’m sure there are huge differences between you and me, but i mean … there are huge differences between me and a harmagian. we’re all different. i’ve been doing a lot of thinking since you left, and a lot of reading, and —‘ she exhaled again, short and frustrated. ‘what i’m trying to say is i — i think maybe i underestimated you. i misunderstood, at least.’
[…]
sidra processed, processed, processed. […] ‘this … re-evaluation of yours. does it extend to other AIs? or do you merely see me differently because i’m in a body?’
tak exhaled. ‘we’re being honest here, right?’
‘i can’t be anything but.’
‘okay, well — wait, seriously?’
‘seriously.’
‘right. okay. i guess i have to be honest too, then, if we’re gonna keep this fair.’ tak knitted her long silver fingers together and stared at them. ‘i’m not sure i would’ve gone down this road if you weren’t in a body, no. i … don’t think it would’ve occurred to me to think differently.’
sidra nodded. ‘i understand. it bothers me, but i do understand.’
‘yeah. it kind of bothers me, too. i’m not sure i like what any of this says about me.’ (189-90)

i particularly like that last line because it’s an understandably big block when it comes to trying to overcome prejudice of any kind. no one wants to learn that s/he has that kind of ugliness within. no one wants to see that reflected at him/her. no one wants to admit that s/he is racist, sexist, prejudiced in any way. we all want to see ourselves as above all that.

the thing, though, is that, unless we’re willing to go there and see the prejudice we carry, we will never change. unless we ourselves are willing to look in the mirror and look that internal ugliness in the eye, we will never change, just like we will never change unless we’re willing to open ourselves up and have the bloody difficult conversations.

and we will never change as long as we stay in our bubbles and echo chambers. we will never learn to see the world through another lens, to see people who are different from us as dimensional, living human beings, as long as we refuse to step out of our comfort zones and try.

that goes for everyone, for all of us, myself included, liberal or conservative, male or female, straight or LGBTQ+. we all have some measure of internalized misogyny and/or racism and/or classism and/or name your -ism, and, unless we try to change, we never will, and neither will the world.

chambers gets at this point in her books, and she does it without getting on a soapbox, weaving these conflicts into her stories and showing us through narrative how difficult it is to recognize prejudice and to work to overcome it. she shows us the consequences of staying locked in a closed, self-serving mindset, just as she also shows us the fruits that come of confronting that ugliness and becoming more open, understanding people. it’s not easy, but it is worth it and makes for a better society — and that, i believe, is why we ought to try, even though the process is neither painless nor pretty.