Columns

LEUNG | Call My Name

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Some memories of my first few years of education still stick with me. Like in kindergarten, when one of my classmates spilled yogurt all over his binders and I helped him clean up the mess. My teacher, so surprised that a young child could embody selflessness, wrote a note to my parents congratulating them on their daughter’s unsolicited kindness. Or when, in first grade, I answered a certain number of questions in class correctly and was able to pick a prize out of the “treasure chest.” I was so excited. I remember rummaging through the gaudily decorated box, debating whether to choose the pink bunny puppet or the duck one.

Columns

RUSSELL | Saviors Don’t Need Sick Days

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To this day, one of my greatest accomplishments is the fact that I was able to change my name in my eighth grade yearbook. To me, it was proof that I could reinvent myself whenever I wanted. The book just had so much finality to it — locked into history forever. If you journey into the depths of the hidden basement archives of Curtis Middle School right now, you’ll find a 2010 picture of a short and skinny black kid named Rusty Russell. Looking for Paul Russell?

Columns

HAGOPIAN | The Pipeline in Perspective

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Armenian-American. This phrase means a great deal to me, but it doesn’t always mean much to others. “I’m Armenian,” I tell people. Often I see a blank stare and I reluctantly add “like the Kardashians.” There’s a very tragic reason why the Armenian race isn’t more widely known; namely that there aren’t that many of us left. Between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman Turks systematically executed 1.5 million Armenians in an act of genocide.

Columns

GUEST ROOM | The Ñ Files

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Growing up in Puerto Rico I was taught two alphabets in school, English and Spanish. To most people they appear the same, but my classmates and I learned the subtle differences. We were taught the effect letters such as ch, ll, rr and ñ could have on a word. The letter that stuck with me was “ñ.” It is a universal symbol for the Spanish language and, to me, a unique part of my family name. For many years, the “ñ” in my last name was mispronounced, exchanged for an “n,” or simply ignored.

Uncategorized

WANG | For Asian Actors, Not Much Has Changed

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In my spare time, I like to watch ABC’s standout program Fresh off the Boat, laugh, and forget about the perils of school for a moment. The show’s excellently casted: Constance Wu is the star, her motherly charm matched by Randall Park’s sheepish humor. Hudson Yang plays the awkward son growing in spades who’s rap obsessed but a poor student, and Forrest Wheeler and Ian Chen round out the family as the intelligent minions. They’re hilarious, relatable and straight up dorky. They’re also the exception.

Columns

BANKS | I’ve Always Hated Brainstorming Titles

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Although I’ve never had the slightest interest in being white, I’ve sometimes wondered what it might be like to exist amongst white people under the same cover of racial subterfuge. Then again, I suppose I don’t really need to wonder. The implications of whiteness remain a secret only to the white people who would bristle or sneer at such a notion — and, perhaps more importantly, have long since ceased to be a secret for any person of color who has traversed the cavernous, perilous chambers of an overwhelmingly white world. Yet, beyond this, I realize that — in a way — I already have an intimate, almost intuitive understanding of being white. After all, I am a man.

Blogs

WHITE KNUCKLES | Washing the Salt Away

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Over spring break, I dropped my phone in the ocean. It broke, and for two days I felt estranged – no sense of time, no notifications, no detested yet familiar sound of my alarm in the morning or the reassuring faculty of documenting every instant. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, life is much slower – the bright color of the small houses shine in the hot afternoons, the tide of the sea oscillates calmly and steadily; roosters’ onomatopoeias resound somewhere in the distance, sangria is served with lunch and the sun sets late in the evening; coquis sing on your way home. After long days at the beach, we could never get rid of the sand – it was in between our toes, in the cotton white sheets where we slept, trapped between a cylinder of red lipstick and its lid. Sand was everywhere and it drove me crazy; I wish I could write that the slow rhythm of the colors and the waves and the separation from omnipresent and overbearing technology taught me to let go of the small things and accept things as they are, but that is not who I am.

Blogs

WHITE KNUCKLES | Spell it Right

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Starbucks never gets my name wrong: bold and thick, the four letters written with the sharpie mark my Cinnamon Chai Latte with comforting exactitude. My mother hated her name, could not bear the length of it, the excessive r’s and the harshness of the t, or maybe because of the fact that it was two names stitched together. For me, she wanted something short, the smoothness of the bilabial consonant, the bright ringing of vowels; she liked the literariness to it and its universality. It is impossible to mispronounce, to be  corrupted by accents or unconventional variations or too many confusing syllables. During my exchange year in Maine, my little host brother used to spell it “Ma,” because “M is pronounced Em, and a is pronounced a.” Like the clarity of a crystal, it was simple and immediate.