Go Home!

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  Punctuation is an ongoing online dilemma. Tacky exclamation marks provide rudiments of etiquette Chiara forgoes. She also scorns emoticons, stand-alone uses of colons with single parentheses, and illiterate shortcuts, such as u for you. She is an Internet prig in a world of online junkies. It is a black mark on her generation that the mindless adoption of the signifier lol, an insufficient proxy for the vagaries of the human voice, happened in her lifetime. She never uses it. Even with friends, she fails to sign off xoxoxo, as if her denial of trite, reciprocal affection were a mark of superiority. She never reads the offensive signals she has committed in her texts and is not bothered by the affection she fails to convey, resisting even the existence of the absurd term emoji.

  She barely acknowledges the taxicab driver’s deep bow as he pockets her tip. Her presence at midnight at the front door of Magsalin’s home in the Punta district has the same substance as her online tone: unapologetic, admitting only of intentions relevant to herself.

  If Chiara were not so tiny, wide-eyed, looking a bit troubled in her skewed, though still faintly perfumed, tank top (you see, the maid catches Chiara’s naked expression of distress despite the arrogant blue eyes barely glancing at her—the servant, who could shut the door in her face), the latecomer would never have been welcomed into the Magsalin home—that is, the home of the three bachelor uncles from Magsalin’s maternal line: Nemesio, Exequiel, and Ambrosio, drunkards all.

  Midnight in Manila is no comfort for strangers. Servants in this section of Manila are justly wary of late-night knocks on the door. Corrupt barangay chairmen harass them for tong, doleful bandits pretend to be someone’s long-lost nephew, serial drunks keep mistaking the same dark, shuttered home for their own. Chiara does not notice at first that the address Magsalin had scribbled on the bakeshop’s napkin is a haunted avenue in leafy, cobblestoned disrepair, full of deciduous shadows, aging tenements of purposeless nostalgia amid wild, howling cats, and the occult strains, somehow, of stupid disco music.

  Chiara registers that the location has a disjoint familiarity, like a film set in which she has carefully restored elements of a childhood by dispatching minions to gather her recollections, so that her memory becomes oddly replete, though only reconstructed through the inspired empathy of others. Such is the communality of a film’s endeavor that magic of this sort never disconcerts Chiara. Life for Chiara has always been the imminent confabulation of her desires with the world’s potential to fulfill them. So while the street and its sounds have an eerie sense of a past coming back to bite her, Chiara also dismisses the eerie feeling. She steps into the foyer of the old mahogany home without even a thank-you to the maid, who against her better judgment hurries away at the director’s bidding to fetch the person she demands, Magsalin.

  “I did not give you the manuscript in order for you to revise it,” Chiara begins without introduction.

  “Pleased to see you again, too,” says Magsalin. She gestures Chiara to the rocking chair.

  “I’m not here for pleasantries.”

  “You are in someone else’s home, Miss Brasi. My uncles, who are still awake and, I am warning you, will soon be out to meet you and make you join the karaoke, would be disappointed if I did not treat you like a guest. Please sit.”

  Not looking at it, Chiara takes the ancient rocking chair, the one called a butaka, made for birthing. It creaks under her weight, but Chiara does not seem to hear the sound effect, a non sequitur in the night.

  Now Magsalin is towering over the director, whose small figure is swallowed up in the enormous length of the antique chair.

  “I did not revise the manuscript,” begins Magsalin, knowing she must choose her words carefully, “I presented a translation. A version, one might say.”

  “I did not ask for a translation.” Chiara looks up at her. “I gave you the manuscript as a courtesy. It is the least I can do for the help you will give me.”

  “I have not yet offered that help.”

  “But you will.”

  “Yes, that is true. I have decided to help you get to Samar, to help you with your film. But not without extracting my pound of flesh.”

  “Coauthorship of my screenplay?” snorts Chiara. “That is unacceptable. You are only a reader, not an accomplice.”

  “Permission to make of it as I wish, seeing as my perspective offers its own matter.”

  “And desires that distort,” says Chiara.

  “Possibilities and corrections,” murmurs Magsalin. “Misunderstandings and corruptions,” retorts Chiara. “A mirror, perhaps,” says Magsalin.

  “A double-crossing agent,” snaps Chiara.

  “Yes,” says Magsalin, “the existence of readers is your cross to bear.”

  Meet a Muslim

  Fariha Róisín

  My sister put on the hijab when she was twenty years old. I remember the color of her first scarf—a pale blue green, maybe chiffon, crinkling at the corners of her smiling eyes, enveloping the circumference of her perfect moon-shaped face. My sister was one of the most beautiful women I knew growing up. Perhaps challenged, in beauty, only by my own mother. She had plump lips, pale and pink like the color of figs, but full like plums, always chapped like creases behind knees in the warm summer heat. She was strong, smart, and terrifying.

  I was thirteen when she put on the hijab. Two years after September 11.

  The day she put it on we were sitting in her cul-de-sac room. The window overlooked our pristine blue pool with leaves dredging on the surface from our overarching mango tree, shedding its leaves with a tranquil languidness. But I did not feel calm. A feeling of dread panicked through my tiny little body. My stomach lay ill with concern, plummeting through all the reasons why she shouldn’t do what she was about to do. My heart, emptied out, carved only by fear, thudded against the cavity of my chest. It was like watching someone about to take a vow, an oath—a samurai, putting on their armor. I felt scared for her.

  Since then, she has explained to me that the hijab is much like armor. It acts as a shield against the world of men, meaning: by and large the patriarchy—where women are so often disposable. The hijab acts as a litmus test; it balances the playing field where men are encouraged to take women seriously not for their beauty, but for their intellect. The best explanation I’ve been given from my sister is that the hijab is like a second skin. It’s protection from all of the earth’s defenses and energetic toxicities.

  THE FIRST TIME I realized I was Muslim, and thus different, was in grade school when I didn’t know any of the words to the Christian hymns in religion class. I also knew that my religion—Islam—didn’t have an assigned class dedicated to it. Back then it was considered acceptable for kids of other faiths to go to Bible Study. I used to think that this was because it bred religious tolerance, but as I got older I realized it was just out of laziness. Strangely, however, I liked going to religion class.

  My sister was seven years older than me, and went to an all-girls private Catholic school in the suburbs of Brisbane. She wore a uniform that consisted of a pale yellow shirt and a forest-green checkered skirt and really ugly earth-brown socks and shoes. Every day, I would pick her up from school, my father in the front seat of the car waiting. In the interim I’d walk around the Christ-on-the-cross-laden halls and feel supremely content with my surroundings. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I’d watch the nuns mulling around the convent on campus, and even talk to Sister Catherine, my favorite sister—who was particularly zealous and enthusiastic. I developed a love of religion and spirituality in those halls, a love of the religious iconography, the gravity and significance of religious worship. It felt like a house of God, and I was deeply grounded by that feeling, the feeling of being embraced.

  My parents weren’t religious, though they weren’t particularly nonreligious either. My mother is a painter and works with kids on the side, she’s prayed five times a day since I’ve been alive. My father is a Marxist with a fondness for international development and Islamic philanthropy. He i
s inspired deeply by the Quran, though he never imposed it on either my sister or me. In fact, he taught me all things that I love and hold dear about Islam.

  Together, we’d watch documentaries about Islamic architecture; or he would take me to exhibitions dedicated to Islamic art. I learned early on about Islamic science—and how it was responsible for so many historic findings, such as the removal of cataracts, or even the inventions of hospitals and pharmacies as we know them today. From philosophy to astronomy—from Ibn Battuta (a historic Islamic traveler) to Avicenna (the OG Renaissance man who was both a medical doctor and philosopher)—I read obsessively about Baghdad in its prime, the poet Rumi, and would listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and dream of the universe and galaxies ahead of, and beyond, me.

  It’s a Mohsin Hamid quote where he says that the day before 9/11 he was just ostensibly another American—just one with a strange name—then the day after 9/11 he was suddenly a loaded word: Muslim, a suspicion, a target.

  I WOULD NOT be able to count on my hands the amount of times my sister has been harassed on the street for wearing a hijab. I’ve heard so many stories of the lewd sexual harassment of Muslim women or other forms of sexual abuse, and even in some extreme cases, death. Muslim women are murdered because they represent something that the West still refuses to understand. Ironically, the misogyny that fuels a person to kill a woman is overlooked because the deaths are warranted by how a Muslim woman chooses to represent herself. Which is an offense, to some—but apparently the harassment of women isn’t.

  A few years ago, Richard Dawkins, your resident atheist-science bro, suggested broadcasting “loving, gentle, woman-respecting erotic videos” into Islamic theocracies, like Iran, as a means of challenging the institutionalized religion that exists in those societies. This rhetoric—one of misguided sexual and “modern” interventionism—continues to other these cultures. And of course the narrative impales Muslims as unnatural creatures who know nothing of pleasure, and only of dogma. I’m so glad that he wants to save us from our boring sexless lives. The hubris it must take to be Richard Dawkins.

  To him, and his trusty band of naysayers, science—or rather the absence of religiosity—is misapprehended as a trapping of intellect. Not only that, the fetishization of Islam as a guilty male-ego-driven monolith obscures and dismisses all the powerful women making so many strides in the Muslim world. Just read Isobel Coleman’s Paradise Beneath Her Feet, which dissects feminism in the Muslim world from country to country (Pakistan and Malaysia are some case studies). This disavowal of Islam by the West pushes forward an entropic worldview that men—especially white men without religion—are not corrupted by their bravados. Which is a farce. Dawkins probably doesn’t believe in God because there’s nothing that he could believe in more than himself.

  Men like him are so consumed by their own egos that they assume that the position of women in the Western world is not lacking in anything. That on the altar of freedom and democracy we, as women, have been given all our rights and everything is fine. That intersectional identity doesn’t exist. That, in America, women no longer experience sexual harassment just by walking down the street. That women receive equal pay for equal work. That between 40 to 70 percent of female murder victims are not killed by their intimate partners. That 83 percent of girls aged twelve to sixteen do not experience some form of sexual harassment in public schools.

  AFTER CHARLIE HEBDO in 2015, the question of freedom of speech garnered much support. #JeSuisCharlie became an international phenomenon and world leaders even marched to support a concept of freedom that some of them haven’t even institutionalized in their own countries. In 2010 the Senate of France banned the wearing of the niqab and burqa. They even employed Fadela Amara, a Muslim, who served as a junior minister in the French government, to state the following: “The veil is the visible symbol of the subjugation of women, and therefore has no place in the mixed, secular spaces of France’s state school system.” Thing is, what the French, or the West, don’t understand is that it’s an act of “subjugation” to a society that has a very specific idea of what a woman should and shouldn’t wear.

  To me, that’s not the feminism that I take solace in. To me, feminism is open and brimming with diversity. I believe in a feminism for women of color, trans and queer women, nonbinary femme folk, and most definitely one for Muslim women. France’s idea of secularism is based on homogeneity. The problem of that stance is that it only further negates and dismisses the identities that are more complicated than just the one prescription they have of a woman. It’s a deeply limiting perspective.

  I don’t wear a hijab, nor do I plan on ever wearing one. But I do believe, and purport to believe, in the right of freedom for all. I, as a Muslim and a feminist, understand that feminism means comprehending that there are things outside of one’s existence and frame of understanding that are just as valid as what we know for ourselves. In a post-9/11 world we have imposed so many restrictions on Muslims and yet expect dedication in return. With every drone that strikes a child in Pakistan, we refuse to comprehend the roots of Islamic terrorism; with every ban of religious freedom of expression, we tautologically debate the concept of freedom for the West; with every speech that is delivered that encourages love and compassion, we isolate a religion, and its mostly peace-loving majority because it supports our international, and national, narratives of what it means to be a nation.

  MUSLIMS ARE HUMAN beings. There are over 1.5 billion of us.

  It’s been hard growing up in this world that has decided on what it means to be you. From every TSA checkpoint, to every nasty comment on the absurdity of the veil, Islamophobia is a very real thing. Making a concerted effort to understand Muslims is actually where it all begins.

  THERE’S SOMETHING SACRED about a religious experience.

  Recently, I participated in a debate at Trinity College in Dublin where the motion was “This House Believes Religion Does More Harm Than Good.” I was on the opposition side, explaining that to say something is outright bad can’t be applicable when it affects so many lives in such a deeply positive way. I don’t really know if it’s possible to describe the nuances and folds of Islam to those who’ve never wanted to understand it. How do you explain what it feels like to dive into something that feels embracing, all-encompassing, how Islam, like most religions, I’m sure, has great peaks that are undefinable? That it gives you meaning and hope in a glorious way. That it exalts you and revitalizes your being. How can we explain what that feels like? How do we define religion and its impact? Is it really quantifiable?

  Things shift within a religious identity; since wearing the hijab my sister has experienced rapid changes in how she feels about herself and the world. There are times she’s grappled with the weight of such a symbol, and she’s come to terms with what she needed in those times. I’ve experienced that in my own way, embracing that all identities evolve and change and rupture and blossom. I’ve done things to myself I’d never comprehend doing as a young Muslim kid, like drinking or trying drugs—aiming to be honest and live with integrity within each moment has been key. Getting older has meant understanding that the limitations of my identity are abstract, and that faith is malleable, as is desire. Everything is complex.

  I think back to the day when my sister wore that hijab, a day that things changed for her, but also inevitably for me. In many ways it was a humbling moment, a terrifying experience of understanding what it feels like to be openly hated, to witness others publicly disgusted. Through that, it was a day when I realized (though it took me years to fully understand) that there is something deeply powerful in subverting the norm. Pushing boundaries is how we learn, so with each step that I change a bigoted perspective, each time I allow someone to question and challenge their unfounded beliefs, I find some solace. If opening up about the nuances of life is eye-opening for others, then why not give words to your experience.

  Truth is, there’s no other way.

  It’s an act of survival t
o speak up, it’s revolutionary to say: hey, here’s my story, please listen.

  Elegy

  Esmé Weijun Wang

  Something changes on the plane ride from San Francisco to Taipei. Inside the plane you are already molting into something else; the aluminum tube that holds you is an in-between space. The flight attendants who ask what kind of breakfast you want inquire by asking, “East or West? East or West?” They do not ask what kind of food you want. It is not a matter of congee or a gelatinous omelet. They want to know who you are and who you want to be.

  I always say “East,” even though I belong to the West.

  Food goes into the gullet, is digested, becomes blood.

  THE IDEA OF “gluten” is foreign to my Taiwanese relatives. Even the doctors among them don’t recognize what it means to be gluten allergic, gluten sensitive, or gluten intolerant—which is what I became three years ago, when my immune system began to attack my body willy-nilly and with great force. I was infected with late-stage Lyme disease; in response to the proliferating bacteria, my body took on a host of symptoms: moderate-to-severe bodily weakness, chronic fatigue, frequent fevers, joint and muscular pain, Raynaud’s syndrome, peripheral neuropathy, cognitive dysfunction, and more, many of which were impacted by systemic inflammation. Any bite of food containing gluten, or even contaminated by gluten, now caused severe, full-body pain.

  In Taiwan, spilling from my mother’s mouth to restaurateurs and street-stall owners while I stand by: the attempt to explain what I can and cannot eat so that they might be able to point to which of their dishes I can eat, or to adjust their dishes to be gluten free. Things with wheat . . . Yes, bread. Also things with soy sauce. And fish balls. Noodles. Rice noodles are okay . . .

  Her explanation hacks away at the foods formed from the hands of my grandmother, and from her hands, and from the hands of Taiwanese people at street stalls. The first time I returned to Taiwan after getting sick, I subsisted on protein bars and hard-boiled eggs for weeks. My mouth watered at the thought of oyster noodle soup brought home in metal pails. I once said that I’d eat Shanghai soup dumplings as my last meal—because I loved them so and because they tasted like joy. I was known in my family as the one most passionate about xiao long bao; we ordered them in restaurants as my own private dish. Five soup dumplings would come to the table in a bamboo basket; I tucked them one at a time into a deep soup spoon, bit a piece of the thin skin to let out the hot soup inside, and felt the steam rise against my face as I ate the rest.