VISIONS Winter 2005 Please scroll down to begin reading our issue. Thanks! Brian Lee ‘06, Editor in Chief [email protected] LETTER FROM THE EDITORS WINTER 2005 VOLUME vi, ISSUE 1 Welcome to the Winter 2005 issue of VISIONS. We hope We would like to sincerely thank our artists, poets, you enjoy the quality and variety of artistic, poetic, writers, and staff members for making VISIONS Winter and literary contributions celebrating the diversity of 2005 a reality—without all of your hours of work and the Asian American community at Brown. creativity VISIONS could not be where it is today. We would also like to thank Dean Kisa Takesue of the VISIONS boasts a dedicated staff of writers, artists, Third World Center and Office of Student Life, who and designers, and maintains a strong editorial staff serves as the administrative advisor of VISIONS, for dedicated to the constant improvement of this truly her ideas, inspiration, and support. We would like unique publication. As many of you know, since to extend our appreciation to the individuals and our Spring 2004 issue we have been in the process groups who generously sponsored this publication of vastly improving the quality of our publication, and gave us their belief in us to succeed, and we transforming it from a small pamphlet into its current are extremely grateful to our supporters in the Brown form. This has been possible thanks to the efforts of community for taking an interest in this publication our staff members as well as our generous sponsors in and the issues it raises. the Brown community. The new format of VISIONS has also led us to consider who we are as a publication and how we may be able to better serve and reach Sincerely, out to both the Asian American and the larger Brown University community. Our mission of “Envisioning and building a stronger Asian American community” is centered on the idea of both shaping and reflecting the idea of what it means to be Asian American. Clearly, there are no simple answers to this question, but we hope that VISIONS can be an open forum for engaging questions about identity that allows for many varying definitions of “Asian America.” As a literary and artistic production, we are in a unique position to transcend barriers and connect the diverse Asian community and larger Brown community with issues relevant to Chris Hu ’06 Sunisa Nardone ’07 Asian America. Brian Lee ’06 Angela Siew ’06 Johnny Lin ‘07 Kartik Venkatesh ’06 Explosion, Quyen Truong ‘05 MISSION STATEMENT CONTENTS OPINIONS 10 EQUITY VS. EQUALITY: THE QUESTION OF JUSTICE FOR FILIPINO VETERANS OF WWII Angela Siew 20 MILITARIST APOLOGIA Chris Hu VISIONS is a publication that highlights and cele- 33 COMMUNITY TIES: GROWING UP JAPANESE AMERICAN Jessica Kawamura brates the diversity of Brown’s Asian American com- 44 CREATING A NEW INDIAN TRADITION IN AMERICA Kartik Venkatesh munity. We are committed to being an open literary and artistic forum for Asian Americans, as well as oth- PROSE er members of the university community, to freely ex- press and address issues relating both to Asia and the 4 AMERICANIZING Johnny PoHan Lin Asian American experience. VISIONS further serves 6 ANCESTRAL HELP Jessica Mar as a forum for issues that cannot find a voice in other 14 CALIFORNIA ROLLS Sarah Kasuga campus publications. As a collaborative initiative, VISIONS attempts to strengthen and actively engage 19 PAPER CRANES Alissa Yamazaki Brown’s vibrant community of students, faculty, staff, 24 TEACUP IN A STORM Koji Masutani and alumni, as well as the larger Providence 30 BENDING Katy Tsai community. 38 MONSTER FANGS AND FAIRYTALES Lana Zaman 42 HALLOWEEN IDENTITY CRISIS Cris Sales POETRY 3 RECOILED AND SOILED Lam Phan 17 GIRLS GUYS Andrew Ahn 48 LETTER TO FILIPINA NANNY WORKING IN ITALY Riabianca Garcia ART & PHOTOGRAPHY COVER UNTITLED Brian Lee (Design), Arthi Sundaresh (Photo) Front Inside EXPLOSION Quyen Truong 2 MUSEUM Ellen Chu 7 FLUTE Andrew Ahn 13 GALAPAGOS Delphine Huang 13 AMAZON Matthew Forkin 18 OMEN Johnny Lin 23 RIVER Matthew Forkin 25 BANGKOK Ellen Chu 29 UNTITLED EunSung Kim 36 QUITO AT NIGHT, ECUADOR Delphine Huang 37 SUNSET Matthew Forkin Back Inside FLYING, PERU Delphine Huang Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of VISIONS’ advisor, editors or sponsors. RECOILED AND SOILED LAM PHAN ’07 recoiled and soiled, just - the fragile, false-golden slipper chokes under her featureless weight show teeth act meek squatting, afraid to stand be discreet leveled, to face this valiant, powerful man “maybe they’ll give me money” she smiles and she reasons to her eldest son: cradles her child, in a fashion the one clinging to pickled pride foreign to all the Americans and numbing dirt lollipops draped in loops and tangles, “poor/exotic woman slightly uneasy, slightly queasy with her three children” trying her best to augment answers reads the picture caption: to achieve symphonic fitting too exact to be fact; too vague to have a meaning made in the while, her fatherless middle child stands erect in a pink frill-less dress “too rich to be featured” over pants that were worn, perhaps, the anti-poverty too many times before by the progeny campaign-man plans of her father’s body-colonizers (anti-poverty: against his own economic insignificance) legalized legacy notpoorenoughexoticwoman’s rendered illogically legal via image fades like her smiles: muted drained passageways of the peasant’s brain by half-consumed bagels and coffee in the corporate room’s it’s really pain, but don’t complain golden trash acceptor “help will come someday” Museum, Ellen Chu ‘07 she wishes, squatting, squished - still recoiled and soiled, the fragile, false-golden slipper chokes under her featureless weight LAM PHAN ’07 desperately wants some of his mom’s Okra-Shrimp Stew with white rice. 2 3 AMERICANIZING JOHNNY POHAN LIN ’07 On a September morning in Providence, I took a whelming taste of Coca-Cola, or Angelina Jolie’s ing American girls, plus a dozen months campaign- who immigrate to America every year, this is what casual walk down College Hill and made myself an cinematographically sexualized lips, there is some- ing to unseat the American president, I got this little becoming American is all about. For me, I am not just American before my 10 o’clock class. thing mystifying about the American lifestyle. Is it my pat on the back, for something too amorphous to living an American life, but also that of those before ready access to the Wal-Mart style mass consump- name. I noticed, with alarm, that I was having few- me, around me, and after me. The “naturalization” ceremony, which took place tion? Or the bing-bam-thank-you-ma’am social life er and fewer dreams in Mandarin or Taiwanese by at the federal courthouse downtown, was long, bu- promulgated by the Sex in the City “revolution”? the year. In taking this step from “resident alien” to Like a good American donut, immigration is a holistic reaucratic, and highly anticlimactic. With a narcis- Well, perhaps. “American,” or even “Asian American,” have I been experience that rolls together the experiences of all sistic speech by the old white man who introduced completely and irreversibly Americanized? Have I generations in a perfect circle. I called my mother as himself as the presiding judge, and a pound of his Being an American citizen means holding an invio- given up my roots, cut off my ties with my birthplace, I hurried off to class. gavel much too loud for an early Monday morning lable vote to the most powerful state that has ever and grew up into the perfect shape, of an ordinary occasion, some 90 of us suddenly breathed in red, existed on planet Earth. There is a certain weight that jar they placed over me? But first, I finished my donut. white, and blue—legally. The family members wait- comes with that, despite popular belief. You live at ing outside the door flowed in and consumed all the the pinnacle of comfort and human progress; the Perhaps the pertinent question here is, what does it oxygen in the room in one collective frenzy. With my food you throw away at a typical cafeteria meal mean, becoming American? After all, all Americans family sound asleep three time zones away, I stood could feed a hungry Pakistani for days. You have are become, if I can convince you to ignore your there awkwardly as my American-trained, Ivy-edu- the right to burn the national flag and call the presi- proper English grammar for a second. Some do so in cated mind quickly searched for proper reactions. dent a blabbering chimpanzee without being put the present tense; some did so through the memory Nothing really came. How I went from getting my on blacklists. You have the choice to not have God of their immigrant grandmothers. And I think some green card swiped at the LAX customs to being smacked on you in a public school and wear a tur- will do so, through the pride in their kids. It might not handed a letter of welcome signed by the President ban in airports without being harassed. Now, quick happen in their lifetime, but one day their kids will be of the United States in the middle of Rhode Island, I reality check: are these still true? Yes, you have the able to stand up and proudly say, “My father gave was not too sure. right to be euphemistic. Liberal melodrama aside, I me the chance to live in America.” I think this is just found the entire “naturalization” process anticlimac- as true for me.