#the fact that they don’t read shit and choose to make the Asian woman quiet and nothing

[starlooove]

Batfans swear they’re not racist and then you click a character tag and see how they talk about poc they’ve never met

[logicalstansadvice]

So there was a party on twitter today. For those of you who are still confused, here is what happened. A fan of Alejandra’s reached out to her about a picture on her ig featuring herself costumed as a geisha at an “Asian” party. The fan requested that she take it down because it was offensive and hurtful because this is someone’s culture not a costume. Ale decided to block the fan. The fan then tagged Seb in a comment about the blocking and then he blocked that fan. Then other fans spoke up about the offensive caricature of Japanese culture and they, too, were blocked and the picture remained up (she eventually deleted it).

Some read this as racist (because it is racist to use culture as a costume and a party theme), but many were shocked by the response. The fan politely reached out knowing how this could be read (especially with more eyes on her) and was hit with a block. That’s weird for someone who is trying to grow and learn how to be anti-racist.

People reacted and then threw a small get-together on twitter and now it is popping up on media sites.

Now here is what actually needs to be addressed (in my humble opinion):

1) Y’all really will defend anything this man does. All he had to do was nothing, literally, nothing. All she had to do was delete the picture and maybe close off her comments. Yet they began blocking. This was, at worst, racist and, at best, not a good look. Too many of y’all, instead of saying “yeah, kind of messed up” you doubled down on how dressing up as a geisha was “not that bad” despite Japanese women asking y’all for DECADES to stop doing that shit. What the f@&k?! It’s okay to admit when someone is wrong. I promise you that no one will take your stan card away. You don’t have to choose racism to love him. I swear you don’t have to.

Now...

2) It’s kind of funny how some people were loud about this but quiet as Sebastian when it came to speaking out about BLM. Is it the fact that there is a woman involved much like the Ellie debacle of 2018, or do you really care about Japanese culture being bastardized? Too many of you were calling people upset with Sebastian bullies 4 weeks ago but are now all up in the mix at this cancel party. Where was this energy last month? I guess we’ll never know.

3) We all need to learn what words mean. Criticism is not bullying. Read it. Comprehend it. Internalize it. Take it into your hearts and live a better life. Being held accountable is a thing. Being responsible with your platform is a thing. Being wrong is a thing. Just because it isn’t nice or it doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy, does not make it mean. Let your faves learn and grow and be the person y’all think they are instead of continuing to ignore when they are not a smol bean. A lot of people will lie to you in this world, so you don’t have to do it to yourself.

Heroine

[rayliur]

Little Fires Everywhere; Everything I Never Told You

“To say that Celeste Ng’s novels have changed my life is an understatement; her works have saved my life.”

by Ray Liu

Follow me on Twitter for more: https://twitter.com/rayliur

No, I’m not being dramatic. They really did.

I first discovered Miss Celeste Ng through Twitter. I believe one of my friends had retweeted her and her tweet made it to my feed. At the time, I wasn’t an avid reader; I barely picked up a book (and this was in 2016). Fast-forward three years, Ng had inspired me--through her two amazing novels--to write my own novel. But my novel isn’t the focus of this blog post.

See, my whole life as an Asian American was atypically strange. I thought it was just me, an individual who didn’t know how to navigate through life. Somewhere inside me longed to see someone--a successful someone--who represented me in this country. I was born in Manhattan, lived in Brooklyn throughout my childhood and early adulthood, and only recently moved to Queens. But I was born here. In America.

But I never read a single book in all my twelve years of school that was written by an Asian American. And as a Chinese-American boy in his teens, I thought that I could never write a book or even be part of the English/literary realm--because no one would want to listen to my stories. Because I am Chinese.

Of course, after high school, and during my journey of self-discovery, I came across works like Joy Luck Club ... that was it. So scratch off that s after “work.” Just work. I was young at the time, so that was not a book I paid attention to or spent time trying to read it or understand it.

There just wasn’t enough authors who looked like me or understood stories like mine.

Over the years, I’ve dealt with issues--personal issues. And they all stemmed from my oddly dysfunctional family. I’ve tried so many ways to express my feelings toward them and about them, but none of them worked. At least not to the extent I thought they would. And I couldn’t just tell them how I felt at the time because, in Chinese households, you just don’t talk about feelings. In fact, therapy is taboo. I screamed inside every day and night--they just didn’t understand what I was going through; that my identity here in this country felt diminished, on the brink of disappearing.

To say that I never thought about death is a lie.

Then I came across Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng.

“Ng,” I thought. “Interesting. An Asian-American author. Wow.”

It was at the Amazon Bookstore on 34th that I picked up the book. I was so excited. I had heard of Celeste Ng on Twitter, but never put two and two together until I googled her on my phone that day at the bookstore, and sure enough her bio popped up, including her Twitter page which I had already followed. I read the back cover. “Death!” I was immediately hooked.

The book opens with Lydia, who is dead. It’s not even a spoiler, because the whole story surrounds this incident--how Lydia’s family deals with her death and how her death reveals all the secrets that, in time, consume the family until everything falls apart. The title is elegantly designed. The choice of “I” instead of “She” or “They” had me thinking about the overarching frame of the novel. “I” applies to every character--not just one. Soon, I was swept into the seventies, where Ng takes me through a conservative society that frowned upon interracial couples, marriages, and relationships.

The first scene in this novel that stood out to me--made me rage and cry in joy--is the pool scene where Nathan (the oldest son) is bullied by white kids in a game of Marco Polo. “Chink can’t find China,” says one of the white kids at the pool (Ng 90). Ng unapologetically exposes racism in her novel by using Nathan as a target for these bleach-blond, ignorant white kids. I was Nathan. I had been in his shoes and reading this scene made me cry--not because it triggered horrific memories, but because I’ve finally found an author who gets it--who isn’t afraid to tell the whole truth, raw and with zero sugar coating.

Then there was the theme of death and suicide. Just to be clear, I’ve only thought about death--never did I ever try to harm myself in any way. Just like Lydia. SPOILER ALERT! Skip this paragraph if you haven’t read this book and are planning to read it in the near future. Lydia hates her life; she was always the quiet girl who got good grades (the stereotypical Asian) simply because she was afraid her mother would run away from her family, again. Of course, Lydia had nothing to do with Marilyn leaving. Needless to say, Lydia’s parents really fucked her up, mentally. Relatable? Fuck yes! Reading proses and passages from Lydia’s POV felt so real to me, like I had somehow channeled myself into her head. At the end, when she decides to challenge herself--rowing herself out to the middle of the lake--by swimming back ashore, she gave me hope. That, shit happens but you just have to choose to live and know that things will get better. Lydia dies of course, because she couldn’t swim and thinking you can swim is very different from knowing you can swim.

Not only does Ng break stereotypes in this novel, she bends the old narrative of Chinese Americans in the U.S. and points the fingers back at trashy white folks--all the while doing it with grace and perfection.

Little Fires Everywhere, however, had little takes on the Asian narrative. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t make a powerful statement through the lens of Asian Americans and racism toward Asian Americans. I’ll get to that very soon. This novel opens up with the Richardsons’ house burning down. And yes, this story focuses on a (presumably) white family--very privileged and very perfect in white standards. It takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a town that was built on order and strict city-community planning. The streets are always clean and the color of houses all share one Home Depot swatch palette. Then comes the wild card character Mia Warren with her young daughter Pearl. Ng doesn’t specify Mia and Pearl’s race or ethnicity--but photos of the cast had been released by Hulu (due to the novel being picked up as an original series on the platform--congrats, Celeste!)--and I believe Kerry Washington is going to play Mia. With that little tidbit in my head, I read through the novel picturing Mia Warren as a black woman with a mixed-race daughter. It’s a great dynamic, actually. Mia inadvertently becomes the mirror that reflects all of Mrs. Richardson’s (and her family’s) pretentiousness and overly saturated life. That’s the synopsis. 

SPOILER ALERT (again)! Skip this paragraph if you wish to read this book in the near future. Like I said earlier, there’s an Asian-American component to this novel. While drama ensues between the Richardsons and the Warrens, a subplot underlines the novel. Bebe Chow, a Chinese woman from Hong Kong (I believe it was HK), abandons her few-month-old child May Ling in front of a fire station. The city claims the orphan and hands her over to the McCulloughs, who could not have children because of infertility. Bebe puts her life back together again and decides she wants May Ling back--who now goes by Mirabelle, a white name given to her by a white family. Toward the end of the novel, a large chunk of it is dedicated to the court case that decided May Ling’s fate: to go with the McCulloughs or be returned to her biological mother. During that legal battle, Ed Lim comes in (Bebe’s attorney). Ed Lim is my favorite character, so my review here is clearly a little biased. Ng creates Ed Lim to be someone who breaks the stereotype of Asian men. Ed Lim is “six feet” tall, “lean and rangy” (Ng 258). Wow. Ng is a literary god. As Bebe’s attorney, Ed’s job is to win the case of course. He questions Mrs. McCullough regarding how she plans to raise a Chinese baby girl. McCullough replies that she would learn Chinese herself: but she doesn’t even know the difference between the variety of Chinese dialects (Shanghainese, Toisan, Mandarin, just to name a few). Then, McCullough shoots herself in the foot by telling him that she buys Mirabelle a lot of toys--namely a teddy bear. Oh, no--not just any bear. Because Mirabelle is Chinese, McCullough got her Chinese baby a fucking panda bear. I laughed so hard at this point. Ng is a genius. But what’s most important and to be taken seriously in this scene is when Ed Lim asks if Mirabelle has any dolls, you know, because most girls in the nineties had wanted to play with Barbie dolls. McCullough, confident and chest-puffed, answers him. “We buy her dolls ... one of them closes her eyes when you lay her down...” (Ng 261). This was when I knew exactly where Ng is going with this: the eyes. Ed Lim asks McCullough what the color of that doll’s eyes is and she says, “Blue” (Ng 261). He proceeds to lecture her, telling her that the Barbie company does not manufacture Chinese or Asian dolls. There is no doll that represents May Ling. Ah, America. Fucking up children of color since 1776. And Mirabelle would lose touch with her heritage as she grows older. A young impressionable girl without any understanding (real understanding) of her identity is dangerous. Just when I thought Ng was planning on drilling through her novel with the focus on a white and black family, she crashes through the fabric of her story with THIS! Only a true legend and storytelling extraordinaire can do things like this.

In conclusion, Celeste Ng is my hero. Her powerful proses articulate the issues of racism and cultural stereotypes in America, and the [inner] human psyche--all through the telling of interpersonal and small-scale stories--that majorly impacts the world we live in.

I hope you all get a chance to read both of her books. I would definitely recommend starting with Everything I Never Told You. I love her writing style in both novels. The debut novel interchanges between past- and present-tenses, which is refreshing. And Little Fires Everywhere is written in all past-tense, which helps the reader focus more on the story.

So like I said. These books saved my life. Ng gave me relatable characters that I absolutely cannot find elsewhere and plots that had me white-knuckle through both books. I truly hope that schools across the country add at least one of her works into their curriculum because it is THAT IMPORTANT.

Below is an excerpt from Little Fires that I tweeted earlier. It’s pretty self-explanatory. It entirely captured my current situation with my familial issues. And thank you Penguin Books for retweeting it!

(p. 294, 2019 ed.)

(From Twitter)

Thank you, Celeste! Thank you, Penguin, for picking up her works to publish.

Thank you for reading my thoughts on these two works.

Now, off I go, back to writing my own novel.

Ray

[speedilyloudpaper]

You boarded the train at Manchester Piccadilly at 4.47pm, starting your journey to Sheffield via Stockport at approximately 120mph. You are going meeting Dom in his new house. You’ve never been to Sheffield but you’ve heard it’s a pretty nice city, according to Dom, anyway. The Trainline.com app said that the journey takes around 50 minutes. It has been 45. The last two of which have been spent in darkness.

Since boarding the train, you read a chapter of the book that Chris lended to you that you promised you’d read, you got bored and wished you’d brought some fiction, then decided to take your earphones from your bag and listen to some music and scroll through Reddit. In the last 10 minutes you assumed you were approaching Sheffield and, for the first time, acknowledged what was zooming past the window. You didn’t expect much, but even so you were slightly disappointed that there wasn’t anything to see from which you could begin to get a feel for what kind of place the city is. Sheffield had seemed like a bit of a strange place for Dom to choose to live in, and you were slightly eager to form some kind of opinion on the place, see what it was that had attracted your best friend to cross the peak district to a new life in Yorkshire. So far you’d only seen the normal trackside stuff; trees, backs of houses, litter, an industrial park. Nothing interesting. Then you’d entered a tunnel you didn’t see coming. That had been 3 whole minutes ago and you are still inside the tunnel; still the windows only show the reflection of the inside of the carriage. You think about taking a picture on Snapchat, with the caption ‘What a view!’, or something similarly witty.

It’s been 5 minutes since you entered the tunnel now. Getting a bit ridiculous, and also a bit weird. You look around at everyone else on the train. Nobody seems at all phased by how long the train has been travelling through darkness. You drop Dom a message: ‘How long is this fucking tunnel lmao’. He isn’t online so you don’t expect an instant reply and put your phone back in your pocket. You take a sip of your Sprite and realise Blue Monday by New Order is playing towards the end, so you start it again because you don’t feel like you’ve appreciated it enough while you were distracted. You lean your head back on the seat and close your eyes, not only to focus on the music but because you’re tired. Admittedly, it isn’t even 6pm and you haven’t done much all day, but your suitcase was kind of heavy, and travelling is tiring.

The song ends before you know it. You had started drifting into a light sleep, which is a little bit annoying because it is a bloody good song and, again, you didn’t listen to it fully enough to appreciate it. You look at the window. Still black. Wait. Still black? That song is like 8 minutes long, how the fuck are we still in this tunnel?  You check your phone. It is 5.55. Dom has messaged you back.

‘What tunnel?’ Ok that panics you a bit. Dom makes the Manchester to Sheffield train journey fairly regularly, surely he would have noticed a tunnel that takes over 15 minutes to get through. Where the fuck is this train going?

You start messaging back Dom: ‘the giAnt fUcKing tunnel on the way to Sheffield, been in it f-’ Your phone dies. Black screen. You press and hold the power button in an attempt to turn it back on. Nope. Unresponsive. (Perfect)

Maybe you got on the wrong train, one that goes underground. But you remember checking the app five times to make sure you didn’t. And you didn’t see or feel the train descending, if it is indeed underground. (which is your best guess right now because surely you’d know about it if there was such a huge tunnel somewhere in the North of England)

You lean over towards the bald 40 year old man in the seat across the aisle from you

‘Excuse me… Where is this train headed?’

The man lowers his newspaper. You notice his eyes quickly flick up and down as he looks at you. You hope you don’t look too panicked. Or stupid.

‘Sheffield… we’ve almost arrived there,’ he replies, apathetically.

‘Cheers,’ you reply automatically, and begin to lean back into your seat, satisfied with the answer. Actually, no you are not at all satisfied with that answer. If anything, that raises more questions. You lean forward again.

‘Was the train rerouted or something?’ The man looks at you, blinks, and responds ‘I didn’t hear any announcements, did you?’ with a slight condescending tone and a glance towards the overhead speaker next to the digital display of the stops.

‘No.. I guess not’ you reply and slink back into your seat, then become annoyed at yourself for such a weak reply to his condescending tone, the kind of weak shit that justifies his use of tone, maybe to him at least. Maybe they rerouted the train and didn’t announce it. But why wouldn’t they? Maybe the route got changed sometime in the last week, between now and the last time Dom travelled from Manchester and Sheffield, so there would be no reason for them to announce it during this journey. Either way, fuck that guy.

Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace. A quote you remember seeing on Instagram, but who said it?

It’s been another 7 minutes which you spent brooding about the condescending tone with which the man responded to your completely understandable (given the situation) question, and you decide you need to forget the whole thing. You always let things like this take too much head space, and take things too personally. It is for these reasons that in the past you have thought about the ways you could kill or severely hurt someone for a good half an hour simply because they were rude to you and made you feel small. Of course, you wouldn’t admit these thoughts to anyone else, and you certainly wouldn’t ever actually carry out any of these fantasies, would you? (Is it my impulses or my inhibitions that represent my true self?) Not the time to think about that. The pain in your asscheeks serves as a reminder of how long you’ve been sat for, and you get the urge to be proactive and find out what the fuck is going on.

You sling your black rucksack over your back and set off down the aisles to find someone else who might know what is going on. The train is lined with rows of heads in books and newspapers and phones, a few sleepers and a few talkers. Nobody but you seems to be phased by the fact the train has been in darkness for the past 25 minutes. Just a typical train journey.

((The whole cast is here))

WhAt?

You get to the end of the carriage, where the doors are. Three people stand in here, leaning against the walls. A young Asian man is stood half in front of the door that leads to the next carriage, looking at his white iPhone with one earbud in.

‘Excuse me..’ you mutter.

No movement. He hasn’t noticed you. You clear your throat with a small cough and repeat yourself, more loudly this time. Still no acknowledgement. Whatever he’s looking at must be pretty fucking engrossing. With a sigh you step forward, tap him on the arm and begin to squeeze past him, when he finally looks up and steps aside, apologising. But there’s something about the way he does it that you find a bit off, and you feel him watching you as you step between the carriages. The engine is roaring loudly here and you can hear air rushing past. You wonder if perhaps you’re not in a ridiculously long tunnel but in fact the train is just going really slowly, however it doesn’t sound that way from here. Pushing the door through to the next carriage, the first thing you notice is that the lights seem a little brighter, everything looks a little clearer. Something feels very different, but you can’t put your finger on it. You are hit with the feeling that you shouldn’t be th-

He wasn’t startled at all.

That’s it, right? The thing that felt off about the guys reaction. Surely if you were totally oblivious to someone’s presence, you’d be a little shocked by them touching you. Instead it seemed as if, upon being touched, he had just decided to become responsive. You probably just imagined that though, right? Your mind is playing tricks. You must admit, the whole situation has you a little bit spooked and you feel uneasy as hell. What if you’re not in a tunnel, what if the whole fucking world has fallen into darkness. Stupid? Yes. Impossible? Indefinitely. But fear doesn’t listen to rationality.

In the next carriage, you see an overweight 40 year old woman outfitted in a Northern Rail uniform checking tickets. She might know something. You make your way down the aisle until you are stood near her, and wait for her to finish dealing with the passenger she is selling a ticket to.

It is only then that you realise how quiet this carriage is. In fact, silent.

She turns towards you, looks you up and down and flashes you a polite occupational obligation of a smile that says ‘What do you want from me?’

Something about the silence of the carriage makes you feel under pressure.

‘H-has this train been re-routed..recently?’ you ask.

Why’d you have to st-stutter like that? Just like you used to every time you had to answer a question back in high school. Back when you used to wonder how people could talk so confidently all the time, how they could really own their sentences and use their words as if the act of announcing an idea would make it official and important, rather than let their thoughts leak from their mouths and be bastardised by a barrier of awkwardness and anxiety whenever they were forced to speak.

‘This is the same route as always, do you need any help?’ replies the ticket collector. This is the opposite answer to what you expected; what you wanted. A simple ‘Yes’ would have explained everything away, put your mind at rest, and you could sit back down and wait to arrive in Sheffield.

‘Then where the hell are we? Why have we been in a tunnel for half an hour?!’ you blurt out without thinking about it, and you’re surprised by your own sudden brashness.

‘Tunnel?’ she replies with genuine confusion which you cannot believe. You glance towards the windows impatiently, and her eyes follow your gaze. As before, nothing but blackness and the dark reflection of the train’s insides. The woman seems to freeze up in front of you, staring at the black rectangles on the wall with slightly raised eyebrows and a mouth held tightly shut.

What the fuck is she doing?

It feels like a whole minute before she replies. She awakes from her trance with an awkward and apologetic cough. She looks at you.

‘I think you should sit down, we will be arriving shortly.’

You are halfway about to take her orders and sit the fuck back down and wait, but now you have more questions that need confronting. The situation makes even less sense.

How the fuck hadn’t she noticed? Why has nobody else noticed?

In your head you have started a mission that you need to finish, the confusion and unfamiliarity of the situation has fed something inside you. There is something else though, isn’t there? Something making you act. Something about the way the people around you aren’t doing anything, or at least not doing anything they wouldn’t be ordinarily.

It is most obvious in the people, but it isn’t just the people.

What is it then?

The light still doesn’t look right.

Why does that matter?

‘I-I’ you begin to say something to the stewardess. ‘I demand answers’ is what is on the tip of your tongue, but think it a little dramatic to announce out loud.

‘Can I speak to the driver or something?’

‘I think you should just sit down.’

‘I want to speak to somebody else. I want to speak to the driver.’

You don’t quite know why you’re making such a big deal, but there’s no way you’re sitting down. You start to squeeze your way past her, hoping she’ll take a hint and move out of the way, as there is no way you could push your way past this obese obstruction before you. She doesn’t budge at all, in fact the opposite; the vast weight difference means a gentle shove throws you into the seats beside her.

What the fuck?! Did she really just push me?!

The obstruction takes a deep breath, giving you a malicious admonitory look before continuing down the aisle.

Confused and pissed off, you take half a minute to comprehend what just happened. Before you’ve finished thinking about what to do next, you feel yourself running towards the door on the other end of the carriage. Yes, running!  When was the last time you ran in front of other people? You can no longer even rely on your own fucking actions to be predictable.

‘Hey!’ you hear from behind you. The obstruction starts a high speed wobble down the aisle towards you, which in any other situation you would’ve found comical (followed by feeling guilty for finding it so funny), however right now, the sight of her pursuing you spurs you desperately towards the door. You swiftly push down the cold metal handle and pull open the carriage door, letting it swing into someone’s suitcase. The adjoining room is empty. Before you is the door to the driving room. You place your fingers over the handle. A meaty hand grabs your shoulder, sending electric bolts throughout your joints. Violently twisting your body round, you face The Obstruction, who you could swear has doubled in size. With all your weight and strength of desperation and madness, you shove her away from you, and are surprised by how easily her immense weight is imbalanced. You’re no physics expert, but you can see when her centre of gravity shifts beyond the back of her ankles. She falls backwards, with her rib awkwardly jamming into an armrest on the way down, creating a muffled crack like a floorboard under a carpet. She curls into a fetal position, an automatic reaction, as if you hit a reset button on her body.

Oh shit oh fuck oh shit WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Breathing hard and fast, you pull shut the carriage door and you find that hiding the situation from your view calms you a little bit. You lean against the wall; you’re sweating and your head throbs.

You look up and see the blue door that leads to the driving room.

What are you going to ask the driver? What do you expect to find out?

Questions like that stopped needing answering a while ago. The feeling you don’t belong feels stronger than ever. Rationality is out the window. It doesn’t matter what is behind that door, something doesn’t want you here.

You place your hand once again on the handle and push down.

Darkness

Loud noise.

Everything becomes black. You are surrounded by pitch black nothingness, as if you’ve been transported to inside a black hole. Suddenly lines of light appear, appearing all around you and joining together, creating a wireframe model of the train around you. You think of your childhood bedroom, when the room was pitch black and the light from the hallway would shine through the gaps between the door and the doorframe, creating the outline of a rectangle.

The exploding engine and whirring wind are deafening now, as if you are outside the train.

Where am-

Suddenly silence. Light returns. You are in the room at the edge of the carriage, standing before the driving room. The door to the left of you slides open to a train station. A blue sign that says ‘Sheffield’ hangs on the brick wall across from you.

You don’t quite dare step off the train, in case upon stepping off, the ground swallows you up and everything disappears again. You look into the seating area of the carriage, where people are grabbing their bags and leaving the train at the other end of the aisle. The ticket collector is in the middle of the carriage, and she turns and gives you a service industry smile like nothing has happened. Through the windows you see the other passengers exit the train and disperse around the station, to wherever they are off to next. You consider going back to your original carriage to get your suitcase from the shelves.

What the fuck does it matter now?

Hesitantly, you alight the train now that you are the last person aboard. The station is empty apart from you and the other passengers from your train, who are making their way to the exit or to other platforms. The place feels more than just unfamiliar, but otherworldly. You need to get out of there, away from anything to do with that train.

Following the signage, you make your way to the exit. The station seems to become more and more crowded, as it should be at this time of day, as you shuffle your way towards the city centre exits.

You are outside the train station, in a kind of public square. Water rushes down giant concrete steps of a water feature. You notice the way the light reflects off the moving water. You look up at the giant cuboid buildings of the city before you, more aware than ever of how 3 dimensional they look, and you wonder what is inside them.

The next thing you take note of is the people bustling up and down the slope that leads from the train station to one of the main roads of the city centre.

It is most obvious in the people

You wonder where they are all going, and whether they have the rest of their lives to get back to, or if they just cease to exist when they go out of view.

Where do you go from here? What do you do now,`````````* when faced with what seems like undeniable proof of something part of you had always suspected. That impulsive part of you that says ‘What the fuck does it matter, if nothing matters?’. The part of you that needed to be controlled, before you acted out all of your impulses and got killed or made a killer.

Do you jump into the fountain because the water looks cool? Run into the traffic? Punch somebody in the face just to see what happens? Or does part of you still cling to what you used to fully believe, what you had to assume to be true in order to function as a cognitive being; That everything you see is real?

But reality doesn't disappear and reanimate itself before you.

What do you do when an experience throws reality itself into question?

*my cat’s contribution that I decided to leave in, she trying to help. 

[sapphirescales]

to rvnin:

there’s already a ton out there on why having an ‘alternate poc faceclaim’ for your white muse is racist, and on why having one (1) ‘verse’ where your muse is a poc when, in every other verse, they’re white is racist so i’ll just reiterate that it’s racist and offensive and, yes, it’s peak white laziness

having a verse where logan is southeast asian whereas he’s white (or, god knows, maybe he’s another ethnicity in another verse??? this tumblr user does seem to Really be reaching for those ‘minimal-effort-representation-points’ and has none of their verses written up as an excuse as though i ‘misunderstood’ the situation which was, in fact, still racist) is racist

to the anons in my inbox: 

firstly, yes, i do use white faceclaims on raven. she’s a southeast asian biracial woman -- german-vietnamese to be exact -- and she’s a shapeshifter. her shapeshifting abilities do not and have not and will never change her ethnicity. her pretending to live as a white woman in order to assimilate is not the same thing as erasing her ethnicity and is actually a central focal point of her storyline on this blog. 

secondly, raven has always been written as white and codified as a both a woman of colour, the same way that all mutants are coded as oppressed minorities without intersectionality with real life minorities sometimes ( notable exclusions: iceman who is now officially gay WHOOP!, raven who is canonically bisexual, sooraya qadir who is muslim, erik who is jewish, the maximoff twins who are romani and jewish, etc ). i chose to write her as a southeast asian biracial woman because :0 i’m a southeast asian biracial woman :0 and i’m well aware that popular fan headcanons say that raven is black. what i’m writing on my blog is my fan headcanon which says that raven is a southeast asian biracial woman. i’m not erasing raven’s canonical black ethnicity to make her southeast asian??? she’s codified as a woman of colour and, sorry to say, but southeast asian women are still women of colour and biracial women are still women of colour. so, nice try but #bye

thirdly and finally, i got involved because it matters to me. i got upset because rvnin made it personal when, and insulted my intelligence. i’m assuming you don’t like me since you sound like you’ve been here before. if your ‘activism’ for asians and southeast asians is based on whether or not you personally like me, you’re fucking disgusting. if you refuse to see rvnin being racist and call out the racism because you don’t personally like me, and choose to harass me instead, newsflash: you’re racist, too. you’re no friend to asian people, you’re no friend to southeast asian people. you are a racist. not because you hate me, i don’t personally care what some fucking idiot hiding behind anon and vaguing about me where they think i can’t see it thinks about me, but you are a racist for seeing racism happen in front of you and choosing to be quiet about it and kicking up a bigger fuss about Who Caused The Dramaz. if i point out racism and your issue is not the racism but the fact that i pointed it out, you are a racist by process of elimination because there’s no other reason why you’re not more bothered by racism than me. it’s literally that simple. if your activism is dependent on whether or not you like individuals in that group, if your activism is not dependent on compassion for human beings, your activism is fake. but what do i know, i’m 23 and i cant fuckin read

finally: im switching anon off since racists on tungle lov 2 hide behind that shit. if you have any questions about my portrayal or my faceclaim choice or even how i handled things with rvnin you can always come to me off anon to talk about it. 

[melisanavas]

HALF-TIME

By Meli Navas

Have you ever wanted to make a graffiti onto someone’s face when they make you angry? Or found a person who is so stuck into his own sadness that you suddenly feel the urge to cut their head down the middle to stuff it with happy tiny cute pastel things like confetti, marshmallows and glitter and then shake it off, so he can look less depressing and more like a snowglobe? Well, I have.

My name is Ramona and I live in Buenos Aires. I have only one job: going to University, but I am not very good at it. Living alone can be a huge problem for those who are trying to be more responsible. One day, you wake up late and that’s it. Your brain is changed forever. You are infected with unpunctuality, a disease that prevents you from being a disciplined person. You start missing the alarm and the 10 other times you snooze it. You live according to your biological clock, so you wake up whenever your body wants to do it. Every day feels like a piñata. You have no clue of what you will get out of it, apart from the angry faces who hate you because you’re late, again. That’s when you decide that the smart choice is not lose all your friends, and rather go vegan on plans. But I must say, flowing is not for everybody.  

I usually tell people that I moved here to study, including my parents, but that’s a fat lie. I don’t come from a family of lawyers or accountants, in fact none of them are professionals. I come from a family of good people. People who are very talented at putting everyone’s needs before their own. People who make the perfect neighbour, employee or husband. The type of people who society loves. I guess society doesn’t care about how perfect feels. But, I do. Perfect smells like advertising. Tastes like politicians. Sounds like a monophonic ringtone and feels like something is missing.

Moving to a capital city was a charade of growing apart from a family that didn’t feel human enough to be my family. For a long time, I was convinced that my parents illegally bought me at a chinese market, but then I realized I was being stupid because:

1) I look exactly like my mom 2) She is not Asian

My mom was the provider for a long time, that’s how she gained the power of control and became the alpha woman of the pack. She is the kind of person who doesn’t like receiving any help, but loves complaining about it. She also has a strong dislike for people who change - that’s a comfort zoner classic. I still don’t get what is it that she adores about her comfort zone, I mean it’s not even that comfortable. The place is full of multi-tasking, multi-eating and multi-stressing, so when you pass by, anxiety gets under your skin and starts driving your life, and you feel the urge of doing something, anything, anything that doesn’t involve relaxing of course. And you do, but you do not enjoy it.

My dad is always dressed in the same way: father shirt, father jeans, no belt. You can only tell that he has changed his clothes by looking at the colour of the cotton handkerchief he carries in his left rear pocket. On business days he alternates between the baby blue with white and navy stripes and the light brown with white and dark brown stripes. He saves the grey one for the weekends, it’s the fancy one of the set. I find this very entertaining, I hope one day someone makes a documentary about it. He also reminds me of my grandfather. But unlike grandpa he can actually hear. In fact he is a great listener, that is why he is always the one calling and I am always the one talking. We complement each other perfectly. He pays, I spend. He is huggable, I’m a hugger. Another thing he is very good at is shopping for food. He puts lots of passion into it, I think it makes him feel like a modern australopithecus hunting and gathering sushi for the tribe. It’s his macho moment. Or it was. Until mom ruined his fantasy by complaining about all his choices and now he is allowed to bring food she will never cook. So chocolate boxes are the only thing left from his prehistoric macho traditions. I want him to keep them alive, so I came up with this ritual: each time I go back home for the weekend, we have to turn the T.V. on and sit next to each other with at least one box of chocolates. During the ceremony, I am the one in charge of discovering what’s inside of each chocolate. So, I bite all the pieces, one by one, and pass them straight to him, the finisher, the one responsible for eating all my bitten chocolates. Our bonbon celebration was the muse of my new theory: “Dad was a grey giant furry dog in his past life”. I have solid evidence:

He knows how to keep you company He is a best friend by default He loves eating the leftovers

I have a brother too, who doesn’t give a shit about me and loves his routine very much. He leads the same life my grandfather used to. He wakes up at 7.30 am, eats crossfit food and reads the newspaper, starting from the obituaries. Then he exercises, watches TV and goes to bed before 10. He doesn’t drink alcohol, his comfort zone is a never-ending Monday.

Although mom would never admit it, I know that the comfort zoners of the family team up to hate me. My brother is a big devotee of that religion, he ignores me in every possible format: text, email, audio note, inbox, skype, phone call, selfie, flesh and bones. The only time he thinks about me first is when something bad happens. Then you'd better be in a crying-friendly place, because I am telling you, he has no filter. He makes every piece of bad news, worse, especially if it’s the death of someone close. Luckily, we are a small family and he has already used four and a half shots, one for each of my grandparents, and half for my aunt’s cancer. I am sure that right now he is fantasising about the lines he will text me when Susy finally dies. It’s one of his guilty pleasures. Or pleasures. I take the “guilty” back.

It’s been more than a year since I’ve decided to grow apart from my family and even though I still look like 19 year-old Ramona, I feel smarter. As if God was constantly updating my software without my permission to make my human apps work better, and now I can sense more and see new things in the same old situations. No, I am not on drugs. And yes, it’s a crazy experience.

The voice that controls your thoughts breaks and everything you think sounds more mature, more like a 28 year-old Clementine, who wears bordeaux lipstick and feels sexy when she lights up one of her white thin Virginia Slim cigarettes. Being smart is hot.

Clementine helped me realize how awkward our family dynamic has been during the past two weeks. My dad has been acting like my brother, he doesn’t call me anymore. So I had to act like my brother and team up with my mom, who has been acting like my dad. I don’t know what’s going on there, neither does Clementine. And the more I hear my mom on the phone saying everything is “good” and “perfectly fine”, the more I feel haunted by the ghosts of my brother’s text messages. I don’t know what to do. I need to think of a solution. So I turn the TV on - cable movies trigger my thinking. They are showing an Icelandic action movie on channel 42. Cool. I am watching an Icelandic weirdo walking in his weird Icelandic sweater. The phone rings. In real life, not in the movie. Time stops.

Clementine thinks that Ramona should do the right thing and go back home. Ramona is convinced that she’s being too sensitive. She is PMSing the whole situation. The Icelandic weirdo walks past an Icelandic sheep that matches his sweater. Ramona reminds Clementine that she only has 500 pesos left, spending that money means asking for extra cash. Clementine feels mom’s comfort zone getting more uncomfortable than usual. The Icelandic weirdo is now riding the matching sheep. Ramona tells Clementine to relax. Clementine is quiet. The Icelandic weirdo parks his matching sheep at the supermarket. Ramona doesn’t get it. Clementine doesn’t understand Icelanders either. The Icelandic weirdo steals a non-matching sheep. Ramona thinks of her family. Clementine feels bad for Ramona. The Icelandic weirdo is now being chased by three Icelandic policemen mounted on their three blue matching sheep. Ramona doesn’t know what to do. Clementine is quiet. Ramona breaks into tears. Clementine feels lonely. Clementine and Ramona are now sobbing.

They can’t do what they always do. They can’t call who they always call. They can’t call him. Dad.

Clementine turns the TV off, grabs a backpack, puts some clothes on and leaves the apartment to get into a cab. As the car moves, without even crying, tears start falling down her face and the streets of Buenos Aires become more and more blurry. The taxi stops at a red light, the window projects the scene of a young girl holding her father’s hand, waiting to cross the street. Ramona wonders if he is acting too. Pretending to be happy when he is not. The taxi leaves them behind and she looks into the rear-view mirror, trying to hold onto that image, but instead she discovers the reflection of a more grown-up woman, sitting in the back of the car. She looks as if she was holding a bunch of worries between her eyebrows and although she is not moving, she feels heavier than before. Her throat is blocked, the air doesn’t go through. It’s hard to breathe when reality has just cracked. Ramona wishes that her father would open up and talk about what was eating him, and that he had never acted the way he did today, like a sad little kid, calling for everyone’s attention through a stupid suicide note. Expecting someone to do better hurts. Expecting your dad to do better, hurts even more.

Ramona wants to believe in her father, like she used to believe in Santa, the monsters living under the bed and her imaginary friends. Clementine tells her that the magic is gone and wanting it back is only for comfort zoners. Ramona doesn’t want to be one of them, so she chooses to face the sad man that Clementine is now showing her. A man who wouldn’t understand the value of his own presence and would think that the only way to keep people in his life is by pleasing them. Ramona remembers her dad’s favourite mole, the grey hairs hidden in his moustache and his weird habit of never wanting to wear a belt, but this time she sees something new. She gets it. Belts are accessories exclusively designed for the ones wearing the pants. Knowing the size of your belt is knowing the size of your personal space, of how much do you occupy in a pair of jeans, in a room, in a marriage, in a family, in the Universe. Ramona is not sure that her dad understands this, so she decides to tell him how important he is and that it’s ok to be sad, because sometimes existing fucking sucks. He could count on her, no matter what and she meant that. Ramona understands now that complex situations require simple words, filled with good intentions. She is excited to show her father her new Clementine voice. She promises to herself that she’ll call him more often, so he can talk to her. She thinks of getting a job too, so the next time she will pay for his drinks. Her thoughts are now interrupted by taxi driver announcing that they’ve arrived at the bus station, Ramona pays and gets off, knowing that with each step she makes, she is closer to her father. The real one. Half-time is almost done.