ROAM H

OM

ER’S R

OA

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RS Issue I

2014

HOMER’S ROAMERS[refraction]

Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief Joan WangPublicity Director Sunny YangHead Text Editor Jodie MoonText Editors Jaye Whitney Debber Angelynn KhooHead Layout Editors Philip Georgis Shruti KoradaLayout Editor Gretchen BueermannVisual Art Director Jenn McNeal

Dear reader,

A group of students gathered in the fall of 2013 to create a space for vibrant conversations about be-ing in a foreign country as a Reedie. We met with a shared desire to move beyond hasty descriptions

came with our own experiences of being abroad as Reed students. Some of us had studied abroad; for some, being at Reed is studying abroad. Some of us traveled; some even found work in a foreign country. Over time, we came to acknowledge that “abroad” had different meanings for each of us, and that conversations about the foreign are always simultaneously about the familiar.

stays of various purposes and durations in differ-ent locations. Some contributors speak of studying abroad, as well as studying abroad while studying abroad. Some speak of work, travel, or both. They speak of a semester in Argentina, weeks in Swit-zerland, months in Japan, years in the US. The dif-ferent mediums of the contributions also speak to differences in voice – from linocut to photograph, from essay to poem. Each piece presents and de-limits its context in a particular way, inviting you to contemplate the foreign and the familiar. In re-lation, the pieces resonate and screech, jostle with and curl next to one another.

Our vision for the publication has evolved through the process of engaging these pieces. Now we hope that they will spark more dialogues – within your-self and with others. The works presented here, we

-tion as “the change of direction of a ray of light, sound, heat, or the like, in passing obliquely from one medium into another in which its wave ve-locity is different.” Life in a foreign space might then be said to be continuously refractive: con-stantly navigating through different mediums, our initial directions and velocities may be challenged

and transformed. We may also become a different medium ourselves, with our bodies, gestures, and speech acquiring unexpected meanings. Thus, we might ask, how have the contributors’ own refrac-tions resulted in particular understandings of that space and time?

Prior to the release of this publication, no formal

about their experiences abroad existed in the Reed community. We thank all those who generously supported us to make this publication possible: the Student Body, Dean of Student Services, President

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Community, Dean of Institutional Diversity, Inter-national Student Services, the French, German, Spanish, and Chinese departments, the Classics and Religion departments. We especially would like to thank Paul DeYoung for providing crucial re-sources during the founding of Homer’s Roamers, and for being a continuous support throughout the development of the publication. And of course, we would like to give a huge shout-out to all our con-

with us through edit after edit.

Though Homer’s Roamers focuses on Reed stu-dents’ crossings of national boundaries, the expe-rience of being a foreigner is clearly not limited to life in a foreign country. At its heart, this publica-tion is about the (quintessentially Reed) experience of seeing oneself anew, while remaining aware of how we carry the places we come from and have been in our daily life. In that spirit, we hope you’ll take your time to ruminate – and roam!

Yours,Homer’s Roamers Editorial Team

Table of Contents

yesterday / today Elisabeth Miles 1

Berlin // Copenhagen Alec Recinos 3

Swarm! Kaori Freda 4

Count Jodie Moon 5

On Müggelsee: Suns of Thyme Genevieve Medow-Jenkins 6

Some thoughts about the city Olivia Capozzalo 7

On the Way Home Sunny Yang 9

No News Mary Lubbers 10

Class trip to the Eagle’s Nest Christopher Munoz 11

School in the BackstreetsStuart Steidle 12

Through Thick and Thin Jaye Whitney Debber 13

The Beauty AisleJenn McNeal 14

KartikeyaLiana Clark 15

Double Decker Banyan BridgeStuart Steidle 16

HeraklionAlma Siulagi 18

Austen Weymueller 19

2 Bucks Ben DeYoung 20

Untitled Mary Lubbers 21

Swans in the Summer Jenn McNeal 22

a collection of loose thoughts Joan Wang 23

Bay Leaves and a Thousand Steps to Go Stuart Steidle 25

depth over distance Emily Brock 26

My Broken Korean August Wissmath 27

about being in russiaBernadette Clark 30

Taksim CoupleJenn McNeal 32

Under African SkiesTaylor Rose Stinchcomb 33

Journal entry (8.27.12) Chanelle Doucette 36

The Moon Sunny Yang 37

Barcelona Street Art Chanelle Doucette 38

Birds of a Feather Jaye Whitney Debber 40

Summer in GenevaAndrea Lim 41

Pskov: untitledBernadette Clark 43

Turkish Market // Berlin Genevieve Medow-Jenkins 44

Valuation of CuisineJoan Wang 45

A Side Street Jenn McNeal 46

City of Design Katharina Schwaiger 47

IdealLiana Clark 48

Topography of Terror: Dream Big of Die WeltGenevieve Medow-Jenkins 49

Untitled Shruti Korada 50

Untitled Brent Bailey 51

Prayer Alma Siulagi 52

Upon my return to the United States回来美国 Antonio Marin 53

Maria Maita-Keppeler 54

attention à la marcheMaddie Reese 55

Love’s Allowance Elaina Ransford 56

Untitled Liana Clark 57

dogshit Jodie Moon 58

songbirds in ninh binh, vietnamAusten Weymueller 59

Untitled Sunny Yang 60

Dejá preguntarme azul y blanco Dwayne Okpaise 62

(De)colonizing Study Abroad: Ruminations on Ambivalence Archit Guha 63

1

yesterday / today

(1)Yesterday I touched the ceiling of the elevator in my apartment building. I wondered what would happen if one day I were to leave this place for

read the bumps like braille and I remembered the

the popcorn ceiling of my childhood bedroom.

(2)And I remembered the night when I was eight and I slept over at a friend’s house but couldn’t fall asleep and she told me that all I had to do was stare at the ceiling fan without closing my eyes. So I looked around the elevator, trying to memorize it all before the blink.

(3)Someone once told me that if you were to look at all of the paintings in the Louvre, it would take you three weeks straight. Today I tried to memorize these paintings, too, but I kept getting distracted

(4)You asked me yesterday if I had a really good

I have a really good memory for lots of things, and I was only sort of joking because of course I do for-get and I often forget when I shouldn’t but usually I remember so much that it hurts.

(5)Today I read a quote by Marguerite Duras – to write is to be no one – and I wonder whether she really meant that or if she just said it in the way that sometimes people just say things.

(6)Because sometimes these same people talk about time as though it all ran together, but for the last few months time has felt more like a shifting bifur-cation. I can only grasp it through its splits.

(7)What if I told you my favorite thing to do here is to take the metro when it’s empty? I wait until 2am and then get on and stand at one end of the train. I watch the other end move along the track, turning just a bit before or a bit after my section. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to think of something poetic to say about this.

(8)And what if I told you that I’ve taken a desperate bathroom pit stop in the McDonald’s around the corner enough that by now I know instinctively to push the door, not pull?

(9)

bones, and while I’m sure there are many, here’s one: they matter to something, by which I mean they literally matter, they give substance and form. The room of skeletons at the Natural History Museum knows this too well; it thrusts its bones out into the world and it does not apologize. It expects your grat-itude.

(10)These paragraphs are numbered for the sole rea-son that a lot of prose poetry is numbered. And the numbers are in parentheses because one of my professors writes them that way and I always think that it looks like they are giving the numbers a little hug and anyway, what don’t we do that doesn’t come from someone else?

(11)And by the way, the “you” here isn’t necessarily you, you know? What I mean to say is that sometimes it means you [you] and sometimes it means you [some-one else]. And the days aren’t always the same be-cause I’m not writing this in one sitting. So please, pay attention.

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(12)I tried to love the whale skeletons. They were so imposing and clearly placed in the center, waiting to be awed. But instead I watched the two-minute video about whales nearly twenty times, entranced by the movement that these bones once allowed.

(13)I thought I should let you know that today I added another entry to the list of reasons why I shouldn’t be left alone in a strange city. It turns out that I will stand half-naked in front of a mirror, wine bottle in hand, for sixteen minutes and wonder if intuition has become taboo.

(14)I transferred these sentences over from another document – a secret one with a misleading name, you’ve got to cover your tracks – where the last thing I wrote was this: I just opened up this doc-ument to write exactly what I had written above. What does it mean for me to forget what I have already written? Particularly considering that I ha-ven’t and won’t show this to anyone else. Who am I writing for? Certainly not for someone who will forget what they’ve read. And the funny thing is, today I’m thinking of showing this to someone. Someone real, someone out there. Maybe someone who won’t forget.

(15)I’ve been thinking about making bird nests out of all the hair I’ve lost here. My usual reaction is to hold a handful of it and to cry for however long seems enough and then to throw it away, but maybe there’s a more productive way to handle this sort of thing. There almost always is.

(16)Who knew that acute stress could also induce numb lips? Because lately I’ve been wondering if you can ever truly stop thinking about words, espe-cially the ones you’ve lost, and my mouth is tingling right now at the thought of them.

(17)And even if Duras meant it, who is to say that I should take her seriously? Because Annie Ernaux said that writing is a knife, and a knife can’t be used by no one, and someone has to be right, but who?

(18)Today I am standing in front of the mirror again, except this time the wine is gone and I am wearing pants. Intuition’s not taboo, or shouldn’t be, I’ve decided.

Elisabeth Miles

3

Berlin // Copenhagen

Alec Recinos

4

Swarm!I created this piece during my time studying printmaking techniques at The International School of

Advanced Printmaking in Florence, Italy. This is a print created using drypoint technique on plexiglas.

Kaori Freda

5

Count

1.The longest runway: staccatodown stairs to subway trainmy father’s eyes holding

Daughter, an arrestwhen I would disappearwithout another goodbye.

His damp face, darkfrom drink and night.Mine, taut and soberto hold againstthe fact of blood,his one half a reason for this body, leaping

2. Once, he was a boydiving after clam and squid for his mother

Once, a young man

in my mother’s arms

Once, a young salarymanwending home after

to bathe mebefore I sleptand he returned to the bar

3. At the bar, heady with smoke:Can I tell you a story?Will you be angryif I say something about your mother?

What’s this street called? Bondojo?No it’s Pontocho Pon—tochoWell the character is bon.It’s pronounced different here.You want to bet on it? I’ll bet 10000 won on it.Keep your 10000 won. Call it Bondojo then.

4. One halfmy life agoI speed through watermy brother bubbleslaughter beside methis is the deep endand we sea urchinsatop a frog

5. I don’t countthe steps I take as daughteraway from daughterhood.

His hands hold me in waterI cannot count;this body carries reasonsthat add to more than one

Jodie Moon

6

On Müggelsee: Suns of Thyme

Genevieve Medow-Jenkins

7

Some thoughts about the city

So the thing is, people here remember living in the Soviet Union and are now living under some bullshit democratic regime and people are con-fused about paying for medical operations when they used to be free and now the city is full of traf-

subways are clean and beautiful. They don’t smell. And women in stilettos and tight skirts kiss men in washed out jeans and tight shirts on the long escalator rides in and out of the metro; and they live at home with moms and grandmothers, so it’s understandable and there’s something pent up and frustrated about the sexuality in public, everywhere, trying to grab some ass before work and then din-ner at home. I’m not sure what it’s like to bring a girl home, but probably there’s a lot of quiet sex.

My host parents are really great. Particularly my host mom. She and I drink tea together everyday and al-most always she tells me stories. She loves talking and is good at storytelling and at speaking Russian so that I can understand everything she says. And so I listen a lot. She is one of those people who knows the history and particular details and anec-dotes and personal lives of seemingly any topic or

through the city she tells me about the buildings we pass, the architects, what famous people lived there; she knows the names of the noble families who owned the palaces that are everywhere in the city, wedged between townhouses now, with stores lining the street level. She has so many stories of her own too, about her and her family. I try to re-member everything she tells me and so now I have some stories too:

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home.

She loves giving me things, mostly clothes, and she says she has all the cheap clothes I could ever want and to not try to buy cheap clothes here, because she has them already. Today she gave me a scarf be-cause it’s getting cold outside. I’ve already received at least three sweaters too. Last Saturday morning she woke me up by walking into my room holding a black and white squiggly printed sweater stretched between her two hands in front of her, telling me I would need it, it’s cold outside today. I said thank you and continued sleeping.

Her sister’s dog is staying with us for a week. He is very small, with large pug-like eyes and snout, but more narrow, and a very pronounced undershot jaw, which makes him look generally ridiculous. Appar-ently he is a coveted breed here though because he has a dark blue tattoo on his inner thigh with his ID number in case he gets lost, and a chip in his ear in case he gets lost internationally. His mom has the same tattoo and chip–it’s a special breed. He is always cowering but doesn’t take too long to warm up to people. He eats shoes, or rather chews them, even if people are home but just not paying attention to him. My host mom said that her daugh-ter read on the internet that you have to beat the dog with a newspaper every time it chews a shoe or does anything else bad. She says if you beat the dog at least once a month, after three months the dog will be good. I express doubt and tell her he will probably just become more scared of people. But

on the internet. We agree that you can only punish a dog, in general, at the moment they do something wrong. If you wait, they will not know why they are being punished. I feel very bad and hold the dog whenever I’m around and I try to pay attention to him so he doesn’t become worried and start eating shoes. The other day her husband, my host father, came home and saw that some folded clothes had been pulled off the bench in the kitchen and scat-

8

saw the dog cowering under the table, grabbed a

tiny creature several times, lunging at him as he scampered out of the kitchen. He clearly didn’t know about the in-the-moment rule of punishing dogs. I had never seen him be angry or aggressive in any way; he’s a calm and usually very kind and soft-spoken man, and it was unpleasant to see and there was nothing I could say. I let the dog sit on my bed with me and he was shaking and so I held him. I don’t think they hit him very often though or at least I’ve only seen it that once. I hope he learns for his own scrawny sake.

* * *

My host mom saves everything: bread crusts, cans, pieces of ribbon, so much clothing and cloth. She says she remembers how people would knock on their neighbors’ doors and ask for some bread, or a scrap of cloth, anything, to mend a hole. She re-members when there was absolutely nothing. That is the time we know from photographs and history books that a garden grew in the huge square by St. Isaacs cathedral. A vegetable garden planted and tilled by everyone, anyone, rows of cabbage and potato and whatever else could survive in hard cold earth, because the city was starving. And she remembers having nothing, so now she says she cannot throw away anything. And so there are piles of clothes, bits of cloth, lace, old shoes in corners of the apartment. She still mends the holes in her grandsons’ nylon pants and moves cloth from bed-room to kitchen to sew.

And food. The house is absolutely crammed. Ev-ery space is storage and so places where no one before imagined a cupboard are stuffed with cans and jars of preserves. Once she bent on all fours in the kitchen and nimbly pulled back the bottom edge of the counter, the strip of wood about three inches high that runs along the bottom between

reached her hand under to pull out some old met-al skillet that had been jammed in there. She was

looking for the electric juicer, I think. And she tells me, almost everyday, to eat, to eat more, and if I politely refuse, she insists. And more than once she reminds me that she remembers having nothing, and so now I must eat. People must eat if they can.

But her daughters are upset with her current weight and they’ve told her to go on a diet. She laughs and shows me the tiny wedges of packaged diet food she’s been regimented to eat. The deprivation only makes her want to feed me more. Now is apple-har-vesting season, and every trip back from the dacha is accompanied by a huge white plastic bucket or two of knobbly pale green apples. They bruise very quickly and become mealy, soft, spongy. She says Russians call it “cottony”. Every time I leave the house it is necessary that I take at least three or four apples with me, which she carefully selects

knife to peel off the particularly dark spotted areas. She tells me to give apples to my friends, and I try to but sometimes they’re just so pathetic and mealy that no one wants them and then I try to feed them to the stray dog who lives on the same street as my school. I call him Nasha, which means “ours”. It’s short for “nasha sobaka” which means “our dog”. From what I can tell, Nasha is not partial to apples and nudges them with his nose before stalking

will eat them if he’s really hungry and they’re lying on the cement between him and the dumpster. She says I shouldn’t complain about eating so many ap-ples and that I’ll be sorry soon when they’re done being harvested, the winter ones too, and we have no apples. But then she reminds me we’ll have ap-ple jam, since she boils huge pots of apples and makes sweet, brown, syrupy jam that’s stored in

the wall. I am happy now, I just wish I could catch the apples before they become cotton. The batch she brought home tonight are large and green and hard; they still have a chance.

Olivia Capozzalo

9

On the Way Home

Sunny Yang

10

No News

A common pastime in Ireland, as one is sitting around the hearth and having a drink, is storytell-ing. There are individuals who make this their pro-fession, and I was lucky enough to meet one such person early on in my trip. His name was Pat “the Hat” Speight, and over the course of our conversa-tion he regaled my friends and me with a number of stories, ranging from hilariously witty to vulgar and blush-inducing, all of them worth noting. One of my favorites I have copied down here, doing my best to remember its various details and capture its Irish telling.

continued on.

time.

dog has died.”

horsemeat.”

shocked, for it is a great sin to eat horsemeat in Ireland.

after it died.”

from the house.”

too close to the curtains.”

the postman.”

Mary Lubbers

11

Class trip to the Eagle’s Nest

Berchtesgaden, Germany

Christopher Munoz

12

School in the BackstreetsChennai, India

Stuart Steidle

13

Through Thick and ThinPalestrina, Italy

Jaye Whitney Debber

14

The Beauty Aisle

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of certain small moments that surface my previously unregistered precon-ceptions. Such events are premised on a small head turn, a missed bus, a need to rush, or, more plainly put, chance.

Walking to the checkout line at a foreign grocery store, I came across the beauty section. I paused. I needed moisturizer. I crouched at the bottom of the skin section, searching for the right mask.

When I rose, I was shocked to see a veiled woman at the end of the aisle intently studying a bottle from a nicer line of hair products. I had not imagined that the woman might be interested in her hair, espe-cially because she covered it in public. In my surprise, she became real to me, more than just my ideas of how a veiled Muslim woman behaves or desires. I could now see she had a history, with her own personal idiosyncratic longings and ambitions, and a face which is different from all the other faces.

Jenn McNeal

15

Kartikeya

Liana Clark

16

It seemed the ends of the earth, the village and valley of Nongriat ensconced deep in a temperate jungle at the end of many winding roads and legs of transport there in Megalaya, India, a state whose name means “Abode of the Clouds.” The upland plateaus of this abode once held the British mon-iker, “The Scotland of the East”, and until recent-ly this region received the greatest amount of rainfall of anywhere on the plan-et. One local of the village, Byron, who spoke the most English and had more of the world under his belt thanks to his outsider sta-tus, told me that climate change was noticeably al-tering the rain patterns, though not to any extent a foreigner like myself would be able to notice. Anyway I was there in the dry season, late December

from the switchbacks that hug the cliffs of the East Khasi Hills.

Signing in at the bare-bones guest house (no RSVP), I noticed I was the 25th US citizen to rest my bags there, and didn’t see any other travelers un-til encountering a young French couple late in the evening. In this village, still headed by a sover-eign elder (meaning the State of India can’t in-trude upon the land/jungle/mountains for miles and miles around), there is a traditional practice of building bridges from the roots of Banyan trees. These woody overpasses are literally living, breath-ing pieces of architecture, and the natural growth of the roots ensures greater stability with time. Their construction is an inter-generational project as one span may take about 40 years to fully materialize. Pictured above, one of Nongriat’s most glorious bridges is actually a double decker; Byron informed

Double Decker Banyan Bridge Nongriat, Megalaya, India

me that the bottom level is approximately 200 years old and the upper deck about 100. There is another village of another valley somewhere in this region that boasts a 500-year-old Banyan bridge, still used to this day. (In recent decades steel cable bridges have made inroads into the region.)

Having married into the village of Nongriat (great swaths of Megalaya are matriarchal), Byron told me he’ll always be considered an outsider, despite his great admiration and respect for the village and its surroundings. Still, with an eye toward the future, he suggested that the villagers build a third tier to the pictured bridge (some strands of which you can see), in case another hamlet somewhere steals

17

Bob Dylan of the East

the glory of having a double decker – ha! Facing the prejudices of the general populace, Byron smuggled his suggestion into the village meetings through a close friend of his. In the evenings after exploring the bridges, jun-gle, and river – with gorgeous aquamarine pools,

overlooked by boulders the size of houses – I set-

French duo, and some locals. Interspersed with sto-

on fruit bats, cats, and dogs, we all sang tunes late into the evening. I was surprised to see some mar-ijuana emerge, which we duly smoked, listening

tongue, but also Bob Dylan, the Doors, and some country licks to boot!!! I was shocked when I heard him pull these tracks from his sleeve, haha! His soulful singing has won Byron the nickname “Bob Dylan of the East”, and he said every year there is a large music festival of local villages on Bob Dylan’s birthday. I wonder if it rings in the season when a

Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. . .

Stuart Steidle

18

Heraklion

Alma Siulagi

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explanation for

hovering with their cargo of precious metals, precious heartspieces like confetti on riverbeds red dirt roadsin brown eyes and arms like sinew, in the casual way we walk talk drink breathe hopeand something in my body aches, surrounded as I am by order, straight lines

in skies meant to be stared atby people meant to be presentand the presence I felt with that eyes wide open vivid feeling that my half-heavy lidded eyes are looking for nowand the state of invincibility that one can only have on a tightrope wireon bundles of tangled and spiderwebbed telephone wiresover streets too narrow for anything wider thanour arms-linked bodies.This is what my body aches for in the quiet moments.

Austen Weymueller

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2 Bucks

Bags packed, unpacked, packed againAs fresh and inexperienced as the traveler himself, neither yet showing the scuffs and marks of timeNew shoes, crisp white shirt, the beginnings of a sparse beardSame journey, same angst, laden with much more baggage than the trunk’s contents would suggestPassport check: 1, 2A moment of pride, as though the red and blue books gave some sense of an as yet ambiguous identity

We roll on, past the landmarks that signify countless hellos and goodbyesAnd then a question, innocent, thoughtless:“Any cash for the airport?”Without hesitation, she reaches to the purse, to provide, as she always hasThe zipper weathered slick from opening after openingOut come two dollars, and an apology, and a laugh“What can I buy with 2 dollars?”Nothing.

And so those dollars stayed, and for months, did little more than get in the wayThey gradually became lucky dollars, nostalgia dollarsBut as the heart does, in its cunning way, they became, or had always been, more than thatThese dollars were my wings

become his ownThey were my parachuteThere when the leap is made, comfortable, secure, but won’t jump, won’t let go for youAnd they were my ticketFor the train does not reverse.

I could well have spent them. But, then again,what can I buy with 2 dollars?

Ben DeYoung

21

Mary Lubbers

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Swans in the Summer

Jenn McNeal

23

a collection of loose thoughts

disorientation

that moment when you take out your earphones and you realize you’ve been whispering obnoxiously loudly. with all of that spit on the library keyboard. that was how i felt when i stepped off of the reed

to knowledge on full blast, all i heard were repetitive bars of daily human (inter)actions.

in the restaurant traveling takes many different forms: with family, with a few friends, with one friend, with a lover, alone. being a guest. being a host. each form comes with a set of advantages and disadvantages. my favorite is alone: all that accompanies you is your thoughts. sometimes silent and empty, sometimes fast-paced and colorful. all there is is you and the alleys. the sky, and nothing in between. and yes, alone makes you want to sound poetic, because your words are all you hear. sitting at one of the café-style tables, i naturally focus on the spot directly in front of me. this setting is designed for

waiter.

on museums my mom tells me there is an obscure difference between appreciating art and doing art. she encourages me to be onstage, despite my repeated protests. “you hate the prospect of being onstage but you always end up thanking me afterwards,” she asserts. i never knew why exactly but she used to take me and my brother to museums all the time. i think she wanted to understand that difference. maybe she wanted to be sure that she was better at appreciating art than doing art.

-cause this is something people do. i did it because if i didn’t, my brother would tease me for being a bad tourist. but i kind of like it now. it’s a relatively cheap activity, and it’s a great way to kill time. but step-ping into a museum results in a frenzy of note-taking. i write down the names of every artist i like and the titles of their work. sometimes i even scribble a vague outline of the pieces that really catch my eye.

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-thing that i can reminisce and day-dream about. but all i see are pages after pages of spanish names,

this means i should stick to doing art?

travel routine

a middle-aged man runs to le jardin de peyrou and reads his mail on top of the hill. i chuckle to myself, “this only happens in montpellier.” indeed, the city is a paradise without any trace of ostentation. its residents possess all the architecture, the facades, the parks, the trees, and above all, time, in tranquility. i open my diary. its weight juxtaposes with the empty pages. the diary is usually reserved for the moment

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hour i had originally allocated to searching for local cheap eats. i scribble an outline of a mansion, drawing comparisons between the montpellier-style houses and a tra-ditional chinese siheyuan. next to it i endeavor to write something architecturally oriented, jotting down incoherent phrases like “houses creating their own levels” and “the juxtaposition of lines and shadows.” a bit after, i feel compelled to observe the residents of this paradise around me. other than a few tourists dispersed here and there, all i see are local students making pencil sketches of le chateau d’eau. what a touristy act. this mail-reading man, on the other hand, knows how to live the life.

-opted over the past few months, in an attempt to live “la vie quotidienne” like the mail-reading man. but i am still the tourist. i am a tourist for I passively observe the daily life of this city, for I attempt to mimic

upon this foreign place.

Joan Wang

25

Bay Leaves and a Thousand Steps to GoMegalaya, India

Stuart Steidle

26

depth ove r distance

i got your compass carved to boneH O M E

permanently hooked in tow–the memories of you, of me,sucking at the same salt seas

which carry(i carry)

your heart

wayfaring toesunbound

through wild dances over oceanswrangled, by tight aortic anchors,

your siren call pulls,i fall

i got a plane ticket tattooed to chestRUN

permanently placedpaced by heart, through feet

i do not root, my outbound beatswhich carry

(i carry)your heart

(i carry it in my heart)

Emily Brock

1

Ben Howard, ‘depth over distance’e.e. cummings, ‘[i carry your heart with me (i carry it in)]’

27

My Broken Korean

I am an American. [Mee-guk saram

saram i eh-yo]. But my mother is Korean.

The taxi-cab driver in Dajeon asks me if I’m Japa-nese. A woman in Seoul mistakes me for a local on the Subway. In Busan, three school girls point and whisper, foreigner. Even my uncle gives me a look when I arrive in Inchon. Korean words fall into my ear as nonsense and we trade languages, switching from intimacy to business: Korean to English.

-er forfeited her Korean citizenship to start a life in America with my father. In twenty years, she estab-lished herself as an American homeowner, an En-glish speaker, a public school teacher, a mother of two children, and one of those lucky few who can single handedly prepare an entire Thanksgiving dinner.

The word assimilated might describe my mother.

learning to pepper her speech with proper English words like behoove, regardless, and penchant. She

twenty. She listens to tasteful music, like Beetho-ven, Chopin, and Mozart. Her closest friends are Catholic priests, since she doesn’t have patience for persons who she judges to be ordinary, typical, or petty. She always knows when there are sales at the mall and takes great pleasure in saving money when buying purses, shoes, jackets, scarves, neck-laces, furniture, and home improvements.

But the word assimilated does not capture my mother. When I was nineteen, my mother con-fessed:

When I was nine, I walked into my mother’s bedroom and witnessed her in tears, arms wrapped around a pillow, moan-ing for the Korea she had lost. What do you say to a woman who cries for home in the only home you know?

My mother goes back to Korea periodically. The last time she visited Seoul, someone called her a foreign-er [ ]. They told her, you look Korean and you

* * *

In the city of Busan, there is a sign, which reads in Korean, English, Russian, and Chinese, -

. The sign sits in lobby of a 24-Hour public bathhouse, known as a [ ]. The sign sits adjacent to a pudgy-faced woman, who emphatically communicates in arm movements and broken English, . My traveling partner, Marianne, tells her in perfect Korean, he is not foreign. He is Korean. His mother is Korean. But her attempts to persuade fail. Sliding

streets. Proper Koreans enter and leave, but I am only allowed to leave.

In Busan, there are hundreds of , way stations for the millions of Koreans living in Bu-san to rest and bathe their tired bodies. In Busan, there are hundreds of such pleasure rooms – the PC-room, the DVD-room, the Love Motel – where manufactured intimacy can be bought for an hour-ly rate. In Busan, there are hundreds of commercial

another, colliding into one another, forming and constituting the Jagalchi Fish Market. Tents, open displays, women with steaming pots of stew, and

-cophony of visual, verbal, and gestural signs shout-ing for attention, confronting you – a marketplace like no other.

There is a woman selling raw yellowtail and oysters ,

negotiate the price. Confusion reigns for the next

which side dishes are chosen, and which prices are

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In broken Korean, confusion reigns. Words that should mean things slip in and out between sense and nonsense. In broken Korean, you can survive; you can haggle; you can travel; you can even say I love you [ ]. But, in broken Korean, there is no way to assert I belong. In broken Korean, there

Korean, you can only communicate one meaning-ful statement: I am foreign. I am foreign. I am foreign.

In Korea, foreigners are fascinations. Strangers in Dajeon ask me with excited eyes, In Portland, Oregon an elderly white woman asks me,

In Seoul, the woman asking for directions gives me a disdainful look, realizing now that I am foreign. And so, when a man in a -

approaches me, I assume that he arrives with the same ‘curious’ questions: And

* * *

In Korea, bathhouse protocol is simple. The con-cierge trades your money for a key, attached to bracelet, keeping the key close to your body, even in the bath. The number on the key designates your locker, where you’ll deposit all of your clothes, before walking naked into a room full of bathing bodies, adorned with nothing more than bracelets attached to keys.

A good bathhouse is almost always located in a city

residences. And a good bathhouse almost always has a full tub of hot and cold water, a steam room, a sauna, and a room full of showers. In the room full of showers, there are rows upon rows of orderly showers waiting to be used, punctuated not by par-titions but by the bars of soap which rest adjacent to each.

The bathhouse is a communal space; it is an inti-mate space. But in Korea, those contradictions ar-en’t always so apparent. Fathers and sons come to the bathhouse to bond. Close friends and brothers wash one another, scrubbing dead skin from each other’s back, while elderly Korean men decompress their bodies in silence. Today I enter the bathouse alone, without cousins or uncles to guide me.

Having paid my entrance fee, I enter. Forgetting my fear and my foreignness, I strip, allowing myself to be naked and vulnerable, participating in naked-ness – as if I belonged. I store my clothes in a locker, now wearing nothing but a small bracelet attached to a magnetic key. Grabbing my toothbrush from my bag and a pink scrubbing towel from the stack just inside the door, I prepare myself for a bath.

to wash sweat, grime, and sand from my skin. Wrap-ping the pink scrubbing towel round my hand, I lather it in soap and abrasively scrub dead skin from my shoulder, back, arms, and legs. In the room full of showers, there are small pink plastic buckets.

body, cleansing the skin that I’ve now rubbed raw.

To my surprise, I discover a white basket full of shampoo in the middle of the room. Thinking that the bathhouse has kindly answered my silent re-quest for shampoo, I gratefully and greedily slather liquid soap into my hair. My moment of shampoo

one of the other showers leaves his place and walks over to confront me.

His kind face betrays me, his curious eyes betray me, and my broken Korean betrays me. A stream of words leave his mouth, failing to leave an impres-sion on me. Nonsense batters my ears. I am helpless and he even expects a response. So I tell him what I said to taxi-cab-driver in Daejeon, what I tell to the woman on the subway in Seoul, and what I wish I had said to the whispering girls in Busan:

The man widens his eyes. He gestures emphatical-ly and he reiterates his message in Korean words I don’t understand. I reply, once again,

But the man seems to not understand. He doesn’t seem to believe me. So I repeat once more, pounding my chest for emphasis,

The message is received, my broken Korean does the trick, and the man drops his arms in resignation before walking away, back to his own shower. Em-barrassed, scared, and confused, I leave for the lock-er room to dry off. Alone in contemplation, I think

29

over the scenario, hoping to glean some meaning from his body language, his facial gestures, and the

I return to the room full of showers, this time ready to sink into a hot bath, ready to forget my troubles and decompress in silence, like all the other Korean men I know. But this time through, something trou-bles me. This time I notice that the basket of sham-poo is missing and, suddenly, the truth hits me. The basket was never public shampoo. The shampoo in the basket belonged to him.

The man in the bathhouse had accused me of theft in Korean. He accused me of theft and I told him, in anger, three times: [I am an American].

August Wissmath

30

about being in russia

writing I’m comfortable with sharing. Now it is snowing in Portland and the Olympics are happening and everyone is talking about Russia but not asking about it, which I’m glad about because I’m not in a place to defend it and I don’t want to and I don’t need to. “I’m going to blood vomit on the next person to make a joke about Russia to me,” I said unnecessarily.

* * *

My list of Dark Things that Happened in Russia, for those expecting it

I saw a dead body on the steps of the metro in the middle of a SaturdayI ran from the Hermitage to catch the (really crowded) trolleybus on which I was assaulted in the mid-dle of the dayMy host dad couldn’t make me dinner because he got drunk at his friend’s birthday party, and asked me if I knew what it was like to walk around in life with nothing there while I microwaved hot dogs on grainsMy friends and I saw a man hitting and dragging his girlfriend in the square and the cop my friend ran to get just said “husband and wife” to us at his leisure

* * *

“Private School, Reed

31

I’ve talked to a few people about this and it seems like the general consensus is that when you study abroad the worst people you meet are the other students in your program and usually from one school in particular. For us I would argue it was Bard but there was one guy from Oberlin who was particularly horrible. He embarrassed us in front of our favorite bartenders at Kill Fish on our last night and blew his smoke in my face and offered “sorry, babe” to my friend and at school he grabbed a girl’s face to kiss

* * *

I kissed an Igor (eager is how you say it) in a bar and by a shop and in the courtyard. Older men always asked us why we were wearing backpacks all the time. They “did” “construction” work in Kaliningrad on the weekends and vacationed in Bali (you’re welcome to come!) and one of them wore a hat that said “transstar”

Sasha, to us: what does it mean, on Lyosha’s hat?Us: something like izmenayazvezda??changing star? . . . untranslatable, it means nothingSasha, to Lyosha: znachit, ty edinstvenniy gei v pitere(Sasha, to Lyosha: it means you’re the only Gay in Petersburg)

Bernadette Clark

“

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Taksim Couple

In Taksim Square, I was startled to discover how ordinary events could take on new layers of meanings -

cially when I think of the different reading I would have if they were in a mosque or church. Seeing this couple, I couldn’t help wondering what their story was or what they thought they were doing. They appeared not to have a wedding party following them, so were they taking their wedding photos? Were they recently wed? Were they going to be married in the park?

Jenn McNeal

33

Under African Skies

Dawn and dusk we tracked the dog packtuned in to the beep-beep-beep-ing of the radiothe telemetry pointing their direction. Even a breakdown in the bush could not stop us from chasing the signal across the preserve, ducking and dodging acacia clawsup the truck-lurching bumps of that rocky road.

Sightings were scarceuntil Liam’s lead foot sped us awaybeyond The Rock and the ranger stationto where the road fades into tire tracks. There they appeared before us:nine white-tipped tails, eighteen big round earstattooed legs lifting effortlesslyas they carved a path through the tall savannah grass.

We watched the pups rough and tumble down a hillside

Yawns revealed a mouth of jagged incisors,

They hardly seemed to mind the rumbling of the metal beast as we followed their trail into the last rays of daylight.

Every drive through the reserve brought new encounters: surrounded by a family of giraffes, startled by the blur of cheetah, stared down by a lion resting at the roadside

Elephants crossed the road in front of us,and Cape buffalo forded the river far below. Nyala and impala spotted the grasslandswhile birds streaked the skies and enlivened the mornings with their chorus.

34

Sunday supply drives into the townshipwere adventures of another kind,

We passed curbside and truck-bed fruit standsand signpost portraits of Colonel Sanders. Then stopped for milkshakes at the cricket clubwhere we gave bowling and batting a go.

We once spared a local man from sore feet;he jumped in the back with a spirited smile.A simple “Sauborna”, and I became his unwitting translator,releasing a stampede of Zulu that swept me away before his asking eyes.

We became close as kin in the kitchen

while the Afrikaans braai braised or the American s’mores roasted.

Nights were often mellowed by exhaustionwith one wicked exception:Drinks in hand, a ring of cards on the table,geckos stuck on the walls, and a stick held fast to the head – we rivaled the hyenas’ howling laughter into the morning,crowning ourselves the Kings of Mantunma camp.

35

On the full moon we hid away at Kumasingato watch the waterhole awaken. Under its light we could see silhouettes clearly,hear the sloshing of water, the squealing of calves

We felt the wood shake beneath us as a colossus whetted and shined its horn.

The sight of a rhino, the sound of a hyena, the smell of a wild dog – the sensations of Africaare beyond compare. My eyes could never believe the expanse of unbroken sky. Breathless, I wanted to reach up and touch the brush-stroked clouds.Sundowners made my soul feel solemn;watching the purple shadows blanket the bush,

in the waning red glow.

My Kiwi brother has a phrase,the only one that seems adequate enoughto hold a world of emotion in its simplicity: “Sweet As.”

Taylor Rose Stinchcomb

36

Chanelle Doucette

Journal Entry (08.27.2012)

I learned a new word today – “Sobremesa”. It is the word Spaniards use to describe the event of eating and talking, the majority of which is long after the main meal has been served. But from what I have seen and experienced, it is really the pleasure of being in the presence of others. Meals are served slow-ly, with each course arriving to the table hours apart just to prolong the event.

Much later, “Alguien quiere café?”

As night creeps in: “Whiskey?” Followed by playful chuckling.

Photo albums are brought out to show friends, new visitors. Maps are spread across tables. Stories of how spouses met are shared.

In Spain, the act of eating is not just about the bringing of nutrients to the body, but most importantly to the heart, the mind, and the mouth.

37

The Moon

Sunny Yang

38

Barcelona Street Art

One of the best nights I spent in Barcelona was exploring Barcelona’s street art. For hours I just kept arbitrarily turning corners and choosing streets, down dark alleyways, through storefronts. In Barcelona, streets are canvases, constantly being reinvented. I was stumbling into this underworld, and I just got lost in it.

I found poems written to lovers I’d never met, entire walls of beautiful, powerful women, and messages of political anger strewn across entire streets because believing in something means shouting it too.

39

I found an artist at work, and watched, hidden behind a stone pillar, as his hands moved at crazy speeds. But then he caught me, so I ran. In one particularly dark alley I discovered I was being followed by two men. With palms sweaty, I turned and stopped to look at some art on a doorway.

They stopped too. They moved closer, until they were right behind me, and kept coming closer until they moved through the door I had been looking at. It was their apartment.

For one night I felt like I was apart of this world. The rogue artists, their lovers, their friends. Street art in Barcelona is beautiful not in its perfection, but in its sharing of space with the viewer, the feeling that you a part of this work, this story. Where I live in the U.S. there are blank walls, blank streets. I wonder what stories they would tell if we let them.

Chanelle Doucette

40

Birds of a FeatherFlorence, Italy

Jaye Whitney Debber

41

Summer in Genevafor Martha

We had no idea what to expect. “Shops close at seven. There’s not much to do at night.” “There’s

of high summer.” “Things are expensive – like re-ally expensive. Chocolate is good though. And of course the cheese.” These were all things we were told before we started our eight week internship at the World Health Organization. “EasyJet becomes your best friend,” said another intern I met, who’d been there a whole month earlier and hence con-

sage advice. “You’re in Geneva for the WHO, the UN, CERN, whichever international organization that’s providing that line on your resume in ex-change for your free labor. The best thing about Geneva is that it’s so easy to get out.”

-frains grumbled by even the Swiss themselves. (“You HAVE to cross the border to buy groceries

nodding along. “Urgh, GENEVA,” we would moan, accompanied by the customary eye roll. When it’s

people from ten different countries at a table (or more often, picnic mat, since we could not afford to sit at tables), I guess shitting on the very country that brought you together was the most diplomatic approach to bonding.

Yet, when I think of the summer, the gripes melt into the background, as much a backdrop as the glittering Swiss Alps. There is something to be said about a determination to have a good time – some-thing to be said about enjoying yourself in spite of. People like to complain, especially when the com-plaints do not really hurt anyone.

When I think of Geneva, I think of dear friends.

till we were just about ready to open that bottle of the second-cheapest wine. Cool dips in the glassy Lake Geneva after work, lying in the grass with cheese and chocolate; yes, Geneva is home to the 9 franc value meals, but who eats McDonalds when the stuff you pick up in the supermarket for half

that can only be found in ‘gourmet’ food shops back home? I actually miss having to code-switch accents, learning to curse in six different languag-es. I think of everyone being amazed whenever someone was revealed to be Swiss “You’re actual-ly FROM here?!” – a constant reminder of today’s seemingly borderless world. I remember having the time and energy to hunt down free live music, of not even having to look for it, because sometimes it just seemed to be everywhere (your wallet hurts

good place to be a busker.) I laugh at the stupid things we did – unwittingly freezing our asses off

France. Sometimes, I wonder if we really did dance -

ing bass, god knows what else, and the knowledge that it was the one night Geneva got dirty. I marvel at how we stayed up all night at festivals in other Swiss cities, and somehow still had the energy to analyze tobacco consumption patterns at work. I think of sitting outside till we missed the last tram – of always missing the last tram, but not being too worried because Geneva was small enough to walk home anyway.

Geneva reminded me of the greatness of Reed. Mar-tha and I were one of the few undergraduate interns at the WHO – granted, it was unpaid, but we would not have landed it without the help of the gracious alumni and the Switchboard. Our only interactions prior to the internship was struggling through Jeff’s Metrics class together (a bonding experience

endlessly against the lazily setting sun; when we found ourselves feeling at home in ‘underground clubs’ or in front of Gold Panda; when we relished in the welcome grit – juxtaposed against the con-stant knowledge that you are in Switzerland, where you can set your watches by the trams – with tunes pulsing, moving in a way reminiscent to SU balls,

sometimes got frustrated by the perceived incom-petence of others, where we somehow found mean-

42

ing in mundane work because it contributed to the overall aim of tobacco consumption reduction (per-haps because we were given this task, and we were going to do it well, dammit), we knew we had the rigor of Reed to thank/blame. We were not joined at the hip, but when I started thinking ‘Oh, Martha should be here to enjoy this’ on independent week-end trips to other parts of Europe, or telling others about ‘this Polish-American girl from my school’, I knew I was in trouble. When thoughts were be-ing conveyed through eyes, and we found ourselves

summer, I felt thankful that Geneva had yielded this gem of a girl I knew I could trust with anything – and sorry that I wouldn’t be back in school for

from Harvard and Cambridge and we found eerie similarities in our schools (yes, I said that, and it has struck me on multiple occasions that the col-lege most similar to Reed is Harvard), but we knew we wouldn’t trade our spots for the name and re-sources. Reed is a small place, but sometimes it takes stepping out of it to fully appreciate its power and beauty.

Yes, there are the big banks, jewelers, and hotels for Arab tourists that we never stepped into (except to use the restroom once). Yes, a weekend in Paris felt like a successful Prison Break. But a place always becomes your own if you let it, and it’s hard not to love your own. Towards the end, friends with full-time jobs there would tell us, “You’re lucky. Gene-va is really the most boring place on earth, but in summer, it comes alive.” And so, when I think of Geneva, I think of life.

Martha’s collection of Instax Minis scratches the surface of our summer in Geneva.

Andrea Lim

43

Pskov: untitled

Bernadette Clark

44

Turkish Market // Berlin

Genevieve Medow-Jenkins

45

Valuation of Cuisine

For 5 dollars I get a soup, a main dish, and a dessert. I even get to pick my meal from a three-ring binder full of colorful laminated choices. No explanation necessary. And no time is ever wasted; this little gem was discovered just around the corner of my Hungarian language school.

For 15 dollars I get a whole goose leg. On the side there is goulash, braised red cabbage and mashed potatoes with caramelized onions. Don’t forget the old man playing the piano from dusk to night, and a rotation of chivalrous waiters charming my guests every time I visit.

For 12 dollars I got a coffee and the original Sa-cher-Torte at the Hotel Sacher. It was fun to see the grandiose interiors and the elaborate staff uni-

For 8 dollars my mom and I shared two plastic plates full of Polish food that I cannot possibly do

-municate our wish for ‘authentic Polish sausage’, two extremely bloated stomachs, and one trium-phant photo with the owner of the humble food

she ran to the freezer next door and returned with

word we learned on our entire trip.

For 20 dollars I got a deceiving pan of cold and salty paella. It was Christmas Eve in Lisbon and I gave in to one of the restaurants hustling tourists in the streets.

For 70 dollars per person, my housemate Clémence and I do our weekly shopping at Carrefour and she cooks me food with butter and garlic and mustard and lardon. In exchange I put up with the dishes and eating kid-size compôte-de-everything for des-sert.

-guignonne on a family-owned farm, jambon persillé

-bian fusion in Marseille, a precious bowl of tagine in Montpellier, and an assortment of pâtés, chèvres, and macarons in Avignon.

a snowstorm in Lille, I got to spend a week tasting everything Istanbul had to offer. “We can’t eat this because the color of the dough doesn’t look right,” Bahar exclaimed as she dumped the whole pot into a plastic bag. She wouldn’t stand a less-than-per-fect presentation of Turkish cuisine. After she left, I

it, mixed it with curry, and packed it for the three following lunches. I joked about her absurd strin-

she more than made up for it by taking me up and down the alleys of Istanbul, introducing me to ev-ery food item up to her standard. And yes, it began with her grandmother’s unforgettable etli yaprak sarma.

The only real cost of cuisine is perhaps the 12 pounds of weight gain, with every pound in ex-change for an experience that no market price can

Joan Wang

46

A Side StreetMadrid, Spain

Jenn McNeal

47

City of Design

With sweat on my hairline, I ride the Elevated at 7.29, to a bed, not mine anymore. White wood, chipped like teeth, frames pale pink views of the playdough castleacross the street, emblazoned with kebab and currywafting through the morning. Glowing or grey.

We are multitudes of not born here, drape over bulging balconies like gargoyles spitting ash. Our gorgesparch when settled in prefabricated lebensraum –

In bat-infested courtyards, in the attics of factories your skin crawls while kings of voodoo tell your fortune. Blood on the white linens of a stranger’s

I love you forever on a tray in the bathroom.

In the cellar with you I barely see your facethrough twenty mouths drinking cigarettes.Awake and blind and boiling we share words

Katharina Schwaiger

48

Ideal

Liana Clark

49

Topography of Terror: Dream Big of Die Welt

Genevieve Medow-Jenkins

50

Shruti Korada

51

so i don’t know if this is a common problem on US subways, because i never really had reason to pay attention to it before, but in a lot of metro stations in paris, there’s a small gap between the platform and the train. every time the train stops, a robotic voice reminds you, in french and english, to mind the gap. i never paid this warning much heed because the gap looks way too small for an adult to fall into. besides, what kind of fucking idiot falls into the gap?

then this morning i fell into the gap.

after getting about 4 hours of sleep last night, i stumbled onto the train at 8 in the morning and moved aside to make space for a woman getting off. then all of a sudden there was no ground under my right leg.

for a brief moment, i considered the possibility of dying in a metro station. i imagined the tombstone : “brent bailey, inattentive idiot. bled to death from a severed leg in a puddle of hobo urine.” then adren-aline took over and i started scrabbling like a starving rat in a cage to get into the train. unfortunately, when your leg is stuck in a hole, you’re nowhere near a handhold, and two decades being polite are preventing you from using someone else as one, scrabbling isn’t particularly effective. i used to occa-sionally wonder if i’d do well in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic world; now i know for a fact that i’m far too afraid of committing a faux pas to survive a life-or-death situation.

luckily, though most of the people surrounding me just gawped at my predicament, a few passengers helped pull me up, and, after two or three endless seconds where my foot was stuck and an ignomini-ous subway death (or at least foot removal) seemed certain, i was upright again. about a second later, the doors slammed shut and the train went on its way.

once the metro started moving, my heart still racing as i processed just how close i came to losing a leg and/or dying, one of my fellow riders put his hand on my shoulder and said something incomprehensi-ble in french.

“quoi?” i asked.

“that’s very dangerous,” he said, in “talking to a very stupid child/tourist” english.

thank you, anonymous subway dude, for your sage advice. i had no idea. i thought getting your leg stuck in between a moving train and a platform was a safe, fun way to have an authentic paris experience.

Brent Bailey

52

Prayer

Alma Siulagi

53

Upon my return to the United States 回来美国

In rich black soil planted 土地肥黑种 多花气味吸

Cut and prune them stem by stem 剪砍莖莖下 Wait and wait through the utmost of the long winter 等等长冬机Only the strongest purest among them 淳强只有些 will push up through the dirt 土地翻推起To be smelled again 闻闻气味再drawn in even deeper 更更深沉吸

Antonio Marin

54

to the location their new means of interacting with it, which in this day and age inevitably means taking photographs for social media. I, too, obviously had this in mind as I cozied up beside the deer to get my

Maria Maita-Keppeler

55

attention à la marche

in french the word for high-heeled shoes looks more like talons and i’ve seen more hunting here than i ever had beforedirty looks from students, dirty thoughts of men dirty hands seek out my assetsand dirty morals hate who i am

the birds of prey of this city use their sight to take me down cutting apart my outsiders’ clothes and my foreigner’s walk seeing through me and not seeing me at all

i watch and study them, trying to learn to hunt for myself

been missing the sound of bikes on lawns and knees on carpetsi am so sick of the smell of piss in every corner and the sound of heels on concrete

Maddie Reese

56

Love’s Allowance

Ludo was naked and I was sitting on him and he was laughing at my bad French and I grabbed my camera and zoomed in on his lips.

He was old: forty, probably. I liked the lines on his face. I liked our skins touching each other; mine smooth and young and soft; his starting to sag, covering old rugby muscles.

“Arrête,” he said, “no pictures right now. Let’s watch the news.”

He tired easy. I took a picture of his leg. It was sturdy and I felt small and feminine next to it so I snuggled into his arm even though he was ignoring me. I touched his receding hairline.

“Je t’aime,” I said.

“I love you,” he said in heavily accented English and we both giggled.

“I am very tired. Teered?”

“Tired.”

We were both very happy.

It was six a.m. and we were waking up slowly. He was going to open his café; I was going to the darkroom to develop the photos for my exposition. I’d taken an entire roll of Ludo and I felt guilty about it.

I heard him peeing as I pulled my tights on under the covers. I shivered and thought about his rough hands so I ran into the bathroom and kissed his shoulders. We both had to go, though.

blank. Not a single picture. His hand, his knee, his laughing lips, my stomach against his, his back facing me, his long torso running not-smoothly into his strong legs, our kisses, his hand on my knee, him, us. I

Elaina Ransford

57

Liana Clark

58

dogshit

1. she sent me a picture of the baby dog wrapped in a blanket, its snout and some bluish tubing visible beyond the hem. , she said; this meaning something like: emotionally moving. it had been sick

found an IV pouch and a pediatrician and said, . after a dozen tries the needle went in. she said, , and now it slept without whimpering. her heart swelled with some-thing. “moved”. i said, ? .

, she insisted. . i was brimming with petty exhaustion so i said goodnight and signed off.

2. the day after, there were people here to talk about religion and language and materiality. somehow, when i’m farthest from the language of my family, it’s easiest to remember how they speak. this time – in the middle of it was her telling me, father taught

. together they read the words of god. . because by the time they were ready to learn, he no longer stayed home long enough.

3. i am online but invisible when she starts, . . i keep still. it died this morning. , she types.

4. even though i gave him that name, he died. she typed this after a pause. . an incantation upon spirits to leave him be, by calling it the name of something without worth, something dirty. i think of my grandmother, her calling me . in my childhood i never once thought the word had negative

caresses. . i try to translate that sentence, i slip and write: . a yelp of the fear the world has drawn into me. yet, the love my family taught me is the act of wrapping arms, pressing cheeks, so much so that the beloved might disappear. because they will – but you will love, even then.

Jodie Moon

59

songbirds in ninh binh, vietnam

Austin Weymueller

60

A friend suggested that I should get good closure with her before leaving Europe. I agree; it would be nice to have done that. But there's really noth-ing to end. You see, the whole thing was kind of like a whirlwind that arrived suddenly and depart-ed abruptly. There was not a real beginning to start with, so what's there to put an end to? Though I didn't see this coming, I fell into it as time went on. But I suppose the moment wasn't right; our

her, she gradually stepped away. This is my study abroad, she said, and I want to make the most out of it, doing as many things as possible before leav-

with mine, but I realized that there's not much time left for her and that our relationship, if there were to be one, would not last anyway. I did not really bring closure to it, whatever it was, when I last saw her. In Mandarin we call it , meaning “to draw a period”. To put a period to something im-plies that there is a complete sentence before it, so wouldn't it be inappropriate to draw a period when the sentence before is composed of fragmented phrases, chaotic grammar, and inconsistent tenses?

Matthieu started calling himself my dragon in the emails after that day. We bonded over Taiwanese

-ied abroad in Morocco and speaks French, English, and three other languages, and a Taiwanese girl, who was studying abroad in France from United States and speaks English, French, and yet three other languages, bonding over Taiwanese music that only grandparents listen to in Taiwan. I still chuckle when I think about it. I ended up teaching him a little bit of Mandarin, in traditional characters of course. He is a fast learner and wants to come to Taiwan someday. He said I should visit his grand-parents in Brest, the West-est point of France, with him and taste what real galettes and crêpes made by Breton grandmas are like. I really wanted to, but

You know, I never thought Reed would have such a

wanted to be labeled a Reedie, trying to disassoci-ate from all the different connotations that come with it. Always defying norms I disagreed with, al-ways yearning to get outside the Reed bubble, al-ways wondering if that was the right place for me. And now here I am, studying abroad half a world away from Reed, yet unexpectedly missing it. Grass is always greener on the other side, they say. Even though I don't think that's what's happening here.

What am I doing here? Or what should I be doing? Since when did I become someone who couldn't

-ademics? People always tell me to "make the most out of" my semester here. Sure. I would like to do

making the most? The most what? Foreign friends? Lovers? Travelling? I'm listening to this song from

, a movie I watched with someone whom I might not have the chance to encounter another time. Is that it? Those who enter my life accidental-ly – I should just treat them as if I won't see them ever again?

There's a term in French called -ure things out on your own, but literally it means to de-fog yourself. I like that term, for my life has been

grappled with what it means to be Taiwanese after being Reed-educated when I returned to Taiwan during breaks; now I wrestle with my multilateral

-ing why I speak French with an American accent when I actually come from Taiwan. I never really

perhaps there is no real answer. I wave my hands earnestly, trying to make out any sight ahead, only

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time didn't allow. He was disappointed, saying I would have really loved his grandpa. I was disap-pointed too, imagining how I could have listened to his grandpa tell tales of Bretagne and attempt-ed to speak Breton with his grandma. Next time, I said.

I said farewell to him that day, gave him a little jade dragon as a souvenir because of his Chinese zodiac. I cried and cried when saying bye in the parking lot of my apartment, not knowing when I would come back or see him again and whether I would ever get to visit his grandparents. After I got back to my apartment, he called, asking me to look outside my kitchen window. Look! I made it snow! Doesn't the dragon have some magic pow-er in Chinese mythology or something? he said,

below me. I know you were disappointed that it never snows in Rennes, so I made it snow for you, he said. I opened the window and looked at the

laughed, with tears still in my eyes, yes you did, you are a real dragon.

Now I’m back here at Reed, rearranging my

on the whole experience over there that occurred more than a year ago. As much as I left there thinking that it was too short and that I would have been much more integrated if I stayed one more semester, I don’t think of the life there, how it was more relaxing, exploratory, and sensational, when I’m stressed about workload or thesis here.

away in Rennes and in France, encountering the people, locals and foreigners alike, the culture, and myself. Even if that meant missing classes I would have wanted to take and throwing some possibilities out the window when I returned.

I don’t think about the life back there because I don’t think of it as a substitute for my life here at Reed. More like a complement, if you were to put it in Econ terms. I have slowly learned that every place has its own stage and time in my life. I’ve had the stage in Rennes as a 21-year-old college student at that point in time, and it is now the stage to be

-ments representing what Reed is to me. Places and particular experiences have their own stages and spotlights – who knows if someday life might give me another chance to bring a new stage to Rennes and to France, orchestrating a different ensemble composed of old friends, new encounters, and in-terweaving memories? Just like how I didn’t realize Reed’s impact on me until I got to France, the im-pact of this experience on who I am and who I be-come probably won’t dawn on me until years later.

Sunny Yang

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Dejá preguntarme azul y blanco

Dwayne Okpaise

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(De)colonizing Study Abroad: Ruminations on Ambivalence

Mimicry equals ambivalenceHomi Bhabha wroteAm I now a mimic, then?for I feel ambivalent:ambivalent about studying abroadwhile studying abroad; ambivalent about my (de)colonization

At Reed, I felt unrepresentedmisrepresented, even; Who am I?brown skin, white mask or brown skin, brown maskthe weight of the veil remainsFanon and DuBois in their blackness thus spoke to meif you’re not white, you’re black

In Oxford, where I sought refuge,they study me;the men who made my ancestors refugeesdid study there tooDecades have passed and now we are colonized no morePartitioned no more, independent, secular, democratic, and liberalizedHas history been defeated, then?

My mother tells me to not live in the pasta third world woman, singlehandedly she brought me up,But what to do Ma when the past lives in me, ambivalently?

Archit Guha

ContributorsBrent Bailey

Emily Brock was once a London-based poet and Norwichian American Lit student until she decided to indulge in a year-long stint of continental drifting in the US. Now she’s not sure where home is.

Olivia Capozzalo has always loved storytelling. She plans to return to St. Petersburg, Russia next year to continue collecting other peoples’ stories and writing her own ones there.

Bernadette Clark

Liana Clark is a woody semi-parasitic tropical vine, twisting around a great number of sturdier trunks and branches. She probably likes your eyebrows.

Jaye Whitney Debber is a Classics major, writer, animal lover, and travel enthusiast. She has travelled to twelve countries, and hopes to visit many more in the future.

Ben DeYoung is always looking to expand his horizons. Chanelle Doucetteenthusiast. All happening at the same time – pure happiness. Oh and everything she knows she learned from Beyoncé.

Kaori Freda loves walking down the streets of Florence with a doner kebab in one hand and gelato in the other. She is also enthusiastic about the ways Reed Switchboard can connect Reedies abroad.

Archit Guha is intrigued by questions of the (post)colonial kind – Partition meant something to him before Beyoncé. While he isn’t trying to (de)colonize the ivory tower, he also enjoys British television shows, reminiscing about growing up in the 90’s in India, and people watching.

Shruti Korada

Currently residing in Cairo, Andrea Lim enjoys the city’s unpredictability and can no longer imagine settling forever in any one place. She started a literary/arts travel magazine in Singapore during a semester off from Reed (http://www.afterglobemag.com) – check it out!

Mary Lubbers is a bit of a travel buff and has kept a running total of the number of countries she has been to. Her favorite is easily Ireland and she absolutely cannot wait to go back.

Maria Maita-Keppeler is a creator and consumer of songs and doodles and paintings and stories and tasty meals. She hopes to share what she makes and learn about life by appreciating and understanding all of the strange cre-ations that the world has to offer.

Antonio Marinelixer and looks forward to attaining the Dao and transcending the mortal realm.

A sorceress by day and a siren by night, Jenn McNeal will cast a spell on the toads in the man-in-the-moon’s coy smile.

Genevieve Medow-Jenkins is an artist who uses the mediums of photography, video, and writing to broaden our perceptions and perhaps, widen our subjective realities. She is a practiced observer, conversationalist, and critic.

Elisabeth Miles

Hoyoung Moon is Jodie and a few other things. She comes from a line of sages in the shower, so you best believe when she tells you you’re cute.

Christopher Munoz

Dwayne Okpaise is a junior art history major. Sometimes he misses Buenos Aires.

Elaina Ransford enjoys bouldering, IPAs, coffee in bed, and boys in Carhartt beanies.

Alec Recinos friends.

Maddie Reese is a pun-loving franco-nerd who had only ever lived in Oregon until going to Paris last semester. Maddie talks a lot about running for President of the United States, but really only time will tell.

Katharina Schwaiger

Alma Siulagi is a Portland native with a stubborn streak about practically everything. She is passionate about urban spaces, the environment, and public transit.

Stuart Steidle is an avid adventurer who also loves building, gardening, cooking, making music, and being active outdoors. He is attempting to learn Burmese and settle in Southeast Asia for long-term commitments to photojournal-ism and various forms of human rights advocacy.

Taylor Rose Stinchcomb -la! She is restless to see the world and spend her life protecting the wildlife to which her soul is indelibly connected.

Joan Wang appreciates doors with a history and bathrooms with a personality. When she is not busy searching for

Austen Weymueller has serious wanderlust and is constantly making lists of places she wants to go. Someday, she’ll

August Wissmath -tory, with the intent to understand the ways in which meaningful works emerge, with the hope that he can master old images, utterances, and ideas as tools, in the making of something new.

Sunny Yang is a language enthusiast and has a collection of “I love you”s in 18 languages. She is also passionate about education and plans on turning the Taiwanese education system upside down in the future.

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