July 31, 2018 First Person Like You Know Your Own Bones By Crystal Hana Kim On memory, inherited trauma, and my grandmother. Crystal Hana Kim and her grandmother. When I was almost two years old, my grandmother flew from Hongcheon, South Korea, to Flushing, Queens, to take care of me. For a few years, while my parents worked, I spent my hours with Halmuni. I do not remember how we colored our days, but I press my thumb onto the photographs of that time. I smudge their borders and try to return to a forgotten past. In one glossy, blurry photograph, I am paper-crowned with a waxy yellow Burger King wrapper laid out before me, a rounded bun raised to my open mouth. Halmuni does not eat; instead, the camera catches her watching me. A tender, unsmiling gaze. When I examine this picture, I am convinced I remember. That crown, I think. Yes. I remember the thick gold paper with the Burger King logo, the jewels on the rounded arches. But the crown in the photograph is blue, and that unexpected color unbalances me. My confidence slips. Perhaps I am remembering a different day. Perhaps I am remembering the last time I looked at this photograph. Memory warps and stretches and shifts to fit the strictures of your life. As my mother and I share a bottle of wine, she recalls my first years. She tells me that I had no understanding of mother-daughter love when I was young, that my world revolved around Halmuni. I wanted to sleep in her room. I wanted my mother to return “our” chopsticks when she used them in the kitchen. The edges of my mind seem to prickle with recognition. A white linoleum floor, my hand on Halmuni’s knee as I demand my mother leave us alone. Read More
June 28, 2018 First Person What Comes After Idealism? By Heather Abel “Class of ’36, I guess we did something wrong.” This is what my grandmother wrote to her Barnard College classmates fifty years after they had all graduated. My grandmother was charismatic and uncompromising, equally critical of capitalism and sentimentality. In her life as a Westchester housewife and radical leftist, she’d planned protests, played tennis, and published mystery novels. When her children were grown, she moved to Manhattan, waking every morning at five to walk briskly around Central Park (she was mugged only a few times). She spent the rest of the day writing and tending the ivy she’d planted to beautify the trees along her block. Every Saturday, she organized against U.S. atrocities in Central America. Days before she died in 1992, while attached to an IV, a blood transfusion, and oxygen, she dictated the final paragraph of her eighteenth book to my mother. The book was, she explained, the first in a new series she planned to write. At her memorial a week later, held in a classroom at Barnard College, her five children yelled and laughed and interrupted one another. She’d taught them to rebel against society’s mawkish ceremonies, like memorial services, as well as its unjust institutions. Her children all inherited her radical politics, and they raised us, her twelve grandchildren, in the same mode. You can be anything, they joked, as long as it’s a public defender. Interpreting this broadly, we complied. Read More
June 27, 2018 First Person On Writing Letters to Famous Strangers By A. M. Homes John Templeton Lucas, The Letter Writer, 1877. As a teenager, I wrote letters to strangers. I was trying to write my way out of my parent’s house, where I was psychically trapped. Like an alien seeking contact, I started by doing research. I went to the Bethesda Library, where they had phone books from all over the country. I remember being surprised by the number of well-known names one could find in a New York phone book in the 1976–1978 time period: Art Garfunkel, Mikhail Baryshnikov—those are just two I recall, but I know there were dozens. My inability to leave home, my separation anxiety, was all-encompassing. It wasn’t just about leaving my mother, though that would have been enough. It was about house and home—family—in the largest most literal sense. If I left the house, something might happen. It might not be there when I got back. This soul-crushing sense of impending doom was crippling. It started in nursery school, when my mother would drop me off at the little house at the top of the hill. They’d have to hold me back while my mother drove away, never looking in her rearview mirror at her sobbing child. I didn’t write to strangers because they were famous. I didn’t want an autographed eight-by-ten. I wanted to tell them about my life, my day at school. I wanted to drive a wedge between my childhood and the larger world that I hoped I might join one day. I wanted a way out. Read More
June 11, 2018 First Person Toothless: On the Dentist, Powerlessness, and Pnin By Adrienne Celt Otto Dix, Mädchen vor dem Spiegel, 1921. Sometimes I wonder what I’d look like without any teeth left in my head. Lips turned inward on themselves, gums a shocking pink. My throat a cavern that empties forever downward, and my body hollow, without purpose or power. Mine would not be strong gums, like a baby has, with nascent teeth budding just below the surface. Mine would be a mouth of death, as soft and pliant as dirt tossed loosely on a grave. Clearly, I have some feelings about my teeth. When I was a teenager, my parents divorced and stopped making dentist appointments for me—I’m not sure whether this was a miscommunication between them or if, as I distantly recall, they both decided I ought to take on the responsibility myself once I reached fourteen, even though I couldn’t yet drive and was afraid of making phone calls to strangers. Either way, I didn’t go, and my teeth have been a mess ever since. Read More
June 4, 2018 First Person A Taxonomy of Wind By Ben Shattuck Jean-François Millet, The Gust of Wind, 1871. Alone and asleep last December, I woke to two men standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I saw their guns held by their thighs. A flashlight blinded me. “Everything all right in here?” one said, stepping into the room. I held out my palm to block the light. “Police,” he said. “There was an alarm going off.” I knew there wasn’t an alarm going off because it had been deactivated months earlier. I thought, This is not the police. This is a home invasion. When I turned on the bedside lamp and saw their uniforms, I thought, Those are fake uniforms. He told me to get out of bed. I stood between them in my boxers and T-shirt. “Why are there no clothes in here?” the other man said, pointing to the open drawers across the room. “What, you just move in?” They holstered their guns. “Yes,” I said. I’d just returned home to Massachusetts after half a year away. Rain crackled on the roof and lashed the windows. The day had been warm because of a southerly storm shoving up against the underarm of Cape Cod. Out the window I saw a third man standing on the patio, perhaps guarding the exits. “Come with us,” one of the men said. The house is down a long driveway on a fishhook peninsula. On one side is the ocean; on the other is a river that shares my middle name. The house is a loft my great-grandfather built for my great-grandmother. Hardwood floors. High ceilings. Wooden chandeliers hanging from wooden beams and permanently covered in a frost of dust. There’s a cluttered centuries-worth of old books, shells, and antique souvenirs and no insulation. When I walked into the main room, I saw that the overhead lights and lamps were on. The men had been there for some time. I’ve lived in the house since before I walked, and could lead a tour blindfolded. It’s not easy to find the bedroom. You go into the house, take a U-turn to a back hallway, pivot to another hall, and go through a door. You’d have to spend some time looking around for it. Read More
May 11, 2018 First Person All I Want for Mother’s Day Is a Goddamn Drink By Lauren Elkin A tipsy Klimt This Mother’s Day, I’d like to raise a mocktail to all the mothers-to-be, to all of us united in suffering the joys and the indignities of pregnancy, stone-cold sober. As my own mother tells it, she knew she was pregnant with me, her firstborn, when she got disproportionately sick from one gin and tonic. When I, in turn, pushed away a glass of Côte de Beaune at the dinner table, I knew something was up. Now, twenty-one weeks in, I wish I could go back to that night, back when it still didn’t count, and finish my glass of chardonnay. What was I thinking? I just wasn’t thinking. Read More