A story I wrote was recently published on literary website Joyland Magazine. Check it out here.

I finished my job two weeks ago, on a Thursday, and on that day, during the going-away party my boss threw for me at a nearby pub, I found out that my mom has cancer. I had only moved into my new apartment the previous weekend, and had boxes crowding the kitchen and the corner of my bedroom. The next day, Friday, I walked most of the way to Target, picked up a few miscellaneous household things–a trash can, a desk lamp–and carried them to my apartment. Stephanie met me, and we set about unpacking, sweeping, swiffering, setting up. It was all done in less than half the day, and then I was on a Greyhound bus (after 2 hours in line at Port Authority) back home.

The past week has been full of relatives, visitors. Lots and lots of food. I cleaned out the refrigerator last week because I couldn’t take it any more. I discovered my parents were hiding three separate, barely cracked containers of sweet relish. I used as illustration of their discord these, plus the Hellman’s sandwich spread, which is just sweet relish plus mayonnaise. There was also a 32-ounce jar of Mayonnaise.

I have not done so much wandering. Usually it is around their house, which sits in an up-and-coming part of Center City, which means that it is still very tony. The nearest commercial stretch is South Street, which, for Center City, is about as bearable as can be. I have a coffee shop, a bookstore, and another coffee shop I can go to if my usual one is full.

Today, though, I went for a drive. It was around afternoon rush hour by the time I got out, so I decided to go to Penn’s campus, thinking parking would be easier there. I was in search of a cancer cookbook I promised my mom I’d get. I had to ask a man at the information booth for it, and I wonder what they are thinking; do they pity me? But cancer is so common these days, even though in these past weeks mine has felt like the only case. Maybe I am common?

When they didn’t have it, I set out west, with a vague idea of what direction to find. I ended up where I’d hoped–a stretch of West Philadelphia I remembered frequenting when I was younger. There was a familiar intersection of trolley tracks, an old church that used to house a farmer’s market. And then, I found myself in front of my mother’s old job. It was an education center housed in an old townhouse, a blue and white incongruous paint job, the same old sign stuck in the middle of the front yard.

I found a market that seemed similar to something I would visit in Brooklyn. There were women and their toddlers in the front yard of a home on a play date.

I’m a walker. I’m absentminded, and I love to gaze at old houses and peer into storefronts. I will stop in the middle of a sidewalk, change directions. I’ve had quite a few close calls with traffic. Not having been behind the wheel in awhile, my habit makes for some terrible driving. I almost hit a car, almost missed some traffic lights, and I turned the wrong way down a one-way street.

But the advantages of driving are plentiful. I can go further; I can go to places I might otherwise be afraid to. This is an obvious advantage in Philadelphia, where twice on today’s drive I ran into barricades of police cars blocking off streets. And I didn’t have to lug my laptop on my shoulder and worry about it being seen by potential thieves; it was hidden safely in the trunk of my car the entire time, free for me to whip out and start working if the urge struck me.

There’s not really a point to this post, except that Philadelphia can be a beautiful city, made even more beautiful by childhood memories, and observed quite nicely from the driver’s seat of a car. I bought some local cheese from Lancaster County that I’ll hopefully enjoy today; I’ll order my mom’s book on Amazon. If I’m lucky enough to have the car tomorrow, I may drive, or I may walk.

The past few months I have spent preparing for this transition. I’ve given notice at my job and am working on wrapping up my three years there by the end of July; I’ve found an apartment uptown, closer to school; and I’ve put my nose to the stone, working intently on my creative work, which, I’m happy to report, has borne fruit in the form of acceptances from two literary journals. Going back to school means that I will probably not have much time to blog, and this infrequency of late may well be the norm going forward. Or, this blog may die altogether. If that’s the case, it’s been a nice ride that I hope you’ve enjoyed, or at least not felt that whatever time you’ve devoted to reading me has been wasted.

***

To the issue at hand. Last week I got pretty wrapped up in the drama around Olivia Munn. She was recently hired by The Daily Show as an on-air correspondent, making her the first woman to win such a position in seven years (the other is Samantha Bee). A couple of weeks ago, Jezebel posted an article questioning the decision, given that she does not have very much comedy experience, but is a bonafide frat-boy sex symbol, having posed half-naked on the covers of Playboy and Maxim.

Jezebel was the first to comment on in this situation, and their post sparked a lot of blog back and forth, and in particular this interview with Munn on Salon. I found the Jezebel article completely called for, and even needed. It’s really a typical workplace problem: someone with a weak resume, but possessing some other outside advantage is hired or promoted. There is naturally going to be questioning or even some outrage. If you’ve been on the spurned side of this type of event, you know that it’s your full right to question that person’s qualifications. Really, it’s all that you can do; all of us will find ourselves losing to people who are favored for one reason or another–attractive people, rich people, people with family connections–at some point in life, and you can’t fight every single one of these battles.

But Munn doesn’t do herself any favors in the interview and comes off as defensive and kind of full of herself:

I’m easy to hate. I get it. When I first came to L.A., I would go to these commercial auditions for Target. I’m 110 pounds now, but I used to be 135. And I would go to these auditions and these girls would be, like, in that effortless L.A. look: T-shirt, jeans and flats. So thin they’d just walk with a shuffle. I know what it’s like to not think it’s fair for someone to look a certain way and also get the dream job. But it’s ridiculous to say that a woman can’t be funny and also be sexy.

Also, in a few of the blog comments I read, there was contention around these lines that followed: “‘Oh, I’m the pretty girl who came in?’ That means that Nancy Carell isn’t gorgeous? Like all these other women who have been there aren’t beautiful women?”

People: this is not the way you respond to allegations of preferential treatment! In this situation, do not deny. Denying, first, is impossible to back up. A few months from now we could be hearing tapes from Jon Stewart’s closed-door meetings, full of the sounds of high-fives and betting on who can score with her first.

Second, most importantly, denying means denying others a right to their own feelings. Think of that workplace situation. Imagine confronting the person in question, and having them tell you about how they lost jobs to people even prettier than they were in the past? It makes you feel like you don’t deserve to feel angry in this situation, which–fucking yes you do! What actions you take in response to the incident–whether you sue or threaten to quit, or refuse to make eye contact with that person when you pass them in the hallway–that is what determines whether you will be judged as having handled the situation well or poorly, but you certainly, 100% always, are entitled to your own private feelings.

Munn’s performance in this interview brought to mind a recent article by another woman known very much for her beauty–Elizabeth Wurtzel. I wrote on her piece already, and promised that there would be a coda in the future.

Though the two women have pretty different personalities–Munn comes off as more fragile (which may have to do with how close the interview came to the Jezebel article), and Wurtzel is famously nuts. But in both cases, both women fail to admit, plainly, the advantages they’ve been granted compared to other women because of their beauty. Wurtzel is more aware of how such discussions of beauty turn people off, but is powerless to make herself stop. Munn is either lying, which I really doubt, or there is some part of her that believes  her experiences at all resemble those of Nancy Carell or Samantha Bee. Amy Benfer put it very succinctly in her response on Slate’s Broadsheet: “Beauty is a thing to be observed from the outside, not commented on from the inside.”

But, in revisiting Wurtzel’s article I latched onto her description of the beautiful child, and I have been thinking since about the experience of being consistently told you are beautiful for most of your life:

I was a remarkably adorable child, the kind with such rosily expressive cheeks that grown-ups couldn’t resist pinching them. So when I became a teenager and then an adult, I was what you would call a hot number or something like that [...] I was cute all along—it’s not like I blossomed into honeysuckle after adolescence

It struck me because, more or less, this was my experience. I was a beautiful child. In my whole life, I have been called ugly exactly once, in middle school, naturally, by a very angry girl who in the same sentence called Uma Thurman ugly. So, yes, for as long as I have been around, it has been there, as plain and as constant a factor in my development as my race or my upbringing.

Beauty also dovetails with those two factors: specifically, my race and environment growing up determined how attractively I was perceived, and, more generally, all three have effected my development in similar ways. It is really natural, given that I write mainly on those other two things that I should include the third, lately I have felt so estranged on the internet being reduced to a shapeless avatar (though there is a reason for the one I chose–people did used to tell me that I would look like Sade when I grew up).

So here is the thing: when you are told, consistently, that you are beautiful from a young age, before you have a chance to develop your own sense of what you look like, your beauty becomes separate from who you think you are. It’s someone eles’s invention: a phantom that exists between the space of your mind and the looks of others. To some extent this is always true, but it’s harder when it’s introduced to you so early. And when you learn about sex, when you get what those weird looks actually mean, you become even more of an object for other people’s desires.

I’m not trying to pass off this experience as entirely bad; I have more respect for your intelligence. Duh. When people think you are beautiful, they are usually nicer to you. It’s not all bad, but it’s complicated.

Another plus, when you’re attractive from a young age, you learn earlier about beauty’s myths. I know, by witnessing its failures and disappointments–its broken promises, that beauty comes with no guarantees, which, actually, is a prize. This is something Wurtzel clearly has battled with:

I was given to believe that love would be easy, men would be elementary, and I would have my way. I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess. It was all supposed to be to the tune of some glorious Crystals song from the early ’60s, when everything was still innocent, and my life would be a wall of sound from “Then He Kissed Me.” Love would be simpler than tying a string bikini, the kind I wore a lot while waiting on the beach for my ship to come in.

More of the bad: I am deeply uncomfortable with male attention. I always question what is behind it, I think always about the part of me that they are not getting. This has proven to be a useful defense mechanism, especially in New York, but it makes attraction the sticking point of my relationships, something that most people figure out right off the bat.

And let’s bring up those other two ghosts. In my town, but even in my own family, I was exotic from the vantage of every group. My grandmother, my aunt, and my father and brother are the one small branch of my family with Asian features. Obviously, these features, along with my complexion, do sometimes determine why some people think I am attractive. I’m not as resistant to it as I think many women are. Attraction is by nature individual, veiled and complex, determined by any number of factors that you can’t really ever hope to isolate.

But I can observe the comments I receive, and the way people treat me in relation to others. It does honestly bother me to think that I may be treated differently than even darker-skinned members of my own family, just because my great-grandmother (God bless her), decided to get it on with a Chinese guy.

So where do you go from being a beautiful child? You can, like Wurtzel, cling to it desperately, or, like Munn, not think you ever had it in the first place (or at least to the extent that other people think you do). I like to think I’ve beaten something of a retreat, in favor of a more internal life, partly because I’ve fallen a little from my glory days (see below), but also because being around it so long, I don’t trust beauty. I trust friends, love, words. I trust my feelings; my family.

Anyway, if you think I’m a little grubby, there’s why. Damn I was cute.

I am second from left looking like a lady, unfortunately not like a badass cop.

Tonight a band played music in a house across from mine

At least it wasn’t noise rock.

The U.S. adopted the version of the flag with 13 stars and stripes, and one star for every state in the union, then 20 (1818).

Los Angeles was incorporated as a city (1850).

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbol (the round one with the chicken foot in the middle, that hippies are so fond of), was displayed in public for the first time in London (1958).

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee (1968).

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen (1975).

And, Zinzi Clemmons was born on this otherwise inauspicious day in Baltimore, Maryland (1985).

It seems a little cruel to post the song written for his birth on the day that he died, but this is everyone’s song now. They played it every day on the oldies station my parents listened to when they would read the celebrity birthdays, around the time they would pick me up from school. Thus, the chorus is forever imprinted in my mind. A classic.

When I was younger, for a few years, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I was a doodler, fascinated with the human form, and fashion designer fit with my interests and ruling-the-world ambitions. My aunt worked in fashion in New York, and she would sometimes bless me with hand-me-down Ralph Lauren purple label (as she still does, thankfully) or Moschino, and for awhile I bought W Magazine religiously, I think mostly to dazzle of my suburban friends.

As much as I studied high fashion when I was younger, I can’t say that I ever really “got” it. I was never focused enough to really learn the history, and thus I never developed much of a critical eye. Plus, I was always an artist first, and fashion differs from art in one crucial way–it all uses the same canvas. No matter how off-the-wall a design may be, there must always be a body involved. Most people extrapolate this fact to mean that all fashion must be practical. I am not such a neophyte.  To my limited knowledge, the extent that designers choose to play with (or ignore) this fact, often determines their art. See Martin Margiela for a prime example:

Fast forward to today, when I am 24 and living in New York, where fashion is as everyday as public urination. I work very close to Bryant Park, where I often go for lunch, and during fashion week I sit among the tents, the cameras, and the occasional celebrity. I’ve been to a few fashion week shows since moving here, but I often have a hard time forming an opinion until I read reviews, when my eyes invariably skip past the photos and down to the captions. Numerous friends of mine would kill me for saying this, but a lot of the time, the clothes just looked the same to me.

But something in my understanding shifted when I saw McQueen’s Spring 2010 collection. I recognized immediately the huge strength of this vision–in the futuristic, otherwordly silhouettes and textures. It was completely original, but most astonishingly, I realized after looking several times, this vision somehow didn’t overwhelm the beauty of the clothing, and the women wearing them. Just opposite, it somehow enhanced them. The clothes made the models look incredible–like, weird, beautiful aliens. Every time I looked at the clothes, I noticed some other fold, some other piece of tailoring that I realized I had never seen before, and that I really, really liked.

McQueen’s posthumous show looked incredible. Where before he took reptilian skin and morphed it across textiles, he now plays around with medieval artwork and religious symbology. But it’s not just that–one of my favorite gowns uses cartoon images in its print. All of the images are familiar–the skirts are gathered like curtains, scrolling is reminiscent of the interior design of the room in which these looks were shown–but, as I’m learning was McQueen’s gift, they are reinterpreted into something wholly new and breathtaking.

The below coat, the final piece in the collection, is made of golden feathers and embroidered tulle:

The reviews coming out of this intimate showing are short and evocative, more than one describes it as funereal. Witnessing the outpouring after his death, and coming to appreciate his work, even so late on, I feel like I understand where this reaction, as described in the Times review, comes from:

There were damp eyes among the small audience and sobs backstage — both from personal grief and at the scale of the loss to fashion of this singular designer. In this collection Alexander — Lee — McQueen showed his sensitivity to history, his powers of research, his imagination, his technical skills and his love of women, often misinterpreted or misunderstood, but here evident in every fold and feather.

This is one of the images that come up when you search Google for “snow bunny” (there are many that are much more NSFW). “Snow bunny” is also what I was called when I was walking down the street earlier this week. Urban Dictionary has it as ” a white female; [an] expression commonly used to describe a white female who mingles among black males.”

It’s been a long, long while since I’ve been called white. Recently, it’s been Asian; sometimes in earnest, but usually in situations like the above, when men on the street have used it as a stereotyping cat-call. This being America, it is always Chinese, and it is usually used in reference to my eyes. “Your eyes are beautiful, you Chinese or something?” “You look gorgeous, China!”, “China eyes…” etc.

Oftentimes, mixed-race people complain loudly about being admired for their non-black features, and for the most part, I find this disingenuous. I take issue mostly with the regular, non-gorgeous everyday pretty people doing it. I think it’s another thing for celebrities to question how black is too black in magazine articles, because of the personal risk involved for their careers, and after all, they are giving visibility to a serious problem of representation in our media. I give mad props to people like Zoe Saldana who are doing it so articulately.

I’m talking more about reg’lar people, and bloggers, particularly, using a lot of political outrage to complain about getting cat-called. It happens to most people, not just you, and not because you aren’t blue-black. The only people it doesn’t happen to is ugly people (like, really ugly; I’ve seen some real doozies get hollered at), and you know for damn sure you’re happy you’re not one of them. The oppression levelled along the sliding scale of race is a serious issue; the way that punishment is doled out to those viewed as less-than because of their comparative blackness is a huge problem. Popular culture is where it is disseminated, and it is past due for a take down. Being hit on in the street is not this; being hit on is categorically Not A Big Deal.

So, I will not insult your intelligence with a thinly-veiled attempt at talking about my own attractiveness. No, this is a post about another, equally inconsequential topic, but I will do you one better and only refer to it as such: this is a post about the times I’ve been called white. It happened a lot when I was younger, and hadn’t happened for a long time until this week, which is why I’m talking about it again. I live in a white world, between work and friends and the media I choose to consume, I’ve accepted that I’m associated with it to some degree. I expect people to think it, but I don’t expect them to say it, thus my surprise. Thus this post.

It was late on Tuesday night when it happened, around 11pm, and I was walking home on Stuyvesant Avenue. There was a car parked next to the sidewalk where I was walking with its window down, and amidst some other solicitous whispers and kissing sounds coming from the car, I heard it, distincly: “Snow Bunny”. I could not see the drivers. As is my wont in these circumstances, I offered nothing in return, just made an extra effort not to seem to notice and walked a little faster.

In high school, I was probably only called “Oreo” a couple of times, which I considered lucky, because in every movie or book about mixed kids the name followed them like the smell on the Smelly Kid; it was just what mixed kids were called. Though it seemed somewhat benign–Oreos are, like, the best snack. Who doesn’t love em?–I didn’t want to be called out as one by being called one.

Of course, this statement hurt because it hit close to home. Literally. Both of my parents are visibly mixed–my mother is South African colored, a mixed-race group that occupies a cultural space similar to Hispanics in the US, and my father is part Chinese and phenotypically very Asian-looking. He is lighter than I am, and he has epicanthic folds, meaning the “Chinese eyes” that I have inherited are more pronounced on him. Neither of my parents look totally Black, but they grew up in a time, and in respective places that didn’t have much room for in-betweeners (my mother, as mentioned, Apartheid-era South Africa, and my father, Jamaica, Queens, and Inglewood, Los Angeles). Because they were also smart kids and they grew up during times of tremendous Civil Rights action, they aligned identified fiercely as black, as a measure of politics. In short, we were all Black, nothing more, nothing less. My father was Trinidadian, and that Chinese grandfather, he wasn’t mentioned too often.

In my house, being Black was a point of pride. It also represented an interesting dichotomy: my parents were proud of being Black, and proud of the fact that they were the only Blacks in our affluent, mostly white neighborhood. My parents came from the complete opposite: from Black, working-class neighborhoods, and Black was also all my parents knew. The other day, my father mentioned that he was invited to a childhood friend’s son’s bar mitzfah. I was perplexed–my father knew a Jewish kid when he was growing up?

At home, my parents teased me by calling me white, and I, in turn, sometimes leveled the insult at my younger brother. A few times, they expressed concern over my lack of Black friends. I was deeply ashamed of this, and the fact that I got called white at school felt like a pretty big failure. But it happened, over and over. As a smart kid, I mostly hung out with other smart kids–kids I knew from class, where I spent most of my time and energy. These kids considered me one of them, and the worst statements, the ones that made me most embarrassed and uncomfortable, were the ones that implicated me as one of them. You’re not, like, a real black person. Someone I actually knew, for years, who knew my family, and who had witnessed my pathological attempts to trumpet my race for years, said this to me, in front of other people.

Once, in my smart-kid math class, a student sitting to my left asked the student sitting to my right, one of the star theater kids, why it was that black people couldn’t sing classical music as well as well as white people. The theater kid went on to earnestly and scientifically explain why. I sat perplexed and angry, scared into silence, in the middle, and they showed not a hint of embarrassment.

Things changed markedly in college. As much rap as diversity training receives, I can say that we had it in college, and I never experienced any incidents like the above. Some of it has to do with who I chose to hang out with–at Brown I found, at long last, black kids who shared my nerdy interests and instincts, and I fell in with them happily. But a lot of it was that people were told over and over not to say certain things. There were times when I resented the PC-ness–at times the overly the atmosphere tended to inhibit thought and interaction, and there were people who ended up saying even more fucked-up stuff in reaction to all the PC-ness. But given the choice between an unregulated, uninformed environment like the one I grew up in and the at times uncomfortable, sterile environment of college, I would always choose the latter.

I’m well beyond feeling hurt or threatened by being called white or implicated as white. On that Tuesday night, as soon as I had turned the corner, I texted my friend what happened, hoping she’d share the laugh.

In each of these instances, and especially in the most recent one, it wasn’t the name that hurt; it was living in a place where no one understood, or cared to understand your particular background. People called me white because it was convenient for them; it was easier for them to pretend that I was just like them, instead of treating me as black and making caveats, giving up certain insults, or–God forbid–wrapping their heads around the actual complicated nature of my heritage. The worst part is, it was easier for me to let them. In all of these situations, I did next to nothing. They were my friends, and I was a teenager, and I was scared. I let it happen. It’s never really about the insult, it’s more having who you are not be recognized, or even worse, denied.

Enjoy.

This was going to be an update to yesterday’s post, but vodpod screwed up the formatting for that entry, hence the small type at the end. If you read all the way to the end, thanks for sticking with me, and apologies for the technical difficulties.

Now, this is kinda crazy. Sade was also on 106 and Park yesterday, and I almost broke my mouse when this popped up on my Google Reader; I couldn’t share it fast enough! Ok, notice how Terence and Rocsi are trying to whip up some enthusiasm from the crowd. And that primer video in the beginning? They might as well have said, “she’s a legend, brats, so clap REALLY LOUD.” Imagine you’re a thirteen year-old, and you finally win a spot in the audience at 106 and Park. You’re hoping for, who, Lil’ Wayne? Yes, you are hoping for Lil’ Wayne to be there, of course, or maybe that cutie Trey Songz; you’ll even take Nicki Minaj. You show up, and some fifty-year-old is tolmbout “I’m at the hinterland of my devotion” in a crackly voice, and barely dancing. Yeah, sorry, kids.

I have talked a lot of hate in this post, and a little in yesterday’s, but you must know that it comes out of a place of love. If you don’t believe me, please recall my Halloween ’09 costume, in which I paid tribute to her highness for not one, but two nights–once in very high heels and sparkly dress that I wore (worked!) in two boroughs. In my all-time list of beauty idols, she is absolutely number one, followed closely by Zadie Smith (this is me being realistic), then probably Beyonce (unrealistic), then probably Rihanna. And, my respect for her has only increased since she released this album, because she’s shown that she’s still taking risks, and, of course, has aged astonishingly. All criticism comes out of a place of respect, and so from whence my hate springs.

A small update on yesterday’s post: I never mentioned that in the below clip Letterman looks totally smitten with her. He’s downright bashful when he goes out to meet her at the end. Sadly, Dave, she’s already taken, but I give you mad props for finding someone closer to your own damn age.

Mwah, Sade, I love you.