By STELLA WONG
The magnetic North Pole, Northern Canada
dramatic monologue as Bebe Barron
By JOEANN HART
Gloucester, Massachusetts
It was mid-winter, so I timed my afternoon walk to end before the early night. Heading to the beach, I crossed a sea-battered causeway that dropped off to the salty Atlantic on one side, and the fresh water of Niles Pond on the other, ending at Brace Cove. Formed by two boat-breaking arms of intertidal granite, waves were still crashing into the cove from a recent storm. Migratory seabirds struggled to fly in the crosswinds. Added to the elemental roar of water was the steady screech of stones grinding in the surf, too rough a day even for the resident seals. As I stepped down from the causeway and onto the beach, I saw a man with binoculars around his neck. He was talking on the phone and there was a large, motionless shape at his feet.
San Francisco, CA
Gold is all you notice at first. A triptych dressed in shiny monochrome. The center of it is just above eyesight, so you’re left looking up at of Keith Haring’s altar, Life of Christ, an imposing piece, big enough to hold most of your gaze and envelop your mind. Haring made the original cast in 1990 and it’s considered his final work. Grace Cathedral in San Francisco acquired this edition in 1995 for its Interfaith AIDS Memorial Chapel.
Grace Cathedral is an imposing, Gothic-styled church presiding over Nob Hill. Even though I call San Francisco home, I sauntered in after Sunday mass like a tourist, and made my way to the chapel, a corner carved out of the back of the church. I started visiting this chapel after my Uncle Barry died. Barry wasn’t my blood uncle, but I only knew him as Uncle Barry, our babysitter, the artist, a gay man. Growing up queer myself, Uncle Barry was more my uncle than my mom’s brother—straight, conservative, 2,000 miles away—queerness lending itself to question family ties.
My Uncle Barry told me once that a university hospital wanted him to join a study of gay men who were exposed to HIV but never contracted it. How had he survived the epidemic? I chalked it up to the vaguely mystical powers that surrounded him. He was a dog whisperer. He said watches stopped on his wrist. He was born on St. Patrick’s Day. These quirks were enough for my sister and me to believe he was a leprechaun.
Since I was a kid, I’d known about Uncle Barry’s time in New York City. I’d heard the name John Paul. But it wasn’t until I was older and had read Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On that I realized what it meant that John Paul had died from AIDS, just as Shilts had, and Haring had, and so many others.
I came to Haring’s altar not for a memory, but to chase a ghost. When Uncle Barry died, I inherited his stuff, where I found John Paul, a Greek American from Nebraska with kind eyes, in a photo, staring back at me. Ancestors, one generation removed, flung through the storm. I came for a man I never knew but who meant the world to a person I loved.
The altar is cast in bronze but finished with gold leaf. It absorbs light and reflects it back with a glow. There’s no foreground or background to the piece. It’s not about depth, but energy, seeped in Haring’s characteristic style—outlined figures and expressive lines. At the top of the center panel is the Christ figure, a multiarmed body with a cross over its head. Drops fall from the body onto a crowd of outlined figures clamoring below, shouting, pleading. Angels circulate above, but they could be falling or rising or both, the duality of giving and taking, of life and death.
As Keith Haring’s friend Sam Havadtoy, who was present at the altar’s creation, remembers: “When Keith finished, as he stepped back and gazed at this work, he said, ‘Man, this is really heavy.’ When he stopped, he was exhausted, and it was the first time I realized how frail he had become. He was completely out of breath. He said, ‘When I’m working, I’m fine, but as soon as I stop, it hits me.’” Haring would pass away from complications from AIDS a few weeks later.
How do we deal with heaviness? It’s the gesticulating crowd that holds my attention. The sum of their frenetic energy, captured by a plethora of lines, almost frantic, all packed together from the left-most edge to the right. They demand your gaze. There are so many figures in the crowd, there were so many who lost their lives, and so many more who lost their friends, lovers, siblings, coworkers. I feel my own tears grow thinking about the sheer volume of loss.
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There are donation stands in the room with rows of votives on them. I count eleven flames before stepping back to take a seat on the bench. Eleven souls remembered so far this morning. I realize I am no longer alone. A woman hovers over the stand. The chapel is small, and I feel self-conscious in the presence of her intimate moment. I look down at my cusped hands. Through the corner of my eye, I see she’s moved to the other side of the triptych. She spends a second there and then leaves. When I look up, I notice there’s a new light. Another soul remembered. Then, no, I see another, there’s two. How many light just one candle? If you lost one friend to AIDS, one loved one, would it be rare if there weren’t more?
An organ bellows and fills the entire cathedral with a thick presence. It’s a familiar and uplifting tune, but I can’t quite put my finger on the name of it. I don’t attend mass. I only know the Christmas standards. But the sound is pleasant, and I don’t mind it. I look at my watch and realize the fifteen minutes I thought I’d spend had turned into an hour. As I walk out, I pass the baptismal font and peer in at the copper basin. I was baptized here in 1989, the year John Paul died, the year that AIDS cases in the United States surpassed 100,000. I don’t know if Uncle Barry was there at my baptism, if he had returned to San Francisco by then or if he was still trying to make sense of his life after John Paul’s death. At the height of an epidemic, how many others had to attend baptisms after a funeral?
I take one last look at the chapel, at Haring’s altar. Two women have just entered. It’s around 1:00 p.m. on a Sunday and if they look closely, they’ll see fourteen candles lit.
Lily Lucas Hodges (they/all) is a historian who’s written at the intersection of queerness and Catholicism for The Washington Post, TIME, and elsewhere. This is their first published piece of creative nonfiction. They are currently finishing a memoir on their gay uncles that questions LGBTQ+ generational archives.
By EDWARD LEES
Lahaina, Maui
When I was young, my parents
took me to Pompeii.
I remember the grouped bodies in the museum
of people who had tried to shelter.
Catalonia
The sea has moved inland. Below the rectory on the hill, the fields and villages under the fog. In the first blue of the morning. The bell tower of the church in Lladó surfaces through it. It is a few minutes away by car. In Lladó the fog hangs in the streets, close to the ground. Each building in isolation within it. The old church, the locked doors: wood doors open onto metal doors that are molting their skin. The keyhole the size of an eye.
Lake Katrine, NY
I visit with a friend as she works to empty her mother’s house, who died just days before Christmas, and each object holds a tiny piece of Susan. I come away with several treasures lovely (a hand knitted scarf, a clay donkey to hold my garlic) and practical (a metal frog for summer flower arranging, a switchplate for the guest bedroom).
This small home was itself a downsize, and these many items are the survivors of her mother’s own earlier culling, so are a little piecemeal, each one tasked with balancing an eager backstory on its tiny shoulders. More than two of anything inspires commentary, my attempt to make knowledge in place of the knowing I hadn’t sought earlier: She must have liked Edith Wharton or She had quite a collection, here. My friend’s own childhood artwork hangs in several places, and each flutters with a colored post-it; I’ve arrived too late for those.
Yucca Valley, California
When she wakes, I offer water. She sips from the glass. I ask if she needs more pillows behind her head. I look into her eyes and notice that she has deep blue lines that circle her almost black pupils. Why hadn’t I seen that before? I think of the nazars that I bought in Athens fifteen summers ago. Those glass amulets to ward off the evil eye were also called evil eyes. A source of protection against a malevolent gaze. Things make me choke, she says suddenly, then closes her eyes again.
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I’m with my younger sister and my 89-year-old mother at a rental in Yucca Valley, California. It’s nearly 100 degrees outside, tumbleweeds and succulents outside the door. My sister and I drink cold water and blast the air con.
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By TONY HAO
Shenyang, Dongbei
I wore a cream-white scarf and sat on a plastic stool… Behind me were residential buildings, NE Pharm’s apartments, windows caged behind iron lattices. From a distance, the buildings looked like a prison. Wilted leeks and cabbages were piled neatly on the windowsills: old people definitely lived there. Those cargo three-wheelers we call ‘reverse donkeys’ were chained to the rails in front of the buildings. I sat in the sun in front of the wall, my face hurting from the cold wind.
– from “Free and Easy Wandering,” by Dongbei writer Ban Yu. Translated from Chinese by me.
Literature was my introduction to Dongbei, or Northeastern China, and its capital city Shenyang. I stumbled upon its ongoing literary movement “The Dongbei Renaissance” in 2020, when I was stranded at home during the pandemic. Before then, I’d known Dongbei as Father’s birthplace and China’s industrial center. After reading my first Dongbei book, I found myself shaken by Dongbei’s history and the collective trauma of its economic collapse. Since the 1990s, China’s capitalist reform has obliterated the livelihood of millions of state-employed workers. The proletariats who built their country suddenly found themselves kicked out of their factories into a new identity: penniless unskilled social outcasts. They never imagined being abandoned by their government, which, proclaiming communism, promised every worker prosperity.
Father left Dongbei in 1973 when the state moved Grandpa’s work to Beijing, the metropolis I was born in. I couldn’t imagine what my life course would’ve been had Grandpa remained up north. As an aspiring writer and literary translator, I felt the urge to bring Dongbei to a wider audience. In the summer of 2021, after translating Ban’s 42-page story, I traveled to Shenyang for a literary pilgrimage.
My 38-year veteran cab driver Mr. Wu introduced himself by showcasing his knowledge of Shenyang’s narrowest streets without needing a map. As we drove along Qingnian Dajie, the ten-lane boulevard connecting the airport to downtown, the landscape of boundless poplar trees and crop fields was slowly replaced by newly constructed residential compounds. Mr. Wu pointed out to me the luxury apartment of Zhao Benshan, Dongbei’s most iconic comedian. I told Mr. Wu that I was an English and journalism student interested in Dongbei literature. Mr. Wu told me what the pre-collapse 1980s was like and which cultural landmarks I should visit. I asked him how I could see the old Shenyang portrayed in literature. “You won’t be able to find the old Shenyang anymore,” he said, “the time has completely changed.”
An intense feeling of unfairness gnawed at my heart as Mr. Wu drove me by the glamorous apartment buildings. They erased the city’s impoverished past but in no way offered an extravagant present available to everyone. I decided that even if I couldn’t find Shenyang’s past, at least I’d like to see a reverse donkey.
Reverse donkeys are tricycles unique to Dongbei. Unlike normal tricycles with the passenger’s seat in the front, reverse donkeys have the rider seated above one back wheel and a large freight container installed above two front wheels. Reverse donkeys are usually associated with high-intensity, low-skilled labor. Middle-aged riders squeeze their way through the narrowest lanes in old neighborhoods, hauling cargo loads taller than themselves, making only about ten dollars per ride.
The next morning, I rode a bike through the old industrial Tiexi District, where “Free and Easy Wandering” is set; the names of many roads there still contain the character for ‘workers’ (Gong, 工). On the west side of the eight-laned “Protecting-the-Workers North Street” (卫工北街Wei Gong Bei Jie), concrete apartment buildings soared into the clouds, waiting for windows to be installed. In front of the apartment buildings under construction, a blue metal framework proudly displayed the names of a real estate company, a construction company, and the effusive yet literary name of the future neighborhood: “The Majestic/Honorable Passage-of-Time” (御时光Yu Shiguang). In front of the construction site, herds of Toyotas and Nissans passed, shepherded by occasional Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs.
But only two extra blocks beyond, the streets were taken over by bikes and box vans. The pedestrian pavements were soaked in barbeque-scented water flowing from the roadside eateries. Above those neighborhood venues were rows of grey apartment buildings with crumbling exterior paint and rusting window frames. The Soviet-style former dormitory buildings were built for pragmatic use and had terrible internal lighting. Inside those poorly illuminated units, pink underwear and white baggy tank tops dangled on the clothesline above wood chests, the same wood chests I had last seen in Grandpa’s old apartment. Just like Ban’s protagonist, I quietly reacted, “Old people definitely lived there.”
Dongbei sometimes exists in China’s cultural discourse as the joker, similar to the South in America. A Faulkner quote may encapsulate how I emoted on Shenyang’s streets: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Staring at the apartment buildings, I found myself self-interrogating for finding familiarity in this real-life landscape that, to me, only existed in literature. I knew this wasn’t a place I belonged. Deep down, I knew that I might be unconsciously seeking to experience a Dongbeiness of my literary imagination. I’d always been repelled by bloggers who visited construction-site workers’ lunch stands or diners, commented on the deliciousness and cheapness of the food, and intoxicated themselves in their sense of “human connections” at these places. It was inherently violent to romanticize and consumerize what, for other people, was hardship and poverty.
My literary pilgrimage exposed me to a morally delicate position. The overbaked idea of the survivor’s guilt—surviving China’s tide of history—could not entirely encapsulate what I pondered. In America, my foreign passport gave me the authority to write about China and translate from Chinese, and my family tie with Dongbei was what drove me to explore the region. But when I found myself on the steamy and mildly odorous streets beneath Shenyang’s parasol trees, I realized that I needed to acknowledge—perhaps even confront—the possibility of gazing in my process of translation. No matter how I could claim my passion and connection, I had never needed to live a Dongbei life I aimed to translate. I found myself always questioning: how have I earned the right to work on my project? How do I know I’ll be able to represent Dongbei to an English-language audience not only via literature but also through the heaviness of its history?
I eventually discovered a reverse donkey next to an old warehouse—it traversed the narrow neighborhood lanes as if a normal tricycle was moving backward. An old man wearing a red t-shirt transported a pile of cardboard boxes in the freight box in front of him. A few feet away from him was a white $150K Range Rover. I had no idea how it squeezed through the narrow lanes in the neighborhood. I remembered what Mr. Wu told me about Dongbei’s heyday in the eighties, when he drove through these same neighborhoods on holiday evenings, how people crowded onto the streets to find taxis to go to galas and parties.
The cardboard boxes wobbled on the reverse donkey. I held my breath, hoping that they wouldn’t fall and spill on the streets.
Born in Beijing and living in Connecticut, Tony Hao is a literary translator of Chinese-language prose. His translation of Ban Yu’s Dongbei fiction has appeared in Crayon, the sister magazine of British literary journal Litro. He recently graduated from Yale, where he majored in English and studied fiction writing and literary translation
Mama saw her boss, Jack Radovich, standing in her row during a sweltering San Joaquin afternoon. She was picking table grapes alone when he suddenly appeared, several yards away, gazing off in the direction of the blue-gray Sierra mountains. She assumed he was surveying his vineyards, visiting his farmworkers like he aways did. He was a hardworking landowner, who usually let his young sons build and deliver the packing boxes with a beat-up, sunburnt pickup truck. The kind of boss who always seemed to know when the grape packers needed more boxes. He didn’t call out or turn toward her, but she hurried his way, eager to be the first one from her team to claim the boxes. Daddy was her foreman.
By JIM GUY, with ARONNE GUY
Oregon
A fruit tramp family of the 1930s stayed in many places for short periods of time. We arrived, picked the crop, and moved on. That’s why we were called tramps, nomads, and many other things not nearly as complimentary. Our shelters while picking could be the loft of a barn, a converted hen house, or a small sleeps-two tent. On occasion if you were in an especially nice place, you might have a cabin or a large canvas-covered dwelling with a wooden floor. If we had a place of permanency, it was the car or truck that took us to the next job: we might spend the winter in California or pick apples in Washington State. It was all dictated by the season. Packing and moving was as much a part of our life as picking the crop.