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By Anonymous

My dear one in Lisbon, farewell to thee,

As I send back your clothes with bittersweet glee.

A metaphor they are for memories and times,

That we shared together, in different climes.

The scarf that you wore in the cool of the night,

A symbol of warmth, of love's sweet delight.

The coat that you donned when the winds blew cold,

A shield against life's harshness, so bold.

The hat that you wore with a jaunty flair,

A reminder of joy, and a carefree air.

The gloves that you wore to keep your hands warm,

A symbol of comfort, through life's raging storm.

But now it's time to say goodbye,

We knew it would come, this moment in time,

When our lives would diverge, like branches on a vine.

Our memories will live on, like the clothes that I send,

May your future be bright, and your heart filled with cheer,

My dear one in Lisbon, adeus.

A Shame 

By Naama Benamy Schoneveld

What a shame it is that we are embarrassed to love. That we look in mirrors and ponds and tinted windows just to wonder if someone like us could be enough for someone like them. As if there is anything shameful at all about feeling. 

How terrible a fate it is that we are to hide our affections, to “play it cool,” to pretend we haven’t been rejected or overlooked. How loveless must our world be for the height of embarrassment to be unrequited love.

What a disgrace that we believe one can love us and hurt us. That just one more shot would be enough to restore everything back to its pink-tinted state. That we deserve uncertainty and doubt because that’s just what love is, what we learned it to be.

How awful it must be for people to love for the sake of others. To not chase our hearts but to chase what we believe we should. To succumb to this invisible pressure to outshine, to impress. The same pressure that birthed trophy spouses and loveless marriages.

What a shame it is that we’ve forgotten all that love can be.

What a shame. 

At My Grandparents’ House

By Jung Haine 

I am visiting my grandparents in Daegu this summer, an essential family routine whenever we return to Korea following our few years’ stay abroad. Strangely endearing and familiar are their persistent offers of food and snacks, unsolicited comments about your appearance, the boisterous atmosphere, and the pungent smell, among other idiosyncrasies of Asian grandparents that may exist in collective Asian memory. In the train, I revel in the rarely felt sense of anonymity and safety, the sense that my East Asian features are not an eccentric exception but rather the norm, not a source of pride but a matter of just being.

Stepping outside of Daegu station, I laugh to myself because I know that I probably wouldn’t be able to navigate the city without my parents. This feels like my place, but it really isn’t. The oddity strikes me; how come I’ve always been here, being in the same cab rides, viewing the same scenery, swept away by the same exact feeling, yet know close to nothing about this place? As I get off the taxi and enter the apartment complex of my grandparents, I’m ready to find my link to the fragile string on the verge of disconnection, strung together only by the intervals of phone calls held over the past two years. I’ve left the fate of our relationship at the hands of something as fickle as a telephone. Did we talk about the weather? Their health? My most recent academic achievements? Check, check, check. These conversations don’t flow to deepen. They only clean the dust off for clarity. 

Then my grandmother would comment on my skin, or remark that my brother and another relative look alike, which upsets him a little. We all need to eat only after our grandfather eats, and he never does the dishes and assumes that it’s the job of women to do them. In my world, in which social justice and liberalism increasingly dominate our culture, many often portray older generations as whiny, intrusive, and morally deficient. I’ve imagined scenarios in my head in which I become the unfazed refuter to their “disrespectful” remarks, thinking that someday, I could finally assert my sense of righteousness to fix the wrong. In my head, I’ve always won. But when I am with my grandparents, I find myself situating myself in *their* world – the world that they occupied: changed, grew up in, and retrieves their past. 

Cross-cultural studies in anthropology show how in Western cultures, “morality” is boiled down to “treating others well” and separates tradition from it, while in non-Western cultures, people tend to conflate social conventions with morality. This difference is both cultural and generational. As a global citizen, I am driven by the kind of moral rectitude shaped by modern sensibilities, yet as a Korean granddaughter, this turns brittle within the landscape that my grandparents unwittingly leave traces of. The supposedly unimpeachable objectivity of my moral code turns amorphous, ambiguous, and somehow lost in translation in my memories with them. 

I think that’s how my Asian appearance and the relationship I have with my grandparents protect me from vulnerability albeit in different ways. Just like how my physical Asianness in Korea protects me from being seen almost only through my ethnic identity and all else that could be implied by allowing me to blend in with the crowd, being with my grandparents shields me from revealing the deepest core of my being by allowing me to blend in with their world. Even without their Gyeongsang-do accent, their inventory of words and phrases hardly overlaps with mine. We both use the same Korean language, and our words seem coherent to ourselves, but as soon as they are said out loud, they are riddled with surprises and lags. Communication is not necessarily key for us; sometimes it feels like a lock that keeps locking itself.

I start to feel that I am like a linear constant to my grandparents. I grow and change, but only through the visible traces of time: in measures, centimeters, grades, making brief reappearances throughout their tale. I have always been a flat character in their stories, and they have also been flat characters in mine. But they always ask me to eat their homegrown persimmons, and I’m guilty about my social awkwardness around them…I think to myself with wonder of how far apart we are, but also never as close.