The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  There was a period in my twenties—when I’d begun dating women but hadn’t yet told my mother—when we started arguing more than usual about my clothes. My wardrobe was migrating toward grays and tans, loose shapes, long necklaces, and clunky boots. There were minor tussles whenever I was home and tried to leave the house without earrings. I recall thinking that she looked at my clothing with distrust. I was becoming a different kind of woman than she is, and though I’ve never asked her about it, I think she could sense it from the cut of my shirts.

  When I told my mother, finally, that I was in love with a woman, she was shocked and not a little outraged. I had always dated men, she reminded me. I’d been with one man for five whole years. Had I just been lying my way through that?

  No, I tried to explain. I was attracted to men and women. I was choosing to be with women. I was in love with this woman.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.” She couldn’t understand why, if I could be straight, if I could be safely inside the majority, I’d choose to be outside it. Furthermore, she couldn’t understand why, if I wasn’t going to be straight, I couldn’t just go ahead and be gay—why I was insisting that I was some kind of in-between thing.

  I was angry about this conversation for a long time. It wasn’t until later that I realized she might have been expressing the kind of fear that comes from experience—it’s not an easy thing to live as not quite one thing and not quite another when it’s not a circumstance you have chosen. But if you are lucky enough to be able to choose—if someone has made you feel safe enough to choose—it can feel like freedom.

  Once or twice, I tried to explain to my mother the feeling I had when I was watching the Marthas onstage. Even though I saw the forces of what constrained her and her mother and her mother’s mother, even though I saw the corsets and the money and the bald desire to fit into a jingoistic idea of Americanness that contorts the people it touches—even though I saw all that, it also made my stomach flip. Because there was bilingual Leticia Garcia, “daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hector Garcia,” beaming before a thousand people while the names of her parents and grandparents were read as honorifics. You could say that it was simply because her family had money and that this is just a continuation of the pathological “right kind of Mexican” self-policing, and you’d be right. I’d just never gotten to see a girl named Garcia from South Texas stand in front of a room of the most powerful people in that state’s government and society and be celebrated specifically for her “excellent” lineage. It was like seeing an alternate history. And I was ashamed, but I was moved.

  * * *

  The morning after the pageant, I woke up early and drove down to the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge to see the Abrazo Ceremony. George Washington, an affable guy named Tim, had assured me that I could park downtown by the historic San Agustin Plaza and then walk the two blocks to the bridge.

  Coming into Laredo near the main border crossing, you see first the mostly abandoned colonial structures of the old city: a tiled plaza rimmed with stylish Spanish stucco buildings that now sit mostly empty. The library was abandoned and emptied decades ago, and aside from a boutique hotel fashioned out of one of the renovated colonial buildings and the San Agustin Cathedral, which still holds Mass in Spanish, the historic downtown has a derelict quiet about it.

  The streets downtown were empty. I parked near an abandoned office building and walked the couple blocks of uneven pavement to the bridge entrance, only to find it, too, empty except for three ICE officers hanging around near their booths. Juarez-Lincoln isn’t a pedestrian bridge; it’s a five-lane highway, so I hopped a little gate and walked across the quiet pavement toward the officers.

  “I’m trying to see the Abrazo,” I said.

  The young man squinted at me. “Who are you? Are you with the mayor’s office?”

  When I explained, he shook his head. “The Abrazo Ceremony isn’t open to the public.”

  I’d believed, based on the way that everyone from the Society had talked about the Abrazo, that it was a moment of mutual public celebration. I’d foolishly imagined that the Laredoans would walk onto the bridge from the north side and the Nuevo Laredoans would walk out from the south side, and they would meet in the middle. I’d pictured the two cities behaving as one city, the bridge open, cheers and music as the children hugged.

  But there was nothing to see from the American side except the implacable faces of the ICE officers and nothing to hear at all. Of course, the bridge is never left wide open in Laredo to whoever wants to cross, not even on this day. The children are escorted out by the mayors and city officials, their parents, ICE officers, and military from both sides. A dais is set up in the middle of the bridge, garlanded in red, white, and blue, and the children are called forth by a dignitary. They approach one another, the four of them alone on the road. The little girl from Laredo is dressed like a mini Martha, the little boy like George. The children from Nuevo Laredo are dressed as was fashionable during the Spanish colonial period, with the girl in a mantilla and the boy in a sombrero, and each girl hugs the boy across from her.

  I listened to it on the radio in my rental car. Driving back north, the city still seemed to be sleeping.

  By the time I arrived near the parade grounds, it had awoken. It’s hard to explain the mood of a town on the morning of an event like this: Every elevator held a man carrying a ruffled shirt in a garment bag. There were squads of kids in dance costumes camped out on the floor of my hotel lobby. Outside, ball-capped fathers had staked out positions on the bleachers with umbrellas and thick coolers full of beer and snacks.

  The Anheuser-Busch Washington’s Birthday Parade is for the whole city, and everyone—from the local children’s dance studio to H-E-B supermarket employees riding on a fourteen-foot-tall grocery cart—participates. In between them all, paced every five floats or so, are the dresses on display, each with a girl inside it, each dress and its girl on its own corporate-sponsored parade float.

  It is customary for the girls to have attendants ride with them on their floats and throw little gifts to the crowd. It is also customary for the people standing on the sidelines, catching the trinkets, to shout for the girls to lift up their heavy skirts and show their shoes. “Muéstranos tus zapatos!” This seems like an almost philosophical response to spectacle: an audience looking at young women in a state of exquisite display, corseted and contoured, fake hair piled high, and demanding to see what they’re hiding.

  Up come the manteau, the petticoats, the hoop, and when everyone sees what’s underneath, they cheer.

  This is the moment that former debs talk about as their fondest memory, the part when the whole city gets to see and admire their dresses. For most of them, it will be the only time in their lives that this many people will look at them all at once and applaud.

  In Say Yes to the Dress, the moment always comes when, after trying on and discarding dozens of gowns, the woman approaches the mirror in The One. This is the denouement of the episode, and it’s always the same. She steps up onto the pedestal in the showroom, sees her reflection, and is bewitched, thrilled, her own dream of herself coming true. Her mother, who perhaps has had reservations about some of the other options, immediately weeps.

  “Are you saying yes to this dress?” Randy asks.

  “Yes,” the woman whispers or shouts or sobs. “Yes!” Everyone cheers, even the bitchy sister. This, in the logic of the show, is the happy ending. (The wedding, if they show it in the closing credits, is simply the occasion where she displays this achievement.)

  So American, this show. You just go to the store and choose yourself off a rack at your preferred price point. As a metaphor—only as a metaphor—the Marthas’ dresses are much more realistic: your mother or your sister or an aunt hands you a hundred-pound corseted structure and says, “Walk in that,” and then you make a lot of decisions about what parts of the gown you want to keep, whether you’ll change its color, cut off the weird embellishments the last wearer
put on, or strip it to its bones, which cannot change.

  I stayed at the parade for a while, weaving between the children jumping for beads and the fathers in lawn chairs who’d rise and angrily tap the shoulder of any passerby who paused and blocked their view. Marching bands and baton twirlers sandwiched the local Catholic bishop, who was riding on the back of a convertible like a teenager. Princess Pocahontas and her court, dressed in giant feathered headdresses and ornately beaded suede, rode skittering horses to great applause. ICE had a large formation of armored vehicles.

  The last girl I saw that day was Sydney, the sixteen-year-old from the hair salon, who, despite the pain the dress was causing her, was beaming and waving. She wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. You could hardly tell she was sitting on a stool until the crowd yelled for her to show them her shoes. She smiled obligingly, gathered her skirts in each hand, heaved them upward, and kicked. There was a swirl of color: the peach and lavender of her dress reared back, revealing petticoats and then a splash of sequins. She was wearing six-inch platform go-go boots with another five inches of heel, covered toe-to-knee in sequins. Custom-made and star-spangled, red, white, and blue.

  An appreciative roar went through the crowd. When Sydney saw me, I gave her a wave and then turned and began the walk back to my hotel, kicking the confetti in the dirt.

  Sarah A. Topol

  The Schoolteacher and the Genocide

  New York Times Magazine

  WINNER—FEATURE WRITING

  “I spent one month in the camps in Bangladesh listening to stories of rape and destruction, but nothing prepared me for the genocide of the mind,” writes Sarah A. Topol in this account of the the Rohingya who fled persecution in Myanmar. “A people can survive a mass murder; those who remain can rebuild their lives. But what happens when a people’s identity is taken from them?” The judges who chose “The Schoolteacher and the Genocide” as the recipient of the 2020 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing said that this “is a story whose distinctive, masterful approach to storytelling and structure sets it apart from any work of narrative journalism in recent memory.” A writer at large at the New York Times Magazine, Topol has spent the last decade reporting from overseas. The New York Times Magazine also won the award for Feature Writing in 2017 for “I Have No Choice but to Keep Looking,” by Jennifer Percy.

  When he was in primary school, Futhu read a story about a girl who named her flowers. She wrote their names in a diary, logged when she planted and watered them, and charted how they grew. The story was in a book Futhu’s uncle brought to their village in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State from across the border in Bangladesh—the words in English and in Bengali. Futhu was the first in his extended family to attend school—the first of twenty-two uncles, countless aunts and cousins—and though he excelled at Burmese and English class, he could not really understand the book on his own. His father was himself illiterate, as were most people in their community. So Futhu asked a village trader who often visited their home to read him the stories in the book, one by one.

  Futhu followed along, practicing his English. Over time, the pages of the book tattered, until Futhu was able to read it himself. He thought the girl had a good idea and started keeping a diary of his own daily chores. He could not write in Rohingya, the language of his community, because it has had no written form, so he wrote in a mixture of English and Burmese.

  The book told another story, too: The girl who kept the flower diary lived through a period in history known as World War II, when, as Futhu understood it, there was a fight between Hitler and the Jews. The girl’s entries about flowers became a diary of what was happening at that time. When Futhu looked around his village, he thought there were many similarities between this story and what he saw in his own Muslim community. He decided he should write the incidents of Rohingya oppression, because maybe someday, in the future, people might want to know about what happened.

  Ever since Futhu was small, he knew that the government did not consider Rohingya to be of this place but instead thought of them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. As far as Futhu knew, none of his family had migrated from Bangladesh. They’d only been driven there as refugees after one of the many armed operations against the Rohingya—of which there have been roughly a dozen since 1948, though Futhu did not know the exact number. Futhu had learned that there were 135 recognized ethnic groups in Myanmar, called taing-yin-tha, which is often translated as “national race” but literally means something like “offspring of the land,” or indigenous. Those 135 groups, including the neighboring Rakhine and the country’s main ethnic group, the Bamar, had the rights and citizenship that went along with official recognition, but the more than one million Rohingya did not.

  Futhu began to write down some of the things he saw around him. The Rohingya, he noted, had to register all their livestock with the government. They required government permission to repair their homes. They needed permission from the government to marry, often paying hefty bribes and waiting for as long as two years to do so. They were unable to enroll in certain majors in college—they could not study to be lawyers or doctors. They could not join the army or the police or serve as heads of governing bodies or run for public office. They were not allowed to have more than two children. Women were forced to take birth control or seek illegal abortions. Families paid bribes to register additional children or hid them from the authorities. Over time, almost every Rohingya had their nationality cards taken from them. They had to give the authorities their chickens and cows, to lend them their motorcycle or their bodies for forced labor when it was demanded, and received no compensation. Many doctors refused to treat them. Getting to a hospital would require so many travel permissions and so much time that Rohingya often arrived half dead and eventually did die. Families cast the blame on the hospitals themselves—they were sure the doctors intended to kill them. Many stopped going. More died of preventable causes.

  Futhu did not know why the government focused on the Rohingya with such ferocity, only that they were unwanted. While the Burmese government maintained that the Rohingya were Bangladeshi and the government of Bangladesh said they were Burmese, a question hung over the community: How could we not be offspring of this land? Did we fall from the sky?

  * * *

  When Futhu set about writing down the story of his village back in the late 1990s, he did not have grand ambitions. He wanted to know about his community, about his family and his neighbors, to understand their own roots in this tiny sliver of earth. Dunse Para, as they called it—Koe Tan Kauk in Burmese—was nestled on a narrow stretch of flat, verdant land with the gray Bay of Bengal on one side and the rocky Mayu Mountains looming on the other. Each morning, the men of the village would wake in the darkness, walk to the shoreline, and climb into boats, setting off for their daily catch. The boats—small wooden rowboats and twenty-two larger vessels with motors—belonged to a few wealthy villagers who employed shift workers to go far out to sea. When men weren’t fishing, they were farming their rice paddies or growing chiles. They tended to their animals—chickens, water buffaloes, cows, and goats. The community was deeply conservative. Women stayed at home, far from the lingering eyes and hands of the Burmese security services, who often harassed them.

  Futhu peppered his grandfather and village elders with questions about Dunse Para’s founding. His grandfather explained that their forefathers lived on a nearby hill where the community now grazed buffaloes. Futhu’s great-great-grandfather donated part of the family’s land there to make a cemetery, but after its construction, people started getting sick, and so they fled down the hill, to a village they called the Village by the Mountain. When it got too crowded there, people migrated, slowly moving closer to the surf. They set up the Big Village, then the Village by the Sea and then the Big Village Transferred by the Sea, where Futhu and his family lived. Dunse Para was composed of these four smaller villages, the roughly 1,000 homes arranged around straight, neatly plotted footpath
s running through groves of trees. Dunse Para sat about a mile away from the nearest Rakhine settlement of about one hundred households, also called Koe Tan Kauk, with a security checkpost stationed between. As far as Futhu had been able to verify, the land they lived on had been theirs for generations.

  Once Futhu was satisfied with his documentation of the land, he turned to the stories of the people themselves. He went back to his grandfather and the elders in order to diagram the village’s family trees. He listed names and birth villages: a mother’s village, a father’s village, and the children they had, the siblings of the mother and the father, backward and forward in time, until his chart sprawled across several villages. He found that in some cases, people who lived in the same village were actually related to one another through blood, though they did not know it. Or in others, that people were related by blood, but not in the way they thought. This was true in his own family. A girl whom Futhu had grown up calling his sister was in fact his cousin. Her father’s grandmother and Futhu’s mother’s grandmother were sisters, and then she was married off to another family. Futhu also found people who had relatives in different villages whom they had never met. Futhu would follow one little family’s bloodline until it grew like vines across the mountains.

  The residents of Dunse Para did not always understand the value of Futhu’s inquiries. They asked him why he was always writing things down—was it perhaps for some kind of sorcery? But when they needed a question answered, about who was related to whom and how and when, they came to ask him, and he would explain. Slowly, as Futhu’s notebooks filled, then multiplied, these small proofs wove a larger web of authenticity—a document of roots in this earth, of offspring, ownership, and belonging.