Generation F

by Molly MacDermot

  On the evening of my birthday, my favorite dishes filled the table. There were sandwiches cut in half with toothpicks from the shop around the corner. The cake that Aunt had prepared had pink and yellow flowers swirled around. Perfectly triangular samosas lay on a plate.

  After we ate, we played a game of charades with my cousins, aunts, and uncles. All of a sudden we heard screams and everyone rushed over to the living room, Nani had started to throw up. It was weird seeing her in this condition because Nani was so active, walking one mile every morning. Uncle called the doctor to the house. All the offices were closed since it was eleven.

  That night, Mom and I slept in Nani’s room. The blankets moved and the bed creaked as Nani fidgeted. She complained about the heat, so Mom turned on the fan. I shivered that night, and my legs tightened.

  The next morning, Nani’s condition had worsened. Her dark eyes drooped. She was rushed to the hospital in Dhaka, a three-hour drive away. Uncle, Aunt, and Nani left before dawn. She wasn’t able to walk, so Uncle carried her to the car.

  We prayed for Nani. Mom cooked since Aunt wasn’t here. A crash came from the kitchen, and I rushed in. A broken plate was scattered all over the floor. Mom frantically ran around the kitchen.

  At noon, the Zuhr Adhan—the signal for prayer—boomed through the city. As soon as the Adhan finished the phone rang. Mom started crying. Nani had died.

  Foreigner’s Tax

  NANDITA RAGHURAM

  Inspired by my mentee’s submission, I also wrote a piece about my grandmother and visiting her in India as a young woman and speaking up for myself. It is one part of a larger story about the trip.

  When I was nineteen, I lived alone with my paternal grandmother in Bangalore. At eighty-six, she couldn’t cook because her gnarled fingers couldn’t curl around pot handles or the oven door. She would forget to wear her dentures; they would sit leering in a glass of water. But at twenty-two, she got her master’s degree in physics and marched with Gandhi.

  My mother had to convince me to go there. “She’s getting old,” my mother said. “It would mean a lot to her.”

  “But I hate India. There’s nothing to do.”

  “Grow up, Nandita.”

  My grandmother woke up at six every morning and would walk to the corner store to get steaming plastic cups of sambar, tripping over the cracked stone sidewalk. She would stick her balding head into my room. I would pull the wool blanket over my head and sleep until noon.

  During breakfast, she would stare at me from across the table. She would hand me the only fork and plate in the house, then scoop mounds of rice and rasam with her hands into her mouth from a banana leaf. I would crouch behind a newspaper.

  The milk there was warm and lumpy. The cereal tasted of plastic. Once I tried to cook scrambled eggs. When my grandmother came home, she retched and made me pray for three hours.

  In the kitchen, a brown photograph of my grandfather hung above the table. I never met him, but I inherited his last name, a nose that’s squat like a mound of mud, and big, brown eyes.

  There were only two other photographs in her house. One shows my brother and I in 1992. My brother’s hands rest on my shoulders, and tight black curls stick out of my head. In another, my mother is twenty-two, shy on her wedding day, staring at the ground, marigolds in her hair and red kumkum powder streaking her forehead like blood. My father cradles the back of my mother’s neck.

  My grandmother never liked my mother. She was beautiful, brushing her hair 100 times before bed. She lived a five-hour train ride away, down broken roads and through sugarcane fields.

  Twenty-five years after my parents’ wedding, my grandmother told me, “That mother of yours, she’s silly. It’s good you didn’t inherit that airy little head of hers.”

  I stared at my food, wishing I knew enough Kannada to yell. Instead, I nodded.

  WINNIE KONG

  YEARS AS MENTEE: 1

  GRADE: Senior

  HIGH SCHOOL: Stuyvesant High School

  BORN: Guangdong, China

  LIVES: Brooklyn, NY

  PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: 2018 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Silver Key; YCteen (September/October 2017); early acceptance to NYU

  MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: I have always been a person with too many words, and Sarah helped me bring these words onto paper. She helped me explore my creativity in terms of writing, creating a safe space that would allow me to be okay with sharing my vulnerability.

  SARAH CUSTEN

  YEARS AS MENTOR: 1

  OCCUPATION: ESL Lecturer, Long Island University–Brooklyn

  BORN: Ogden, UT

  LIVES: Brooklyn, NY

  PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: “Zoom-in Freewrite,” New Ways in Teaching Creative Writing for the ELL Community, TESOL Press

  MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: When we went to see Sheila together, as we were waiting for the other mentor–mentee pairs to arrive, one of the cast members mistook me for a mentee. I was flattered—obviously—but I also find it apt: Winnie and I are both first-timers, learning the ropes, together. We are equally learners, writers, and teachers. She has taught me so much, like how to use slang, and the concept of the Model Minority. We have grown as individuals, and as a pair, in coffee shops all over Brooklyn. We are, as Winnie put it, “an iconic duo” (“but never on time”).

  Dissolving the Spectrum

  WINNIE KONG

  With this piece, I wanted to convey the feminine/masculine culture through a subtle yet compelling story. It was important for me to tell a universally relatable story, so I started by reminiscing about childhood.

  She has always been pink. I have never given her the chance she deserved. Even when I denied her the right to be pink, she was still pink. Just like how I am pink and choose to be pink, she was blue and chose to be pink. I am sorry.

  Pink. That was the color I chose every time. Light-up sneakers, Tamagotchis, fluffy dresses, nail lacquer polishes, scrunchies. It was my color, I was cute in pink.

  I fell in love with it the first time my mother bought me cotton candy. Going to the Asian supermarket, crying and stomping my feet: That was my ritual. That day, one hand held on to a bag of seaweed and the other clutched this strange bag with English letters. I had to choose one. “Money doesn’t fall from trees,” she would say, as if I didn’t understand that from all the previous times. I was puzzled by the peculiar plastic bag and consumed by curiosity. The bag of seaweed seemed like a promise of crispy goodness, but at that moment I was infatuated with the pink bag.

  I ripped open the plastic bag, and a mixture of baby-blue and pink clouds melted in my mouth. My hands quickly became sticky, my tongue obsessed with the sugary foreignness. It was like a game of tag where pink was my sanctuary, and touching blue was dangerous.

  Blue. He is blue. Actually, he is supposed to be blue. Yet he was wearing a pink shirt. He messed up the pattern I created in my head. Why was he wearing a color that wasn’t meant for him? Boy and girl, blue and pink—we were supposed to separate into two different ends of the spectrum.

  The next day at recess I saw him holding a Barbie doll. It was the one my mother refused to buy me. I was mad. He is blue, this is not fair. My face reddened and before I knew it, pink took the initiative to snatch the doll away from him. His childish smile metamorphosed into something tigerish, and soon he was blue, exactly how it was meant to be. I was proud of myself, I changed him back.

  But sitting in class with him the following week, I saw that he had on pink nail polish. So did I, and there it was—this connection between us. I touched his hand, slowly moving toward the baby-pink tinted nails. I could taste the cotton candy in my mouth. He placed his other hand on mine, pointing at my pink-colored nails. Could he be pink, even if he is blue?

  The older we grew, the more he was pink than blue. We used our eyelids like blank canvases, coating them with colors of the rainbow from red to purple, with orange, yellow, green, and blue in between. We felt as if we were above anything.

 
Leopard, polka dots, paisley, gingham, tartan. Exploring patterns in the women’s section became our favorite pastime. We adored the queerness it brought our outfits. We laughed at the looks our parents gave when they saw us.

  It was his touch on my thick black wavy hair that gave me this feeling that I had never felt before. First, I felt warm, then electric. It came like second nature. As I ran my hands through his shiny blond curly hair, he became more gentle, docile, considerate, and nice, and I liked that he was more pink with me, but blue with others.

  And then, one day: “I want to be a girl.” What? No. You are blue. You are blue. No. I am pink. You cannot be pink. No. You can act pink, but you will never truly be pink. I didn’t understand, this wasn’t right.

  He wanted me to call him “she.” It was as if “she” became a brand-new person. I no longer felt the sweetness of cotton candy with “her” anymore. Nothing was the same; it was as if “she” used me to be more pink. All those times, I thought we were friends who just liked the same things. I wanted him to appreciate pinkness, not allow it to overpower him.

  Pink. “She” told me “her” life as if I understood the concept of being blue but declaring myself to be pink. I told her, “You cannot choose to be pink. You are blue.” I took the pink cotton candy from her hands. She wasn’t pink, she didn’t deserve it. And then she told me, “I am just as much a female as you.” Huh? You couldn’t be pink just because you decided you’re more comfortable with an option that wasn’t selected for you. Just like how you couldn’t open a bag of cotton candy and later choose the color of it.

  The day you told me that you wanted to be pink blurred my vision. I could not be in love with pink when I am pink. I wanted you to stay blue but I realize now that I fell in love with your pink.

  Poor Virginia

  SARAH CUSTEN

  Winnie and I drew inspiration from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (at the Brooklyn Museum); the creative process used by The Associates, whose play, Sheila, we saw together (courtesy of Girls Write Now); and—of course—each other.

  Whose idea were the white lace curtains? My sisters’, probably, but they make the room look garish, encased as they are by coal-black wooden walls in an aching, old house. Ditto the faded, flowered bedspreads, the threadbare cotton sheets like girls’ dresses in summer.

  Marcella and Sophia, away now at college, their bedroom frozen like a single slide of film, caught between frames, just before the light shines through. My room lies at the end of the hall. No lace or flowers, just pages ripped from books, from magazines, tacked into the supple walls and waving their words, like flags, in the wind.

  All of us female by birth, double X, though Sophia and Marcella more typically so. They are Mom’s blood-daughters, betrayers of her womb, their very existence an affront to her Self. “It felt,” she once told me, “like being possessed.” She had thought that she couldn’t bear children, hence: me.

  The adopted daughter, “The Chosen One” (they used to tease me), who is here to wipe up. Back home for the first time since turning eighteen, taking care of Mom, postoperatively. No longer Virginia, but Vinci (like Leonardo). She waited for this surgery, like the way some kids’ parents will wait until the kids are grown up to divorce, not wanting to split up the family.

  What she split, though, was time, right down the middle, so that never again would there be a house without a Before and an After. What she split were the seams of her very skin.

  He told me he’d felt “imprisoned” in an “empty soul,” “of which the very windows are shuttered,” and I said, “So what? So you redecorate? Doesn’t that smack of women’s work?”

  Later, she—he—tried again, via text: “I need to clip the wings of my vulvar butterfly, in order to be truly free,” she wrote. I misread the word as “vulgar,” which now I can see as the actual sentiment. I wonder, did the dazzling and dramatic installation of a new phallus, which continues to stain the bandages, give him what she had wanted? Does it rise up against erasure? Will it create the desired tension between historical conditions and the life that she—that he—wants to lead?

  I think of the doctors’ fine needlework; I think of my mother’s face, breast, and arms.

  I never knew she had a sacred heart.

  DIAMOND LEWIS

  YEARS AS MENTEE: 2

  GRADE: Senior

  HIGH SCHOOL: Brooklyn College Academy

  BORN: Brooklyn, NY

  LIVES: Brooklyn, NY

  MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Jaime and I have grown tremendously in our mentee–mentor relationship. From going from complete strangers to bouncing off of each other’s ideas and trading interesting new reads. Jaime is always there when I need her, whether it be for assignments for Girls Write Now, school, or scholarships. Our relationship is amazing and I know it will continue to grow over our teas and coffees at Starbucks.

  JAIME FULLER

  YEARS AS MENTOR: 1

  OCCUPATION: Web Editor, Lapham’s Quarterly

  BORN: Glens Falls, NY

  LIVES: Brooklyn, NY

  MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Diamond gives the best book recommendations. It’s not anything she says; it’s the sheer joy on her face as she launches into a very detailed description of the plot and how she felt during every twist and turn of it. By the time you get to the end, you might know everything that happens in the book, but you still want to go check it out from the library to see if you can get the same kick out of reading it as she had in explaining it. Spending time with her made me appreciate words much more.

  Hating on The Hate U Give

  DIAMOND LEWIS

  The Hate U Give is one of my favorite novels and I believe everyone should read it. The book discusses situations, both commonplace and infuriating, that young people, especially black teenagers, are facing today.

  “I do not like or agree with this book.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Let’s ban it.”

  I imagine this is the conversation that accompanies the banning of books. What I don’t understand, though, is that it is the reader’s choice to read the book, an at-your-own-risk Choose Your Own Adventure. No one enjoys every book they read, and people can’t ban everything they don’t like. If so, there would be no dark chocolate, no tomatoes, no racism, and everyone would live in my perfect world, where the flag is pink, college is free, and The Flash isn’t just a show on TV.

  These conversations I imagine can’t be new, given the history of barring students from novels in the United States. Beloved was violent, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was viewed as a how-to manual for crime, The Catcher in the Rye was simply “unacceptable,” The Great Gatsby mentioned sex, and Moby-Dick “conflicted with community values.”

  The book that has me thinking about book banning in the first place is T.H.U.G. (The Hate U Give). It was banned in Texas, specifically the Katy Independent School District outside of Houston, because of language deemed inappropriate for students. This school district has 70,563 students within grades K-12. Thirty-six percent of the students are white, 35 percent of the students are Hispanic, 15 percent are Asian, and 11 percent are African American. The district board isn’t as diverse. It contains seven members; all are white. The use of curse words in the award-winning book is evident, but in the grand scheme of things, they are not used a lot.

  I can understand why people are hating on The Hate U Give. This young-adult novel, which was published in 2017, is about a sixteen-year-old named Starr Carter who witnessed her best friend get murdered by the police after the two were stopped on their way home. After the incident, her two worlds, a private predominantly white high school and her own neighborhood, Garden Heights, begin to collide. Williamson High School is full of affluent and snobby students. Garden Heights, on the other hand, is an impoverished predominantly black community. The only similarity the two settings have is that Starr does not seem to fit in either. In her own community, she is known for bagging groceries at her father’s store and for going to a fancy school
outside of Garden Heights. When at school, she is not “white” enough to fit in, and code switches often. As she starts to feel these fault lines, the #BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement becomes real to her for the first time.

  From that summary of the book’s plot, it’s impossible not to think that language was perhaps just a scapegoat for the ban, and that the real reason for keeping the book out of schools was because it confronts realities about racism that our country has spent centuries trying to ignore. The book is suffused with the real-world problems and situations that have always been present in America. Banning these books from schools doesn’t make these issues disappear; it just gives students less room to understand them.

  Banning books mutes the voices of the characters within. Though fictional, each character in The Hate U Give carries a specific lesson. For example, Khalil, the character killed in the book, is judged based on his community and race. People who knew him through news chyrons called him a thug and automatically assumed that he was in a gang, exposing the negative connotations that come with an individual’s race. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly what happened with Trayvon Martin.

  Many students have no firsthand experience with the problems in The Hate U Give. Given how difficult it can be to find young-adult books featuring a cast of predominantly people of color, the book also offers unaware readers a chance to see what a world with white privilege offstage—or at least one where white privilege is acknowledged—looks like. Some students reading will never deal with what Starr went through, but they would be able to have some type of understanding when finished. That is a worthy thing for a book to do, not something worth punishing with a ban.

  When I read the book I could not put it down. It was the first time I read a book with a female, black main character who was not pregnant by the end, or whose only role in the plot was not to become another negative teen statistic. Starr was a character I could relate to. I loved that.