Tag: politics

Solidarity with the Hunger and Labor Strike by ICE Detainees at Delaney Hall

By the illume Magazine Editorial Team

MAY 29, 2026

illume Magazine has been on an unofficial sabbatical for approximately one year, with publication having been temporarily halted due to our editorial and design team members’ graduations from university and subsequent dispersals throughout the country. We are writing for the first time since May 14, 2025, to publish a statement about the coordinated hunger and labor strike that has been ongoing for seven days and counting, led by about three hundred ICE detainees inside Delaney Hall of Newark, New Jersey. Delaney Hall is one of the largest ICE detention facilities on the east coast, privately run by the notorious prison contracting corporation GEO Group in a contract worth $1 billion.

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The strikers began their hunger and labor strike on May 22, 2026, to protest the inhumane conditions and consistent physical and psychological torture faced by detainees, but they are demanding more than the improvement of facility conditions. In a communiqué published by the organization Cosecha on May 26, the strikers assert themselves as not just immigrants caught up in the country’s ongoing immigration and deportation agenda, but as human beings whose basic human rights are being violated and silenced.

In a separate press release from the organization Eyes on ICE New Jersey, a participant of the strike inside Delaney articulates the positionality of himself and his fellow strikers as political prisoners who have long been victims of the forces of global capitalism and imperialism that forced them to migrate to this country in the first place; whose labor as cleaners, kitchen workers, and snow shovelers has long been exploited since they arrived and who are now being detained without due process for the purpose of filling another bed in a for-profit facility:

When we came into this country, we were allowed parole and a work permit to be legal in this country. We have people who are married, who have their marriage petitions approved, and are awaiting their residence card, yet are still detained and their cases are yet to be resolved—this is negligenc[e]… Who will then take care of [our] family and kids? Who will take them to school? Who will pay their rent and feed them?… We want to be free. [The] majority of us were arrested during our check-in appointments with immigration, so now even if we abide the law, pay taxes and do our due diligence, we are still detained for going to immigration appointments voluntarily. We were arrested due to the change in government, a political prosecution. They are people scared to go back to their home country due to prosecution but this country now is doing the same with their racist political prosecution. We are political prisoners… We plead that everyone hears our voices and our demands.

In the first communiqué, the strikers wrote a long list of injustices inside the facility, including decayed food or food containing worms; inhumane bathroom conditions; ventilation issues; serious medical neglect with no physicians or nurses on call, even for detainees with the flu, cancer, conjunctivitis, UTIs, and pregnant detainees. Moreover, ICE agents have been coercing detainees into signing forced deportation orders, and forcing them to work maintenance without pay or for at most $1 an hour.

For the past seven days, protesters and community advocates have been gathering outside Delaney Hall, and directly facing off with ICE agents, to stand in solidarity with the strikers and their demands, which include the immediate release of vulnerable detainees—children, the elderly, impregnated, and seriously ill—and the meaningful review of ongoing immigration cases and habeas corpus filings. Despite being beaten, tased, and pepper-sprayed by ICE agents on the ground, the protestors in front of Delaney seem more empowered than before, refusing to give in to the escalating threat of violence and fear. Perhaps because they know that what the state really wants is for us to be isolated from each other; scared, helpless, and immobilized. Videos from those on the ground show silhouettes of the detainees inside the facility, jumping and flashing lights on and off to signal to those outside that they see them and they don’t want them to leave.

Can we say anything that hasn’t been said already in the past year and half? THE CITY’s recent investigation confirmed what was already widely known. In an analysis of 430 street arrests and kidnappings by ICE in the New York region, more than 93% were found to have targeted people from Latin American countries and were disproportionately clustered in Latino-concentrated neighborhoods. We already know that ICE engages in specific racial profiling against Latinos in their operations; that the criminal records of these immigrants certainly do not matter; that they are doing this for various reasons ranging from overt white supremacy to the $50,000 bonus; that they are raping and impregnating children and women inside the facilities. We know that a significant number of the agents are of racialized identities themselves and that this is why identity-based politics and representation fails us. We know that the agency is rogue, militarized, and trigger-happy to shoot anyone who gets in their way in the face.

How can we draw parallels between the administration’s targeting of our Latino and Black neighbors, with Asian Americans and the Asian American history of immigration and resistance? We are always brought back to Lisa Lowe’s materialist critique of the U.S. institution of citizenship writ large. The concept of citizenship in this country, she writes, is predicated on the state’s legal transformation of “the [Asian] alien into the [Asian American] citizen,” in the process “institutionaliz[ing] the disavowal of the history of racialized labor exploitation and disenfranchisement through the promise of freedom in the political sphere.” Through Lowe’s analysis, we see a different historical formation of the Asian American citizen, one based on a deep contradiction that created the alien through a succession of imperialist wars and occupations in Asia and various exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, and simultaneously included the alien in the exploitative labor markets of the national terrain. The political institution of citizenship for the racialized American, is thus a site of contradiction between global capitalism and liberal democracy. It remains not a site of political emancipation, but rather a contemporary way for the liberal state to produce and justify new modes of racialized and gendered violence against immigrant identities with the shifting categories of legal–illegal, citizen–noncitizen; U.S.-born–permanent resident. Lowe’s seminal Immigrant Acts was published in 1998, but still remains vital for drawing parallels between Asian American immigrant history and Mexican and Latino immigrant history. She writes in her explanation for why the Marxist critique of citizenship fails to account for the racialized history of citizenship in the U.S.:

[I]t was on racial equality that the Civil Rights movement focused its energies and through race that a coalition of Blacks, Chicanos, and Asians could form. Yet these struggles have revealed that the granting of rights does not abolish the economic system that profits from racism… Marx described the negation of “private” individual particulars of the subject who becomes the “abstract citizen” of the political state. But for Asians within the history of the United States—as for African Americans, Native Americans, or Chicanos—”political emancipation” through citizenship is never an operation confined to the negation of individual private particulars; it requires the negation of a history of social relations that publicly racialized groups and successively constituted those groups as “nonwhites ineligible for citizenship.”

Immigrants of Asian origin are not immune to the current ICE crackdown of the second Trump administration. The UCLA Asian American Studies Center estimates that removals of Asian immigrants nearly tripled within the first six months of Trump’s second administration. Earlier this year, amid the onslaught of ICE activity in the Twin Cities that killed U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, a St. Paul resident told the The Chicago Tribune that federal agents had asked her to identify the Hmong and Asian households in her neighborhood, and days later ICE illegally entered the home of U.S. citizen ChongLy Thao and arrested him in his underwear in the dead of the Minnesota winter. Thao was one of dozens of Hmong Americans targeted by ICE for detention and deportation, all or most of whom had been in the United States for decades after fleeing Laos due to unstable conditions created by the CIA’s decade-long covert bombing campaign against the Oregon-sized country during the Cold War. The forces of imperial violence and economic precarity in Laos that drove Thao and others to emigrate to the United States are undoubtedly similar to the forces that led many of the Mexican, Central American, and Venezuelan detainees filling inhumane ICE facilities all over the country to seek a new home here.

This is the perverse double-bind faced by immigrants in the United States: U.S. intervention in the termed “Global South” makes immigration a necessity, but white supremacist fantasies of national purity and impenetrable borders make a peaceful existence in the United States an impossibility. Asian American histories of immigration are inseparable from the histories of African and Latin American immigrants suffering and fighting against the same imperial world order. This AAPI Heritage Month, resist the siloed narratives of cultural celebration and Asian American exceptionalism and turn your attention to the ways this country contradicts its claims to diversity. The battle against ICE, and imperial-driven displacement and borders everywhere, is not over.

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The following section is an account written solely by Jesica Bak, the editor-in-chief of illume Magazine, intended to be shared in contextualization with the rest of the publication’s statement on the situation at Delaney Hall.

Even before the current strike at Delaney, I was already personally familiar with the conditions inside the ICE facilities. Last winter on December 6th, 2025, my close friend R (who prefers to remain unnamed for this piece), was abducted from a street in Queens, New York, by a Home Depot parking lot where he was looking for day work. Around the time of his abduction, I hadn’t heard from him for over a month and ICE operations were already escalating rapidly across the U.S. I had had a bad feeling, which was a different kind of bad feeling from when he was MIA because of unpaid phone bills, and on December 13th, I received a call from the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in New Jersey. He said he was calling me in case I was wondering why he wasn’t responding to my messages. He said he tried to run, but one of the agents gunned him down. A robot interrupted us to warn that there were only ten minutes left on the phone call.

After arriving alone at only sixteen years old, R had been living and working in the U.S. for a total of thirteen years. Throughout the years, he had barely gotten by on construction work and other day laboring work; he was, at times, withheld wages without any legal accountability or recuperation due to his undocumented status, and as a result, he was, at one point, homeless for two years and lived in his car. When we met, he had been working another precarious job finding and bringing back shopping carts at a supermarket.

I could tell the lawyer had probably been doing this work for a very long time by how quickly he did the consultation: because R didn’t have a pending asylum application based on a fear of persecution directly from the government or a non-state agent the government is closely tied to, nor did he have a spouse or children heavily relying on his presence in the United States, there is no case to make and we should prepare ourselves for his imminent removal. I asked if, at least, he would be sent back to his actual home country, unlike some of the cases we’ve been seeing on the news where, despite nation-wide protests and judicial orders stating otherwise, detainees were being shackled to countries they were not citizens of and had never heard of before in their lives. He said yes, thankfully because R does not have a pending asylum application based on a fear of persecution in his home country, he should likely be sent back to where he came from, Honduras. Given the circumstances of extrajudicial deportations, I agreed that this was something to be thankful about.

R told me that he would be transferred to a facility in New York, closer to me, but the next time we spoke, he called me from the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana. Pine Prairie is also run by the GEO Group—whose pockets I helped line by frequently sending money to R’s commissary so that he could make phone calls and watch movies on the shared facility tablet—and had also been previously subject to human rights violations from 2021 and 2023. At Pine Prairie, R told me that the detainees were not given clean drinking water; instead, they were brought buckets of dirty ice. He told me that they were not properly fed, so everyone was hungry and sick on a daily basis. He told me that the rooms were claustrophobically crammed and unfit for basic sleeping conditions, and that hundreds of new detainees were being brought in everyday. He told me almost all of them were from Latin American countries, many from African countries, and a handful from China and some southeast Asian countries. He told me that it was difficult for detainees not to fight with each other due to the psychological torture, and that they were being coerced into signing papers they didn’t understand. He told me that he was scared to go back to Honduras, that it had been thirteen years since he left and he would no longer recognize it, much less re-assimilate into its difficult political and economic climate. He had had dreams of saving enough money in the U.S. to eventually open his own small business in Honduras, and also of traveling to Europe. Despite everything, he laughed and made jokes when we called and said that he was thankful to God; that he felt lucky compared to some of the other people in there.

I spoke with another lawyer, who attested that based on her almost ten years of working with detention cases, the Oakdale court in Louisiana where R was assigned is one of the most unlikely courts in the United States to grant relief, even on the basis of credible fear of persecution. Moreover, if we didn’t want R to remain in the custody of ICE for several more months, we should prepare to file for his voluntary departure. I thought about how before I knew he had been abducted, I had bought him shearling gloves for his birthday in November that were just sitting on my shelf and for which he would no longer have a need in Honduras.

By the end of February, he had been sent back to Honduras, where he messaged me to tell me he was free and able to reunite with his family who had been waiting for him. He sent me photos from the beach. I thought about what free meant in this context, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved. R told me that given everything that is currently ongoing at Delaney Hall, he would like me to share a small part of his own story and the injustice he has also faced.

May 29, 2026
Putting the Politics Back in ‘Asian American’

By Juliana George

MAY 14, 2025

Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona, Calif. Photo courtesy of Omar Bárcena; CC BY 2.0.

I grew up 10 minutes away from a detention center that once held over 5,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans.

At the time, I only knew it as the Fairplex, a 487-acre plot of land that hosted fried food stands and rickety carnival rides every year during the Los Angeles County Fair. But the nostalgic place where I used to gorge on cotton candy and coo at baby farm animals was once known as the Pomona Assembly Center, and it operated for 110 days in 1942 as a temporary detention facility for Japanese American Californians.

Like me, about two-thirds of the Japanese Americans incarcerated after Pearl Harbor were born and raised in the United States. Of those imprisoned at the Pomona Assembly Center, some may have grown up going to the LA County Fair, which was first held in 1922. They may have wandered the dusty fairgrounds trying their luck at the ring toss or perusing exhibits on California history, like I did. They may have even watched a childhood site of cherished memories transform into a miserable, makeshift detention center that preceded their eventual imprisonment at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming.

The fair took a few years off during the war. It resumed in 1948, six years after the last Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and three years after they were given $25 and a train ticket to return to lives that no longer belonged to them.

This tragic historical moment did not haunt me, not even subconsciously. I didn’t feel the shadow of injustice looming over me and my kind as I came of age in sheltered California suburbia, and I had no reason to—after all, my family didn’t touch down in the United States until 1970, well after World War II and five years after the Hart-Celler Act abolished former national-origin quotas and exclusions in American immigration policy.

To me, being Japanese American in Southern California meant eating mochi on New Year’s Day and somen in the summer; it meant bonding with my Asian American friends over our strict mothers and shared taste in food; occasionally, it meant hearing racist nursery rhymes on the playground or mean comments about my supposedly exotic lunches. I wasn’t even aware of Japanese American incarceration until high school.

My unlikely educator was the actor George Takei, of Star Trek fame, who grew up in Los Angeles but spent the early years of his childhood incarcerated in concentration camps in Arkansas and Northern California. His experiences loosely inspired the Broadway musical Allegiance, which follows a Japanese American family wrestling with the realities of incarceration at Heart Mountain. The musical, starring Takei, came to the Aratani Theatre in Little Tokyo in 2018, where I saw it with my family.

Despite its historical inaccuracies and mixed critical reviews, Allegiance was a compelling introduction to Asian American history for the person I was back then: a 14-year-old half-Japanese theater kid eager for onstage representation that overcame the Orientalist pitfalls of Miss Saigon. While at times overly dramatized and slightly trite, Allegiance imbued a fair amount of nuance into the range of war-era Japanese American experiences, sympathizing with both draft-dodging resisters and defiant patriots who enlisted in the 442nd Infantry Regiment to reassert their Americanness.

As silly as it sounds, sitting misty-eyed in the audience of Allegiance may have been the first time I thought of my racial identity as political. It had always been cultural—a spectral force enriching some relationships and alienating me from others; creating a shared language of universalized experiences between me and my Asian peers; itching at the back of my brain whenever I thought about the historically doomed imperial pairing of Asian woman/(mostly) white man that led to my conception (see Miss Saigon). Politically, I mostly sided with my parents, progressive Christian Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders and then Hillary Clinton. But ensconced in the comforts of my diverse, liberal West Coast bubble, I didn’t feel like I was racialized in Trump’s America in the same way my Black and Latino peers were.

And then, a little over a year after I saw Allegiance, my AP U.S. history teacher dropped the Fairplex bombshell, and I realized that regardless of when my family immigrated to the United States, the label “Asian American” came with baggage that was closer to home than I thought. Japanese American incarceration wasn’t just a proverbial original sin of Asian American history—it was merely one event in the ongoing project of racialization under the U.S. empire.

If you belong to the same school of thought as Korean American writer and podcaster Jay Caspian Kang, you might say that my Allegiance revelation was little more than a subconscious attempt to insert myself into America’s Black-and-white racial binary; to squeeze myself into a mythical, oversimplified identity category called “Asian American” that’s been many sizes too small since the Asian American activist era of the 1960s and ’70s gave way to the neoliberal identity politics of the 1980s and beyond. In fact, because of my mixed heritage and sansei (third-generation) status, Kang would probably question my right to call myself Asian at all, as he did with his own half-white, half-Korean daughter in his 2021 memoir The Loneliest Americans.

My family falls under the category of “post-Hart-Celler,” a classification that constitutes the majority of Asian Americans today. In Kang’s opinion, post-Hart-Celler Asian Americans are a fragmented group of people divided irrevocably by different class and ethnic backgrounds. The only force uniting middle and upper class Asian Americans, according to Kang, is a shared desire to assimilate into the privileges of whiteness while benefiting from superficial cultural differences and flimsy racism narratives that set us apart from the white ruling class. Kang asserts that a panethnic Asian American history that combines Chinese exclusion, Japanese American incarceration, and the murder of Vincent Chin is as incoherent as it is vastly unrelatable.

“Our great grandparents weren’t herded up in Los Angeles; our parents did not stand with the Panthers or the Third World Liberation Front,” he wrote. So what does that history have to do with people like us?

In some ways, Kang is right. Other than our common cultural heritage and California roots, I did not share lived experiences or histories with the characters in Allegiance. But I don’t think my reaction to the performance had much to do with the “loneliness” central to Kang’s thesis, the cultural loneliness that purportedly drives upwardly mobile Asian-descended Americans to invent an imaginary collective racial identity. Rather, it opened my eyes to nascent ideas about Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, about racial hierarchy and the limits of assimilation, and about my identity being political, whether I liked it or not. My physical and cultural proximity to the characters in Allegiance and other victims of Japanese American incarceration were not essential in my coming to these conclusions, but they didn’t hurt.

I can’t write about Asian America without starting at Berkeley, 1968: the year the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), a joint community and campus organization founded at UC Berkeley by then-student activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, became widely known as the first group to use the label “Asian American” to organize Americans of Asian descent on a national scale.

In May of 1968, the AAPA published an article drawing parallels between Japanese American incarceration and the McCarran Internal Security Act, a 1950 law that allowed the federal government to detain anyone suspected of engaging in “subversive activities,” otherwise known as communism. This sparked one of the earliest mainstream conversations surrounding Japanese American concentration camps, a subject that had remained shrouded in silence for years—and the AAPA invoked this history specifically as a line of solidarity between the newly minted “Asian Americans” and the Black Power revolutionaries to whom the McCarran Act posed the greatest threat.

The AAPA engaged in a number of other local and transnational movements, including resisting the displacement of Filipino Americans in San Francisco’s Manilatown and joining the nationwide anti-Vietnam War protests. In November of the same year, AAPA chapters at Berkeley and San Francisco State College joined the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strikes at their respective colleges, demanding a school of Third World studies and greater racial diversity among the faculty and student body.

The panethnicity of the term “Asian American” was essential to the AAPA’s goal of uniting different Asian-descended communities around shared struggles against racism, imperialism, and capitalism. Panethnicity worked in tandem with cross-racial solidarity, as the AAPA striked alongside the Black Student Union and the Latin American Student Organization in the TWLF and took political inspiration from the Black Panther Party and the Civil Rights Movement.

Despite its radical origins, the panethnicity of Asian America has its fair share of critics today, Kang among them. There is a gulf of difference between the Asian America of 1968, a population of around 1.5 million that mainly consisted of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino Americans, and the Asian America of 2025. At a population of 24 million, Asian Americans are now the fastest-growing racial group in the nation and hail from over 20 countries.

It’s no surprise that a community experiencing such explosive expansion, both in ethnic diversity and sheer volume, has had growing pains. Income and education levels vary wildly among Asian Americans, as do the material realities and political identities of Asians who enter the country as “skilled workers” on H-1B visas as opposed to those fleeing poverty, war, or genocide. Thinkers like Kang ask, in the context of today’s disparate Asian-descended community, is there really such a thing as an “Asian American”? And if there is, what does it mean to be Asian American without a cohesive cause to organize behind?

These questions didn’t go unnoticed by the Asian American activists of the late ’60s and early ’70s. From the start, the AAPA was founded with ideological principles that decisively opposed identity politics and racial liberalism in favor of liberation and anti-imperialism. They never intended the term “Asian American” to be a homogeneous, all-encompassing racial category. The AAPA constructed this identity as a tool for politically mobilizing against forces of domination that oppress not only people of Asian descent, but also the globally impoverished, racialized, and subjugated. The AAPA conceived of the label “Asian American”—to use the words of scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis—as a way to “bas[e] the identity on politics rather than the politics on identity.”

But identity is a slippery thing.

After nearly five months, the TWLF strikes ended and “Third World studies” was amended to “ethnic studies” upon institutionalization at Berkeley and SFSC. This renaming represented a conscious flattening and depoliticization of the proposed Third World curriculum, which the late ethnic studies scholar Gary Y. Okihiro explores in his 2016 book Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation. Okihiro traces the evolution of post-1968 ethnic studies into contemporary manifestations of multiculturalism and cultural nationalism, which superficially celebrate diversity and inclusion while buying into assimilation and tacit acceptance of the imperial world order.

Rather than reflecting the radical principles of the TWLF, this discipline enabled academic institutions to advertise their new melting pot of course offerings as a selling point to prospective students (and donors). In other words, higher academia did not view ethnic studies as a threat to its power hierarchy in the way the TWLF intended.

We can see the same process of elite capture in American politics and popular culture.

Andrew Yang reaped the benefits of identity politics during his candidacies for president in 2020 and New York City mayor in 2021, appealing to a swath of previously politically inactive Asian American voters. He also perpetuated dangerous narratives about Asian Americans as needing to “step up” to prove their Americanness in the face of xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic and advocated for increased funding for the NYPD, an initiative that would harm the city’s working class and Black and brown populations.

In 2018, a few months after I saw Allegiance, the film Crazy Rich Asians released in theaters, billed as the first Hollywood blockbuster to feature a majority-Asian cast since Joy Luck Club (1993). Received with positive reviews and countless essays on the joys of representation, Crazy Rich Asians ushered in a new renaissance of Asian American media. Now we have a Marvel movie, an Academy Award Best Picture winner, numerous Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, lots of straight-to-streaming romantic comedies, and even a few Regency-era socialites on Bridgerton. I’ve personally seen countless TikToks in which Gen-Z Asian Americans prepare a traditional dish from their culture, narrated by a stinky lunch anecdote like the one I shared earlier, and end with something like, “I used to get teased for eating kimchi, but now everybody likes Korean barbecue!”

Kang points to the celebration of these “wins” as evidence of a shallow, artificially constructed identity. I don’t deny that Asian American identity is socially constructed, but I think there’s a more nuanced reason why the label has lost its teeth—rather than focusing on imagined “Asian excellence” and working to slot ourselves into pre-established power structures, we need to fight against the structures that have racialized us in the first place, the same structures that create an international class of subjugated peoples.

As Okihiro wrote, “Black (or Brown, Red, and Yellow) Power is a potent antidote to the poison of white supremacy, but it follows and is in reaction to white power and is accordingly limited by its model and prior condition.”

My first consideration of “Asian American” as a political identity may have come from watching George Takei sing about Japanese American resilience in an air-conditioned theater, but for much of Asian America, this realization crystallized during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After the outrage over Vincent Chin’s racially motivated murder in 1982 died down in the ’90s, Asian Americans largely flew under the political radar for years. The most prominent Asian-centric topic in the mainstream conversation was affirmative action, an issue that had long divided the community, but this was something only certain segments of the population were paying attention to. When conservatives invoked “illegals” and “aliens,” we could count on the fact that they were usually referring to immigrants from south of the border and not the docile, high-achieving ones from halfway around the world.

And then, in 2020, suddenly we were in the news. President Donald Trump referred to the coronavirus as the “China virus” and “kung flu.” Videos and news stories started popping up of Asian Americans, particularly elders, being beaten or otherwise harassed. In 2021, an 84-year-old Thai man named Vicha Ratanapakdee died from head trauma after a Black teenager pushed him to the ground in San Francisco. The same year, a 21-year-old white man shot and killed eight people at three Atlanta spas, six of them Asian women. In the victims, we saw our grandparents, our parents, our friends. It seemed Yellow Peril was back.

Just like Third World studies, the sudden spike in anti-Asian violence and resultant newly unified (East and Southeast) Asian American consciousness were not immune to elite capture.

Fear and anger over suspected hate crimes and high-profile anti-Asian xenophobia quickly birthed several new charitable organizations, including Stop AAPI Hate and The Asian American Foundation (TAAF). These organizations thrive off sensationalizing anti-Asian violence, or what Taiwanese researcher Wen Liu called “the politics of racial injury” in a recent essay for positions politics. Liu writes that by emphasizing isolated incidents of violence and positioning Trump’s rhetoric as the direct cause, Stop AAPI Hate obscures the larger structures of racial capitalism and U.S. imperialism that inform this “hate.”

More notably, TAAF’s close ties to the Zionist Anti-Defamation League reveal an equally sinister agenda to configure anti-Asian racism in the same way the ADL has configured antisemitism: as a tool for advancing racist, colonial narratives that justify the systemic marginalization of historically oppressed groups.

For TAAF, this means promoting anti-Asian hate crime legislation that increases policing and carceral measures that hurt working class Black and brown Americans. For the ADL, this means ethnically cleansing Palestinians with the military arm of the U.S.-funded apartheid state of Israel and silencing critics through the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism.

For me, the Stop Asian Hate movement produced many moments of cognitive dissonance, especially as it played out alongside the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and 2021. Both movements generated similarly bizarre liberal anti-racism campaigns, like Instagram’s black square trend and the weirdly opportunistic “stop asian hate” selfie booth that appeared in a shopping mall 30 minutes from my house. But more than that, the Stop Asian Hate movement seemed completely devoid of a collective goal in the way that Black Lives Matter mobilized protesters in favor of police abolition. “Hate” is too nebulous of a concept to meaningfully oppose, so the movement’s leaders turned to pre-established carceral solutions.

This is the real danger of an identity without political basis. Corny diaspora fiction and media narratives are just symptoms of a larger sickness: if we stand for nothing, our identity can be co-opted for any purpose.

Sitting in her office on Northeastern University’s Boston campus, professor of anthropology and global Asian studies Sasha Sabherwal tells me that most of the students who take her “Intro to Asian American Studies” course come into the class prepared to air out their indignation about COVID-era anti-Asian racism.

Sabherwal understands the feeling, but she also encourages her students to look beyond the specific events of Asian American history to more global systems of domination.

“Asian American Studies isn’t just about Asian Americans; it’s a framework for thinking about questions of power,” she explained. “As Asian Americans, we might be both victims of certain kinds of harm and complicit in perpetuating other systems of oppression.”

Sabherwal was part of a cluster hire for the new global Asian studies department at Northeastern, which the university authorized in response to demands from Asian American students following the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. This student protest took place during the thick of the pandemic, and was consequently almost entirely online, a far cry from the TWLF strikes. It didn’t take too much convincing for the university to acquiesce, probably because they already knew what Berkeley and SFSC learned back then: once institutionalized, ethnic studies would no longer be a threat.

Just a few years later, the situation at Northeastern is very different. In light of the Trump administration’s crusades against diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, Sabherwal worries she may not be able to continue teaching in the near future. For now, she tries her best to engage with students at their level, teasing out their ideas about identity, panethnicity, and power.

Because many of her students began by regurgitating the talking points of Stop AAPI Hate, Sabherwal was careful to both acknowledge the Stop Asian Hate movement as a “turning point for building political momentum and consciousness” in the Asian American community and introduce the tension of the movement’s ties to Zionism and policing. When students questioned why these connections exist, she was able to introduce a wider conversation about the history of yellow washing (and Black, brown, pink, and rainbow washing) tactics in Israel as a means for rebranding Israel as a progressive, civilized counterpart to the conservative, uncivilized, Orientalized Palestine.

These discussions were challenging, especially in a course that many students enrolled in to fill an elective or diversity requirement. On some days, Sabherwal became frustrated with the feeling she wasn’t reaching her students. Still, she finds the classroom to be a site rich with potential for liberation and hope, and she treats it as a space for building political awareness and relationships.

After the lessons on Chinese exclusion, Japanese American incarceration, settler colonialism in Hawai’i, U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, Edward Said’s Orientalism, Vincent Chin, and post-9/11 Islamophobia, Sabherwal’s “Intro” course turns to what she calls “Asian American futures.”

The future of Asian America isn’t something that’s totally clear to Sabherwal, to me, or to anyone. But one thing is certain: if we want “Asian American” to be more than a demographic box, or a homogenized identity that gets hijacked by other movements to maintain the racial and imperial hierarchy, we need to recommit to the anti-imperial principles the term was founded on.

Envisioning a future for Asian America that is driven by multi-ethnic, cross-racial, and class unity against imperialism and capitalism sounds daunting, but it starts with imagination. It starts with learning Asian American history, and examining the ways our histories intersect with the histories of other marginalized groups. It starts with building community power through political organizing; the Asian American Feminist Collective in New York City, the Asian American Resource Workshop in Boston, and the global Malaya Movement and Palestinian Youth Movement are a few examples.

“If we can imagine beyond identity politics, I think there’s so much value in the category,” Sabherwal said. “But as it is, it’s become part of the institutions we all occupy.”

Before I could begin to think about the future of Asian America, I had to reckon with the ways my world had been shaped by its past. The notion of a political Asian America—or, for that matter, a depoliticized Asian America—was far from my mind as I happily overlooked my hometown from the Ferris wheel in my beloved prison-turned-fairground. But once the grim history of Japanese American concentration camps broke through the rose-tinted glass of my mostly apolitical childhood, the revelations kept coming.

From the infamous 1966 New York Times op-ed “Success Story, Japanese American-style” (credited with popularizing the model minority myth) to the horrifyingly named “Daniel K. Inouye Arrow Anti-Missile Defense Facility” in Israel, actors with insidious racist and imperial schemes have been stealing and profiting from Japanese American identity for years. Like Inouye, the late senator from Hawai’i and a vocal Zionist advocate, many have themselves been Japanese American.

To me, being Japanese American still means all the things I thought it meant growing up. But it also means vehemently rejecting narratives that seek to co-opt my identity, and carving out space for the inherently political identity I believe in.

Juliana George is the managing editor of Illume Magazine.

May 14, 2025
I Don’t Hate You

By Jesica Bak

APRIL 06, 2025

Kim Sae-Ron as So-Mi in The Man From Nowhere, the 2009 Korean action-thriller directed by Lee Jeong-Beom.

I recently went on a casual dinner date with a Korean man, which was perhaps my fault. I knew I was never going to see him again because at some point during the dinner, he started to feel comfortable—solely on the basis of our shared Korean ethnicity and not anything I had expressed—making casually racist, misogynistic, and other bigoted comments to me. He asked me what kinds of films I like, and when I told him I recently watched The Man From Nowhere—the 2009 Korean action–thriller blockbuster about an ex-special forces agent (famously played by Won Bin)’s legendary search for his 10-year-old neighbor who has been kidnapped by drug and organ-traffickers—my dinner date flippantly laughed and said, “Right, that little girl is dead now.”

I remember being unsurprised by his comment, only reminded once again of the dehumanizing and degrading ways in which men often consume news about women whose lives have been unfairly taken. Just the other day, I was having a very different conversation with my close female friend about that “little girl”; the female actress who rose to fame by playing Jeong So-Mi, the kidnapped child, in The Man From Nowhere when she was only about 10 years old; the female actress whose name my dinner date didn’t even bother to invoke when referring to her death.

Making Korean headlines these days, Kim Sae-Ron recently committed suicide at 24 years old after facing years of national public harassment and scrutiny for having committed a DUI in May 2022 that reportedly resulted in a damaged electrical transformer box, some nearby power outages, and unspecified impacts on nearby stores. The Seoul Central District Court fined her 20 million won (about 13,850 U.S. dollars), she paid an additional 700 million won in private legal settlement fees, her contract with her agency Gold Medalist was cancelled, and her career henceforth was effectively and permanently ruined. After Kim’s passing, her acquaintance revealed to the media group Osen that the incident had caused irreparable financial damage and the actress was forced to change her name to Kim Ah-Im to work part-time at a café until she was recognized by citizens and terminated from the position as well.

It’d be easy to chalk up Kim’s suicide to another celebrity tragedy partially caused by K-netizens, notorious around the world for malicious comments and online bullying. Juwon Park, the Asia entertainment editor for the Associated Press, wrote on X three days after Kim Sae-Ron was found dead in her home:

Korean media and the public tend to deliver immediate social condemnation for certain offenses (i.g. sex crimes) and, interestingly, cases of infidelity… Yet with drug-related or DUI incidents, public response varies significantly. Some celebrities return to their careers after ‘showing remorse,’ while others fade from public view without another chance. What determines the path to redemption? Gender? PR strategy? Luck?

Park is right to ask about the inconsistency in the national scrutiny and subsequent redemption offered to celebrities and public figures in Korea; she is also right to point to gender as, I’d argue, the main variable determining the said path to redemption. But Park perhaps didn’t have space to note that even after her DUI incident, Kim Sae-Ron had received new waves of backlash for posting a photo on her Instagram story with her then-boyfriend, beloved actor Kim Soo-Hyun. Since her passing, her family has revealed that the actor, one of the highest-paid actors in the nation and a global symbol of K-dramas, had been dating her since she was a minor.

It is impossible to read news related to the late actress and not be reminded of Sulli, the late member of the K-pop group f(x) who similarly committed suicide in 2019 after years of facing relentless public harassment and vitriol, and whom I think of every year around March 29 because we share our birthdays. One could argue that Sulli was a more explicit victim of Korean sexism and misogyny, particularly having grown up in an industry that notoriously treats its youth as little more than commodified and sexualized products curated for cultural and economic export. Fans on Reddit (r/kpophelp) still exclaim how ridiculous it was to have witnessed the bizarre, and eventually deadly, hate invented by K-netizens having to do with Sulli’s expressed sexuality on social media—which, in this case, means having posted “braless” photos, selfies with a banana, and some pictures drinking alcohol or going to the club with friends—as well as her age-gap relationship with Dynamic Duo artist Choiza.

But the way I see it, the ways in which Kim Sae-Ron and Sulli were both exploited for entertainment and subsequently discarded by the public, the nation, and perhaps even the support systems in their respective lives, are two sides of the same coin presenting one of Korea’s most pressing issues today: increasingly popular far-right calls for the elimination of women’s rights and what appears to be increasingly blatant violence against women. I mean not to exclude the issues of the country’s increasing economic precarity, the entertainment industry’s exploitation of artists, or social isolation and depression, which are also urgent and pressing for Korean men and male artists. However, for women in Korea, these issues are always stratified along lines of gender and sexuality.

I have always been critical of the Hallyu wave propagandizing and romanticizing the nation when out of all of the OECD countries, South Korea now holds the highest suicide rate, the rate for longest working-hours, and the greatest gender wage gap. A sweet spot for studying neoliberalism in East Asia, South Korea’s rapid capitalist development and global domination have made it urgent to interrogate this question: as a country modernizes and works towards the political and economic project of futurity, how are high and low-value subjects produced and reinforced? In the project of so-called innovation, who is exploited and who benefits from this exploitation? I think about these questions when, for example, South Korea remains the country “most targeted by deepfake pornography last year,” with female South Korean actresses and singers reportedly making up more than half of the people featured in deepfake porn worldwide. A recent high-profile case from October 2024 highlighted the nation’s struggle to embrace AI when two male alumni of Seoul National University were charged for having created and disseminated nearly 2,000 AI-generated pornographic photos of women from the university. The pair also wrote messages on Telegram such as, “Rape is the answer for feminists.” But the prosecution of these men is rare—Hyung-Jin Kim for the AP reports that a vast majority of deepfake perpetrators in the nation receive suspended terms, fines, or not-guilty verdicts—as is any form of social condemnation that could potentially ruin their careers, their sense of selfhood and safety, their relationships with loved ones, or their lives.

My mother, my sister, and I had a very difficult time rewatching The Man From Nowhere, a film that, while classically beautiful in its neo-noirism, is entirely predicated on the transnational capital movement of drugs and sex, child, and organ trafficking. At one point in the film when Won Bin’s character is about to kill the younger of the drug lord brothers before freeing enslaved child laborers at a drug manufacturing plant, the drug lord whines that these are children whose parents didn’t want them anyway. I could’t help thinking that this comment was true, but only because they are the children of women who are impoverished sex workers and dancers at the clubs where the drug lords do their recruiting and trafficking in the first place.

The women, like So-Mi’s mother, who also became involved in the scheme from dancing at the drug lords’ nightclub, are either entirely absent from the film or their presence is marked only by their harvested corpses shoved into the trunks of cars or backs of abandoned ambulances. But the film and its legendary story wouldn’t exist without their exploitation, their suffering that is sexualized even in their cruel deaths, and then their children’s suffering and deaths. The women and children in the film aren’t just victims of men; they’re victims of the restructured biopolitical systems of global capitalism that have generated a capital imperative for a trafficking market in the first place. Under this system, women become sex workers who are vulnerable to trafficking, and they are then forced to give birth to children who are subject to the same systems.

We almost stopped watching during Kim Sae-Ron’s famous monologue in the film, which is really about the ways in which the adults in her life—her mother, her teacher, Won Bin’s ahjussi—have failed to protect her from abuse. Setting up the catalyst for the rest of the film and Won Bin’s guilt-driven quest to save So-Mi from her mother’s fate, she tells him, “I don’t hate you. Because if I do, I won’t have anyone I like… So I won’t hate you.”

Jesica Bak is the editor-in-chief of Illume Magazine.

April 6, 2025

Anger looks good on the both of us

By Kevin Zhang

DEC 21, 2024

Our anger will not destroy anyone unless it is meant to—
if there is no space for anger there will only be two bodies 
or two cities dressed half-naked in grief. 
You have poisoned the water I drink from, 
and the horses are falling from their teeth. 
so this watering hole was never the one, 
this watering hole was meant to hold all of our failure, 
look at the way the sediment sheds off our bodies as we 
crane our bodies in an attempt to slake. 
we will never be able to slake like this. 
material suffrage mediates the body’s ability 
to be there, to even think about light. 
In the end, I was the lamb, I am rising
to the altar, leaving, burying you softly, 
with a kiss to the land all this 
just to grow as a voice. 
One day, we will know when the fresh of us rises from the dirt, 
when the firstborn of our hair begins to poke from the gravel. 
And we will know ourselves, soon. 
we will dance upon the burial ground of the body 
that once was us— meant by assimilation, 
meant by the cracking of the nation against our skin.

Kevin Zhang is the literary arts editor of Illume Magazine.

January 3, 2025

Diaspora and Displacement Workshop
By Kevin Zhang and Patricio Pino Araujo

OCT 18, 2024
On October 8th, 2024, Illume Magazine and the Interrobang Poets held a collaborative workshop to reflect on this year’s Indigenous People’s Day and the one-year marker of the most recent, and ongoing, genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Through collective discussion and a guided poetry-writing session, we held space and shared words in the face of the distances and displacements that engulf our lives. We meditated on the violences which we have either enacted or been faced with; probed the amnesias that allow such violence to be upheld; and we plotted possible avenues for liberation from the colonial and white-supremacist occupations that bleed into the lands we stand on and the communities we traverse. Above all, we crafted a space where the creative process can help us remember and organize, mourn and resist, and begin the process of illuminating a more dignified future.

This workshop was, and remains, itself a land acknowledgment and a small and imperfect bid to listen to the land and its original stewards. The institution which privileges all of us—“Northeastern University”—and its large and growing network of occupied land, is stolen from the following long list of Indigenous peoples: the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Pawtucket, Agawam, Nacotchtank (Anacostan), Piscataway, Muwekma Ohlone, Ramaytush Ohlone, Duwamish, Mississauga, Anishinabek, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat Peoples as well as the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquody and Penobscot Peoples of the Wabanaki Alliance, and the Catawba, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations, and the Naumkeag band of the Pawtucket Peoples.¹ In addition, this institution continues to enact gentrification and carceral militarization against historically Brown and Black neighborhoods in the Roxbury and Boston areas, the Oakland area, the Seattle area, and globally in their partnerships with military-industrial companies fueling imperial war and death on every continent.²

Below are the questions from the dated workshop, edited for concision and clarity.

—How do you situate your own tangible and physical contexts?
- Look around you: what and who do you see in your immediate surroundings?
- Think of the buildings, the neighborhoods, the city, the land, and connect it with as much history as you can think of.
- History as in: how did this come to be? What was it formerly, where did it grow from, and what has it lost? Who built these buildings? Who paid for them and who labored for them? Who has loved this land, and known this land? What were their lives like?
—What are the actual histories? (See: General History)

—How can you reflect on and honor what was erased/occupied for your present context to exist?
- How can you reflect on what you cannot remember? How can you reflect on why you cannot remember? On how much you will never be able to remember?
- What is the real meaning of erasure? Of genocide? How was history curtailed to our knowledge?
- How can you honor and grieve what was lost that you will never know?
—Now write your ancestry, your lineage, your history³
- One stanza of how you came into this present context, who you are, and how you position yourself here and in the world.
- One stanza of what you don’t know, what you can’t know, and how we can (if we can) possibly reckon with that.
- Alternating stanzas ad infinitum (until time runs out) going backwards as far back into your family tree (or any kind of kinship tree) as possible.
  
  As in: One stanza of how your immediate caretakers (parents, grandparents, etc.) came into their present context.
  
  One stanza of how we can (if we can) possibly reckon with their histories that may never be retrieved.
  
  One stanza of how their immediate caretakers came into their present context.
—Reflect, compare poems, hold space, discuss, mourn, plot, etc.
- What is unsettled by an understanding of diaspora that centers the land on which we arrive and the violence and erasures which have formed it? What is made impossible?
General History i.e. “the United States of America” is a genocidal settler colony

Genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing defines the land we are situated on, starting from the very first interactions between European settlers and Native peoples. In 1637 in present-day connecticut, John Mason, a settler, uttered the following clear enunciation of genocidal settler-colonial intent in his book A Brief History of the Pequot War: “Thus, the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.”⁴ This settler was reflecting on the English destruction of the Pequot village of Mystic where “at least 300–400 Pequot men, women and children were burned alive” and between 600–700 Natives were murdered.⁵ After English “victory” in the war, surviving Pequot were forcibly displaced to surrounding territories, violently enslaved to provide forced labor in the British Caribbean slave colonies, and denied any recognition as a sovereign people.⁶

Massacres both named and recognized, as well as forgotten, would go on to define the founding period of European settlement on the land that would then be termed “New England.” These massacres were predicated on land theft and dispossession paired with acts of forced assimilation in institutions like boarding schools, missionary plantations, and educational institutions (like Harvard Indian College) that have direct connections to modern institutions (like Harvard University).⁷ And as a direct precedent to acts of cultural erasure and extermination which continue into the present, a historical commission from the Nipmuc nation reads: “Children were taken from their families to be raised ‘properly’ in English homes, most returning as adults or not returning at all. This taking of Native children was precursor to the Residential Schools out west that many Native cultures suffered from in the late 1800s and into the 1900s.”⁸

All of these settler-colonial tactics escalated to a truly genocidal intensity during and after King Philip’s War, which marked the last major act of armed Indigenous resistance against “New England” settlers, who retaliated with sustained genocidal violence in return, solidifying total Native dispossession and near extermination under the colonial white-supremacist society we live under today.⁹Settlers in the interior perpetrated massacre after massacre to secure the “utter annihilation”¹⁰ of Indigenous life, in the process forcing Indigenous noncombatants into concentration camps on the Boston Harbor Islands, where hundreds (possibly thousands) were murdered in part due to forced starvation and exposure to extreme temperatures.¹¹ Surviving “‘male hostiles’ were taken and hung, drawn, and quartered” or simply “shot to death” in Boston city-proper, not far from where we study today, with the Common serving “as a prominent spot for executions” intended as public and dehumanizing spectacles.¹²

The material and overt violence—the massacres and “wars,” the forceful disposessions of land and life, the institutions that dominate over and above Indigenous existence, the denial of political existence and dignity, the erasure of cultural forms, the alienation from ancestral spiritual truths—are part and parcel of the same genocidal settler-colonial project that now engulfs almost the entirety of the American continent. Where we stand now, the land-filled remnants of the “Fens” or what marshy waterway settlers called the “Fenway,” was once a site of sustenance, community, and transportation into the greater Massachusetts Bay area for the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Abenaki peoples along with the peoples of the Pennacook confederacy, the Pawtucket peoples, and Narragansett peoples who would travel, trade, and commune in the area as well.¹³ The sheer cataclysm of the complete destruction of these communities, lifeways, and relationships to the land define the brutality of settler-colonization.

Our immediate surroundings are thus the embodiment of the continuity of this brutal and genocidal violence into the present, and a reminder that as citizens and benefactors of the institutions that make up settler society, we are complicit in these violence as settlers ourselves and must work to materially struggle in solidarity and as accomplices¹⁴ with Indigenous peoples in our immediate surroundings and around the world for total decolonization, land back, and the destruction of these systems of violence and dispossession. As the closing words of the Nipmuc Historical Commission read: “The loss of connection to our Land, and our very way of life has caused much difficulty even today in modern society… Generational trauma is especially evident in our relationships with the land and each other. There cannot truly be Reconciliation until responsibility is taken by those who continue to benefit from the injustices of the past and the present.”¹⁵

Citations:
1. Northeastern University’s DEI office provides a list of occupied Indigenous lands across campuses. While not within the scope of this workshop, it is worth noting that when land acknowledgements are not accompanied with language or plans for land repatriation, the acknowledgement remains abstract and immaterial. See “ODEI Messages.” n.d. Northeastern University. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
1. For information on the racialized displacement of historically Black Roxbury, see Sasani, Ava. 2018. “The Roxbury Diaspora: How Northeastern University Is Displacing Long-Time Residents.” The Scope, April 20, 2018. Also see Jennings, James, Bob Terrell, Jen Douglas, Kalila Barnett, and Ashley E. Harding. 2016. “Understanding Gentrification and Displacement: Community Voices and Changing Neighborhoods.” For information on Northeastern’s military industrial partnerships see the Action Network campaign from Northeastern’s Progressive Student Alliance: “Stop Supporting War Profiteers!” n.d. Action Network.
1. This writing prompt is, in part, greatly inspired by Professor Eunsong Kim’s Lineage Prompt written for her Poetry Workshop class, which is itself written in response to Etheridge Knight’s The Idea of Ancestry.
1. Mason, John and Royster, Paul, editor, “A Brief History of the Pequot War (1736)” (1736). Electronic Texts in American Studies. 42. p.21
1. Hilleary, Cecily. 2021. “Did English Puritans Commit Genocide in New England?” Voice of America, January 23, 2021.
1. ibid.
1. For an overview of European genocide against Indigenous peoples and the origins of contemporary settler-colonial society see Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press. For further analysis of Indigenous extermination and erasure in “New England” see O’Brien, Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. University of Minnesota Press.
1. “Remembering & Reconnecting: Nipmucs and the Massacre at Great Falls.” 2015. A Narrative Compiled and Presented by the Chaubunagungamaug Nipmuck Historic Preservation Office and Associates for the Battle of Great Falls/ Wissatinnewag-Peskeompskut Pre-Inventory Research and Documentation Project.
1. For a history of colonial violence in the Northeast and King Philip’s War, see DeLucia, Christine. 2018. Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. Yale University Press.
1. Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014. p. 66: “The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of the extreme violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to seek the utter annihilation of the Indigenous population.”
1. “Legacy of Genocide Resurfaces in Boston as Construction Is Planned on Burial Site.” 2019. Cultural Survival. April 18, 2019.
1. See id. at 8 p.10 and id. at 9 p. 53
1. See the “Establishing Networks: Indigenous Routes” page by Beaucher, Steven. editor and curator, et al., Getting Around Town: Four Centuries of Mapping Boston in Transit (Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, 2023). Also see “History of the Esplanade.” n.d. The Esplanade Association.
1. “No matter how liberated you are, if you are still occupying Indigenous lands you are still a colonizer.” See Rudy. 2014. “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex.” Indigenous Action. May 4, 2014.
2. Seeid. at 8 p.15 (emphasis ours).
Kevin Zhang is the literary arts editor of Illume Magazine. Patricio Pino is a Boston-based poet.
January 3, 2025

Atlantic Salt

By Ryan Siddharth

DEC 21, 2024

Egress to the Homer Winslow.

Smell the cold briny air of the Atlantic ocean. Of this seaweed and silt, dried out crustaceans on the pebbled beach.
Walk through the Winslow Homer, and hear
the cascade of rocks moving under your foot with each and every step.

There's the Decline of British Sea Power
The smallest church In Sussex, or was is Saint-Saëns
and a Want To Be Free.

Down south along the Atlantic, to the marshes,
cicadas pass through their vibrations, occasionally
masked by the wind, rustling and rattling
through shades of green and yellow, and orange and brown. Punctuated and interspersed with the gas guzzling groans, roar, or hum of machinery passing by.

Over East, or was it West? My home across seas and seas, it's so entirely hard to explain how something can feel so foreign, alien. Existing as breathing in this atlantic salt.
My home across the seas matched with the smells of a deep clay chasm, humid air mixed in the particulates of warm seas,
mangrove swamps, and rotten leaves.
Watch where you step, and don’t wander too close to the waters edge there are creatures in there. They’ve wandered in from Sungei Buloh, mixing with the ash in the Kranji river, turned reservoir. But the heat is oppressive, and I want to go closer to
the water's edge, and I can feel
six million eyes upon me.

Back to the Winslow, to the Atlantic I have no eyes on me and god did I wish I did sometimes.
I can reach out and stretch and not yet touch the edges of my enclosure. Home was cramped,
the growing pains of shirts three sizes too small,
I could touch it's surface at a young age,
but god is this space too vast, and too empty.

Ryan Siddharth is a cybersecurity and economics major at Northeastern University.

January 3, 2025

Achilles

By Ryan Siddharth

DEC 21, 2024

what am i but the tropical breeze passing through the tree line. bare feet meandering through short blades of grass
algae and moss growing in the gutter shielded
from the battering incandescent sun.
i tried to farm onions by placing whole bulbs in the shade of the mango tree, the sprout my family buried when we found ourselves
in some far corner of a corner had long turned
to brambles, reaching far up, ever daring a prehensile nature. the cool mildew of the morning
reaching where the roads start to punctuate the world,
to take the bus and i must stand because the bus stop has snakes.

my parents do not find symmetry looking through the reflection of their eyes my father is tall and dutch and crass
and my mother is short and indian and sweet vesuvian.
separated by time and sea, bounded in electrochemistry,
burnt –frayed synaptic ends and black lungs
my laugh is borrowed, my sigh inspired, correspondence in a clenched jaw unknown by time and sea but i know my grandparents, in bangalore, who come to visit when they can and my ammamma who speaks malayalam and diminishing english sat with me to teach me chinese.

industrial dust settles on the window boards, on the leaves, blown in from an encroaching world. semiconductors and rubber.
metropolis standard. my rambutan tree has stopped bearing fruit, there are no mangoes. no infernal shakings of the house,
stretching and breathing. no strange people wandering, standing outside the front door in the dark. i am kept far away now
from this house, spirits and ghosts, next to the prison, in the jungle. you can see through the tree line. the grass, a pallid brown, does not sing with the wind.

Ryan Siddharth is a cybersecurity and economics major at Northeastern University.

January 3, 2025

This is how to transcribe an echo

By Ashley Whee

DEC 21, 2024

In trying to teach my friend Korean, I say that you have to let the language break in your mouth a little. She tells me that of the languages she’s encountered, mine sounds the most guttural. We talk of how we approach language as melody, collecting sounds and inhabiting them like homes.

It’s clear to me now—belonging in this conversation has always required something of the body. But your books, your adaptations, they insist that I see blood first. That I taste it. Which buzzword will I see the theft of next. Tongue. Fluency. Labor. Daughter. They worry whether their trauma will be seen. I worry whether only my trauma will be seen.

I once had the terrible thought that suffering is a privilege. What is the price of desire? What do I sacrifice to acknowledge beauty? Am I victim or perpetrator? In your narrative, would I conform to be forgiven? This is, perhaps, what you would call resolution.

In trying to disprove invisibility, I am asked all the questions I am unable to answer. Visibility is a history that must be fluently captured. Only fluently. I want to be meaningful, you must understand, I want to speak in nothing less than blood-fattened prose, with the reddest tongue.

I get told I’m reading too much into it. I’m interrupting, I speak too aggressively, I don’t know enough to deserve an audience for my hysteria. Worse, I get called disingenuous for all the wrong reasons. The violence of my survival against those who do not know they are dying.

Write the dog metaphor for the fifth time—a dog that does not know it is a dog makes for the best meal. Think about what is eloquent in one language and antagonistic in another—powerful in their shrouding of true cruelty. True is to disrupt. To, necessarily, politicize.

how certain words lose their substance when overused / why they might be overused / how we let ourselves be gnawed away in our struggle to be heard through the void / why I can say that you're a fucking asshole, but I’m afraid to call you racist.

You ask for a question on subjectivity—let’s talk about power. In the conversation we’ll never have, I will tell you that I don’t think I can accept abstraction anymore. Those worn blue jeans. Those crescent bloated earrings. Those soured advocates for girlhood. Behind words, behind a name, obscuration—in what else might we know presence from absence? Religion, you might say.

Meanwhile, we neglect our own autonomy and treat tragedy as abstract. Meanwhile, they encroach on a language borne of resistance against white failure–a language obfuscated when the argument is to escape annihilation. Where the stakes are children being slaughtered and stolen against adopting the language of the oppressors to acquire their pity.

The pressures are always individualistic. The rest of humanity always an afterthought, always a moral weapon. Expendable.

At what point do you say, none of this is unfortunate. None of this is a result of fortune. At what point do you ask, who or what is measuring the worth of a life? At what point do you acknowledge, disposability to a nation preserved by imperialism will never find you in favor.

In trying to find a solution, we admit to each other our subconscious hunger for assimilation that ends the story there, nice and clean.

Our not-so-secret desire for erasure conflated with our desire for entry—how best to reject the deception of visibility when i preen at being called doll-like.

aww, your voice goes higher when you speak your native language.

aww, annyeonghasaeyo.

aww, i love your Sanrio pencil case.

Aww.

Ashley Whee is a psychology major at Northeastern University.

January 3, 2025

Aegukga

By Ashley Whee

DEC 21, 2024

i.
How else to describe this but immortal?
Forget the war that birthed you and
find redemption in a translation that
matters. Here are the paper crane wings
you asked for, the violent men and their
fumbling fingers on bruised marrows of
fruit. Here, you remember matda—
it means to be correct. It also means
to be hit.

ii.
Home has an echo, and it bleeds guilt.
Halmeoni never knew how to
pronounce endorphin, but you were
happy enough to unfurl the saekjongi
under her eyes. A hundred days leak
into a year. And now I love you more
because I don’t remember you. Carve
eleven until you cave in. And this winter
was beautiful because it snowed, and
you were purple and you were pining.
Here, you remember maleuda—to wither.
To thin.

iii.
A love letter to your summer of fools.
To your cultish
dreams, to your
first pink cheeks, to your
angel in
green. A kiss goodbye to
grief.
Because you
didn’t leave too late.
Remember the
shrill song of the maemi.
The
language of your loyalty,
deathless
like a dog’s. Here, you
forget sagua—bite the apple. Swallow the apology.

Ashley Whee is a psychology major at Northeastern University.

January 3, 2025

Nurture or Nature?

By Tessa Baum

JUN 11, 2024

In the waiting room, 
box after box
           Female
                         Asian
                                     Family history: unknown
I wonder about my blood and biology
I question my hands and high cheekbones.
I mourn my own smile and teeth
grieving the genes and flesh I’ll never meet.
The potential of a brother thousands 
of miles away
ignorant of my existence. 

Nurture or nature?

I had read that a child’s DNA can linger 
in the body decades after birth.
How long did I stay with her, 
                                                    stalling for more time?
Am I still with her now?
A sliver of a memory I’ll never quite grasp
I muse the evening down to the bone,
Are my introspections a trigger?
A spark, powerful enough to transcend
             language 
                          culture,
                                       and time
Do they reach her, too?
It’s comforting
these questions loiter 
walking the halls where memory should be.
I can become content with the echoes
of what I have of her. 

Nurture or nature?

If I could not be born from my mother’s body 
then I insist I was born from her mind
smoothed out by ebb and flow, 
tumbling waves of determination, dry humor. 
Like a daughter of Athena, 
her sculpture, careful craft of intellect and heart.
Aflame in my veins dwell counterweights 
on tilting scales
              her pessimistic persistence
              a tungsten gilded will that would fight even with the ending world
                         her deep blue confidence 
                         filled with memories and melancholy 
                         pacified with years of emotional tillage
	                                   I hold it all.

Nurture or nature?

If I could not be born from my mother’s body 
then I insist I was born from her voice.
My eggshell heart annealed, nourished 
by her stories of 
            carefully chosen family
            childhood dinner tables filled with laughter and full bellies
                         heartstrings braided thrice
                         pretty pink stains, like beets on cotton, love persists

I could not be born from my mother’s body.
I do not share her gray eyes
fair skin or stormy heart.
And, although our aptitudes pull from each other,
my hands speak a more visual language,
nine months could not make a difference. 
I insist that nurture is over nature.

Tessa Baum is a Boston-based poet.

January 3, 2025