Kartika_Issue15

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Platonic knowledge is joyful recollection (because traces don’t disappear) and how memory loss is morphine and character assassination. 9. After their mysterious marriage, my grandfather wanted his new Japanese wife and his hapa daughter to move to American as soon as possible. He didn’t want them to become Japs, even though both of them already were and he would never be. Nothing scared him more, in fact. Despite the fact that he was the foreigner and couldn’t understand my mom and my grandmother when they spoke to each other in nihongo, my grandfather banished them from their homeland, sending my mom and then later my sobo to a small town in Northern Michigan to rid them of their sickness called nihonjin no atashi (Japanese Me). This is the story of how an estranged gaijin in Japan (estranged from Yokohama, estranged from his own family in Washington state) turned his hapa daughter and Japanese wife into foreigners in America who would remain stuck in the spaces between cultures forever. 10. Part of the cultural definition of dementia is predicated on the notion of an unchanging self. Americans, in particular, have a monolithic view of the human personality. We pretend that each person has a single overarching self that controls all ancillary traits and characteristics. When we deviate from this monolithic personality superimposed on us from the outside, we’re described as “fake,” “fronting,” “trying too hard,” “phony,” all words used to described people who aren’t “real.” Sociolinguistically, what is “real” has become synonymous with what is true, legitimate and authentic, which is odd considering that humans have never agreed on what reality is for the simple reason that reality is an interpretation of our subjectivity, so elusive, so protean and ontologically promiscuous, like a consort of false idols and imaginary worlds. The binary line separating reality and fantasy is a false one. But this is exactly how reality is supposed to be—impossible to locate, impossible to delimit. This is the story of how we oversimplify the war maps of the self in order to avoid the battlefield of identity, in order to not step on the landmines of contradiction. 11. One of sobo’s last conscious projects was an album book of photographs she’d handpicked herself. Unlike the clean, well-divided and linear picture albums I’d shown her after reading a hospice pamphlet, my grandmother’s 64
ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013 album book was a masterpiece of fragmentation. In it, she had rearranged pictures of her life that often went backwards and upwards chronologically, laterally instead of sequentially. Often the pictures followed a circular, often a dizzying trajectory that always returned to her (hapa) family and her trailer in Traverse City, Michigan and her (American) life as a seamstress for wealthy, conservative white women that smiled when she spoke because her accent overpowered her words like an angry dime store perfume. By looping through time and space, her picture narrative returned again and again to her (hapa) grandsons she used to chase around with a broom and prepare somen noodles for in the summertime and drive to Mrs. Kurtz’s house in suburbia for piano lessons and sit, often for hours inside her own trailer, smoking Pall Malls 100’s and listening as Mozart and Beethoven rose up from the altar on her piano, the notes spilling out the windows that were opened wide for all the neighbors to remember, witnesses to my halfbutchered sonatas, all of them. This is the story of how my grandmother resisted the cult of linearity by bending her memories into a continuous song. 12. The day I realized my grandfather had raped my sobo was the day I realized I was capable of imagining terrible acts of violence. As a committed Buddhist, I’m ashamed by this confession but the burning rage remains inside me like mnemonic napalm. One day when we were eating TV dinners and watching TV, sobo told me: he made me do things I not want to do. While I can’t prove this, I have a feeling that what he forced her to do is what paper gods force ink mortals to do in Ovid’s metamorphoses. I have a hunch that this is how my mom was born, the reason my sobo married a drunk, stubborn American soldier who took away her childhood with a single act of infiltration. This is the story of how a woman married an atomic bomb to protect her family’s honor. 13. In America, we treat dementia as an incomplete version of the former self, even when it’s a result of insufficient oxygen to the brain by metastasized lungs. We view it as raving, possibly schizophrenic (but absolutely lunatic) alternative identity that has hijacked the personality of someone we used to know. Dementia is always the enemy, not our cultural insistence that who we are doesn’t change through time. Dementia is metempsychosis, a change or shift in human souls from one body to another. But what if dementia isn’t the subtraction of the self but the self’s own multiplication? What if dementia is not the cognitive haunting of who we once were or the perversion of how people once knew us but our most emancipated version of 65
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Cover Art: “The Home Front" from
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MISSION STATEMENT Kartika Review se
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EDITORIAL Eugenia Leigh Dear Reader
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Purvi Shah’s “Tree Risings” d
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The Home Front Jordan Josafat 10
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lip as she tried to swing her swoll
Page 14 and 15: “Masayuki! Tsune, sit quietly. Be
Page 16 and 17: simple wedding was kept. Along with
Page 18 and 19: Etsuko had backed out the door slow
Page 20 and 21: SKIN DEEP Anu Kandikuppa To: Kinder
Page 22 and 23: northwestern part of India, in part
Page 24 and 25: must use a blend of oils and perfor
Page 26 and 27: To: Ms. Clayton and Ms. Simpson Fro
Page 28 and 29: To: General Manager, Crayona Compan
Page 30 and 31: “Yes,” I said, “though I’m
Page 32 and 33: THOUGHTS OF SINKING Kaitlin Solimin
Page 34 and 35: I paused. How had she remembered th
Page 36 and 37: never touched any of the girls inap
Page 38 and 39: the next generation couldn’t best
Page 40 and 41: Chenxi climbed up the silver ladder
Page 42 and 43: she’d tried. She’d climbed to t
Page 44 and 45: else. For now, this tall, slow Amer
Page 46 and 47: “That’s true,” I said. I hate
Page 48 and 49: I’d read a newspaper article many
Page 50 and 51: Bomb the Morons 50
Page 52 and 53: Into the Wild 52
Page 54 and 55: Runaway Train 54
Page 56 and 57: PAROUSIA I Karen An-Hwei Lee Red bu
Page 58 and 59: QUARANTINE Henry W. Leung My feet p
Page 60 and 61: THE TRANSFUSION OF YUKIYO KANAHASHI
Page 62 and 63: 5. Some people will accuse me of bi
Page 66 and 67: our self, freed from the constraint
Page 68 and 69: the story of how I began studying J
Page 70 and 71: Jackson Bliss earned his MFA from t
Page 72 and 73: piece suit nearest the air conditio
Page 74 and 75: AUTHOR INTERVIEW WITH MONIQUE TRUON
Page 76 and 77: suspect everyone in Saigon was conc
Page 78 and 79: KR: What is the physical act of wri
Page 80 and 81: CONTRIBUTOR BIOS FICTION Sharon Has
Page 82 and 83: ART 82 What The Jordan Josafat Jord
Page 84 and 85: Nonfiction Editor, Jennifer Derilo
Page 86 and 87: Kartika Review is a national Asian
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