Here are the times that are taken in the schedule for submitting final papers:
5/28
Rand 1200
Samuel 1215
Roy 1300
Benson-Davis 1400
Miller 1500
Coryell 1510
5/29
Villarreal 1300
Kalbrener 1310
Anderman 1400
Meyer 1500
Standish 1600
Hendrikson 1630
Smith 1650
These are 10 minute appoitnments. When requesting an appointment, please select a time that has not been taken to avoid the need to reschedule.
NO papers will be accepted after 1700, 29/05
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Amanda Villarreal 2
Phase
The African winds arrived in San Antonio in the late summer and the dust they brought obscured the skyline during the day and created twilight shows of red, orange and violet, colors too vibrant to be normal. The winds blew all through August, and then disappeared. The grime that coated the city and the brilliant sunsets it produced washed away by a day of sudden thunderstorms.
The school year began in mid-August, when the city was still covered in a dull haze and the meteorologist gave science lessons every morning on the five am news, gesturing excitedly over the world map behind him, tracing the path of Sahara sands across the Atlantic, a natural phenomenon occurring every few years made unnatural by the pollutants it now carried. Ozone Action Day flashed on the TV screen in my parents’ bedroom, as I sat on the bed and waited for my mother to finishing ironing my white uniform blouse. Stay inside, the meteorologist taught us.
Don’t breathe the air.
It met her on my second day of classes at Incarnate Word School for Girls when skies were hot, clear, faded blue. It was after lunch and I was hurrying to my biology class, still excited about attending high school, thinking about the shine of my Tommy Hilfiger loafers and newness of my black watch plaid uniform. Then she just smashes into me, notebooks out of our arms, Chanel clutch gone, papers sailing off into the pond. She’s cussing, and I’ve never even heard some of the words she’s using, but the ones I do know are awful enough. And who actually uses the word ‘fuck,’ besides, you know, public schoolers?
She helps me pick up everything, the whole time complaining about how we’re not allowed to study outside, and how some old lady reprimanded her for sitting on the bench outside of the science building. Why, she asks, would someone put a bench outside if no one was allowed to sit on it? Then she turns to run after the papers that haven’t made it into the pond, yet.
I’m wondering whether to tell her not to bother, because I just want to get away from this girl who is talking to me like she knows me, with her wild curly hair hanging in her face. The matching black watch ribbon we all wear in our hair is tied around her throat, a dark collar, strange. And then she’s already back in front of me, her blue eyes too big for her face, like a bug, and she sticks her hand out. I take it, and she squeezes so hard that my ring loses its shape. Alexandria Jo Carollo, she says. Alex.
It turns out she’s a friend of friend, she used to go to public school, but she said that yeah, she was technically Catholic. We sit next to each other in theology class. She writes poetry about blood, love and broken mirrors in our workbooks, and rips out pages from her bible to make paper cranes. Thin strips of Matthew and Mark collect under her desk, and when the teacher says, Alejandra, explain yourself, she pretends not to hear because her name is not Alejandra. I’m like, dumb-ass gringa, just answer her. Then we both are sent into the hall with demerits, because I cussed and she blasphemed. So we sit around in the hall with her destroyed Bible, reading about Onan and the Song of Songs, and talking about how “dumb ass” is about as colorful as I get.
In the morning we’d meet in the hallway of the Theology wing, in front of our lockers, an hour and a half before classes started because our mothers had other things to do besides drop us off at school. Alex with dark bruises under her blue blue bright eyes, having slept three hours that night, same as always, from insomnia or nightmares or whatever she feels like blaming that week. She leans against the lockers and slides slowly down, her too-short plaid skirt riding up in the back, showing off black silk boxers. I hand her plastic cup, lop-sided and bulging on one side because it’s not microwave safe, but it’s all I had to make the Easy Mac in. She doesn’t mind because she knows I stole both the cup and the spoon from the teacher’s lounge, and I think she appreciates the sentiment. I sit down next to Xan, pressing my side against her side, and eat out of my own deformed cup. Our shoulders and hips line up, bare thigh to bare thigh, knees knocking, the knit of our knee-high socks making static and we stay close because the mornings are getting colder every day. We watch the sky lighten from navy blue to Crayola-crayon blue through the window at the end of the hall. A sudden gust of wind rattles the plastic windows, and we hear a loud bang and then the wind is pushing past us down the hall, harsh cold, blowing Alex’s curls into my face. I can taste her shampoo and my Easy Mac, and I sputter, pushing her hair away.
Alex smiles and drapes her arm around my shoulder. “Oh c’mon,” she says, “You know you like my taste. Eat me.” I roll my eyes and eat another spoonful of yellow noodles.
Until my mother finds out, stops giving me money for “in case” and forbids me leaving the campus, everyday after school Alex and I hold hands and walk over the little hills of rain lilies and past the brambles of bougainvillea and under the boughs of mountain laurels to the bridge that connects the cliffs of the high school and university. The bridge is a narrow strip of concrete wrapped up with a chain-link cage to prevent people from throwing things like rocks, trash, and themselves on to highway 281’s eight lanes, some four stories down. We cross it, swinging our clasped hands between us, and tell each other secrets, the noise of the highway below swallowing up our words, keeping them safe from eavesdropping friends. I cling to the chain-link wall as I confess, and she stands in the middle of the bridge, not too close too either side, her only fear exposed as she refuses to look down. She only ventures close enough to loop her arms around my waist and tug me away from the side and push me towards the other end, and we laugh when the truck drivers blew their horns at us because our skirts have flipped up in the rush hour wind. On the other side, across the parking lot shaded by thin china berry trees, we go the Intercultural Center and take the elevator to the fourth floor where the Starbucks is, across from the University bookstore, where we buy our overpriced textbooks. The Starbucks, with the cute guy who just stares at the game on the TV, featuring two teams from someplace that speaks Spanish and is not Mexico. We order a chocolate-mocha-brownie bit frappacino to share and leave our change in the tip jar so the guy might smile at us, but he doesn’t, so we figure he’s gay. On the walk back we make up a story about him and his lover, who we figure would be from California and probably blond. Of course, their love is tragic and doomed and all that, since Californians are crazy, and besides, they live far apart. Around the time we finish our drink, we’re sharing one of the plush maroon chairs in the air-conditioned lobby of our school, and Paco from Texas has just discovered that Chad from California left him for Suzie Floozy from New Hampshire, and we have an audience of girls lounging on the worn Persian carpet, picking at the dirty fringe until our mothers honk their horns in the driveway. Then we swing our backpacks on to a shoulder and run for those battered vans whose sliding doors always get stuck.
Alex and I always told stories, and sometimes they were just made up on the spot, but mostly the stories were over-thought epics that always focused on the two of us as the main characters. I told fairytales with magic, islands, kingdoms and gardens, with me as princess and Alex as general, with lengthy descriptions of stained glass windows and parapets, gossamer gowns and codes of chivalry. Battle erupted in tandem with arguments with friends, and princes came rushing in only to be brushed away as crushes came and went. I talked until I went hoarse, croaking out an ending, my throat dry and aching, and Alex pulled me close and hugged me tight, saying, “Your story is very pretty, and fun.” I waited. “And sort of insipid and ridiculous. Like you, I guess.” She had already grabbed my wrists so I couldn’t smack her or scratch her eyes out as she screeched that hey, she called me pretty, too, but I just threw my head back to try and break her nose.
I did not succeed and instead Alex began telling me her stories, just as long as mine but with the beginnings always getting erased and retold. All the versions had a red-headed grey-eyed heroine that I recognized as her, re-cast into something even stranger than what she already was. Red-gold wild curls instead of the glints of the color in her chestnut hair, grey eyes instead of her strange neon blue. Her tongue flicked out and licked the scar on her top lip as she told me about razors, chains and boarding schools stories in goth colors. Sometime she gave her characters wings, huge wings that they could fly away on, not that it mattered, because everyone always died at the end of the story. All her stories were every bit as predictable as mine, but I still cried.
We began to talk in a code meant for only each other, laughing as non sequiturs piled one after another, leaving our friends confused. “Ivy, my tetra of a luffer,” she’d coo, and I’d dramatically collapse into arms, crying, “Oh, Pomegranate Salvation! Take me on blue-flowered sheets!” On a note she stuck on my locker, it read, “Always speak your mind and remember to smile with potassium. Jesus wants to eat your eyes.” She signed it, “Your Salvation.”
Alex couldn’t even laugh like the other girls. Her laugh came bubbling up from deep inside her, a throaty sound that would shake her shoulders until it came pouring out, loud and deep like a man’s laugh, her head thrown back so I can see her throat, long white graceful thin. The kind of throat that suggests reaching out to run a finger down it to the dip in the collar bone, or wrapping both hands around and strangling her because she’s flipped up my skirt again in the hall, flashing everyone my unicorn boxers.
People mistook us as twins. Never our friends, because our personalities made it impossible for them to see us as we were—they always insisted Alex was larger than me, even though she was slimmer, and that my features were more feminine, while it was Alex who had porcelain skin, a small nose and high cheek bones. But teachers and nuns only saw that we were the same height, with curly brown hair and light eyes, and assumed that we were the same person, or sisters. Never mind that she was white, and I had excellent manners and a perfect pony tail. One Halloween we dressed up like each other and switched places. All it got me was two demerits by the end of the day, for talking back.
“We are sisters, lost through the generations,” Says Alex, sitting cross-legged in front of me, mimicking my motions, so that we could impress our friends later with our mastery of the mirror game. “I bet,” she says, and we both reach to caress the other’s cheek, “That my gypsy ancestors seduced your noble relatives.” My hand falters and draws away as Alex reaches up with her other, breaking the mirror. Alex rolls her eyes. “Seven years bad luck. But still, I can see it. Your pretty, tight-laced distant relative taking a turn in their Spanish rose garden on the edge of their villa, and then up rolls my family in their wagon, all loud color, silk scarves and tambourines, and the two are knockin’ boots out by stable before the day’s done. That’s why we look the same.”
“That’s disgusting,” I say, re-creating the mirror. “My family would never mix with gypsies.”
Alex adored my family, eating their food on weekends and using them to irritate me on school days. “Christ,” she would exclaim, “Where are your earrings? How is anyone going to see you without your earrings?” mimicking my grandmother. Or maybe, “I saw the strangest thing just now. I could have sworn I saw a boy in our school, wearing our uniform,” she’d pause, allowing for my eye roll since I knew what was coming, “But then I realized it was you. Where’s your make-up, mija? How is anyone going to tell you’re a girl?”
But by the time she gets to “girl” she’s already laughing, ruining the impersonation of my grandfather. The most annoying part of it is that my grandparents are convinced that Alex never leaves the house without make-up, even though she doesn’t even own lipgloss, because of her naturally rosy cheeks and purplish tint of her eye lids. “Don’t you white people have anything better to do than mock well-bred Mexican girls?” I huff. “Go steal someone’s land, or something.”
“Been there, done that. We call it the King Ranch.” That’s another sore point in my family, particularly for my father, who brings it up every time he has to pay a bill. Alex finds it hilarious that he can complain about something that happened a hundred and fifty years ago, but she doesn’t understand history the way we do. Alex’s father died when she was ten, and her mom’s her only family. It’s strange enough that she never attended Catholic school before high school, her mom doesn’t go to church and she’s not Mexican, not even a little bit, not even a little bit of anything that speaks Spanish. But no family, too? So none of the girls ever tease her about her family, because some things are just rude to bring up.
My mother stopped giving me money and so after school our stomachs growled and we sat around and talked, the heat and our hunger making us lazy. Alex and I would hang out by the rose bushes and the overgrown honeysuckle and wait for our moms to pick us up. Alex would lay right on top of that honeysuckle, like it was a couch, and pull me on with her, leaves like feather down and pink-orange trumpets stuck between our lips to satisfy our sugar cravings.
In the spring, Alex and I picked all the roses, each one full of rain, and wove them wet into our hair. Rose water, we said, hoping it would make our curls magic or manageable. We stuck the petals to our skin in swirling lines, and called ourselves rose warriors. That’s when Alex kissed me and I kissed her. It short and tasted green because we’d been hungry and eaten some of the roses.
Then my mom showed up and I went home, ripping flowers out of my hair and frantically pulling it into a ponytail as I ran to the car. It didn’t work, and I got in trouble anyway, for making a mess of myself.
Alex and I loved each other in simple ways. We went to the movies together sometimes, just us, not our friends. She’d buy me Mayan chocolate ice cream and I’d buy her a book, or a shiny rock. Maybe in the hall, when her arm was slung around my shoulders like any friend might do, her thumb would brush along my neck. Or when she would hug me, one of her hands would find the place where my shirt ended, and my back would feel her palm, hot. During sleepovers, we’d share a sleeping bag, my head under her chin. In the summers we’d meet up on weekends, get a smoothie with two straws and sit around in a bookstore reading trash fantasy novels and flipping through stacks of comic books.
Our friends knew about it; mostly, they pretended it wasn’t happening. Alex and I were just best friends, they reasoned, and weren’t all the girls really affectionate, kissing hello and goodbye, sitting on each other’s laps at lunch to steal a fry? What made Alex and I different were the smallest increments of time, that when added together, gave the other girls an uneasy feeling—a hug that is too long, with hips pressed too close together. A kiss on the lips that lingered a fraction of a second too long to be playful. The way our gaze lingered on one another, always watching the curve of her back, the bend of my wrist, the turn of her head.
We stopped hanging around the gardens near the parking lot and would sneak up onto the roof instead, sprawled out staring straight up into the clean blue sky, Alex’s eyes absorbing the color into her own. Her shirt riding up and my arm slung over her exposed stomach, fingers stroking her side, but neither of us caring or really feeling anything beside the sun pressing on us, burning us into the stone under our bodies. Sometimes we’d just sit around and bitch about Math, or watch the white pigeons as they flew in and out of the school’s bell tower, and wonder how they became so different from the other pigeons. Mostly, we were just worried about keeping our mothers waiting, and we spent a lot of time peering nervously over the edge of the roof.
As the days cooled we’d find the energy to argue, happy and sarcastic, for hours up there. I would reach behind her neck and let my hand rest there, while my fingers played with the knot of her ribbon-choker, so that it would come loose at a sudden gust of November wind. She caught me at it once, grabbing my wrist and squeezing until the bones made a wet, snapping sound as they slid past each other. “Stop that,” she said, her eyes narrowed, electric blue from the sky.
“It doesn’t look,” and I stop myself before I say ‘good,’ and finish, “right.”
“It’s what I do. Deal with it.”
And I did, because that was the only way to have her. I never told her it was also the only way I wanted her. Alex, bold and reckless, flipping off the principal as we drive away in my jeep, ditching class for Chinese food. I chided her for her wild irresponsibility, and lectured her about her violent streak, but I loved her and everything about her. I collected demerits for tying my tie like a boy’s, for drawing on my shoes and cussing after chapel. I let my hair go free like hers, although it never looked quite as pretty, the curls never as defined, and my grandma started addressing me as “Bruja.” Alex was everything in world worth having: all that loudness, color, bang fuck shit smash it all to hell. “Don’t be afraid to cut your tongue as you lick up the shards of life,” she’d say. She was strong, unstoppable, afraid of nothing, and I swore I would never let her go.
When I told my parents that I was in love with Alex, my mother told me to go to my room and spent the rest of the night talking to my father. Laying on my bed, I watched the overhead fan beating the dying spring air and the mosquitoes the size of avocado pits dance on the wall. Eventually I pulled out my Math textbook and wrote down some problems, not really intending to solve any of them, only wanting to look productive if my father came in. There were words, I knew, that would be attached to these feeling I had for Alex. I had read books about it to satisfy my curiosity, but it was different from Alex and me, I thought. That movement, the politics, those women were not Alex. They were certainly not me, with my altar to the Virgen in the corner of my room, well decorated with dried roses, honeysuckle scented-candles and my Clinique compacts dropped there from this morning. But if my parents came in, and demanded answers, I would have to claim something, I would have to give them some reason, some understanding, and I knew that I would point to that word, the one that everyone understood and I still could not bring myself to say while thinking of how much I loved her. Over the hum of the fan, mosquitoes, and the flipping pages of my textbook, I could hear nothing. There was no yelling, no slamming doors, no hint of tense whispers beyond my bedroom. I was ready to defend my right to love, to run away into the San Antonio night, or maybe even be kicked out of my home, a choice which seemed the most preferable in consideration to romantic notions, but I just waited. When my ten o’clock bedtime came, I washed my face, brushed my teeth and tucked myself into bed. Hours later, my door opened briefly to shed light on my bed, and they whispered “I love you,” and “Goodnight,” and then shut the door, assuming I was asleep.
The next day, when my mother drove me to school, she talked about how young people sometimes experiment and go through these phases. Young people can develop such intense friendships that they get confused and think they’re in love. But of course, they’re not really in love, and it all goes away once they start to date members of the opposite sex, and once they really fall in love, they forget all about that other person. After that, we didn’t talk about it anymore. And once I realized that Alex had no intention of ever telling her mom about her feelings for me, not even Alex and I talked about it.
She wrote me first, wrote to me first. It was just a short story, some little ficlet about two boys who were best friends, but one of them died. She could never break her habit of killing characters, but one, at least, would always survive. It was overly sentimental for anyone, especially Alex, but I appreciated it anyway: “And I'm rambling aren't I, boring you with melodramatic chunks of my musings. At least I'm not there to see you roll your eyes at me. Roll your eyes, I'm sorry, I want to be there more then I can stand. Our friendship shall be the stuff of legends—it already is to me.” Maybe I was more touched by it because it was the only time the character that represented me managed to survive the story. She called me her muse, and I spontaneously combusted, was crucified on a mantle place, and tenderly murdered by her. She was sweet, in her own ways. “Mint eyes,” she wrote, describing me. “Her resplendent dress a nearly incandescent pale green, so shiny it looked moist to the touch. A fairy gown, light and airy as she turned to scold in hushed tones, the social vampire at my wrist.” Green eyes she found so fitting for her Ivy, the dress I wore at that formal when I sent my date home and spent the evening with her, instead. Back then, I never wrote her. I didn’t want to compete, didn’t know if I even could, didn’t know what I even was allowed to say.
I started dating boys, and so did Alex. Neither of us talked about this with each other; when guys asked us out we just shrugged and said okay, or blushed and said thank-you, depending on the guy and the occasion. Alex went out with guys who had names like Valentine, Wolf, and Laterrious Starks. I dated boys who kept their hands to themselves, didn’t expect me to kiss them, paid for everything, and even proposed. I told them I was going to college out of state, and stopped calling.
On the last day of school, Alex helped me clear out my locker. We rested at the on the back stairwell, overlooking the drained pond. Alex sucked on one of her curls. I’m sorry about everything, she said. I know it sucked, but I couldn’t tell my mom. I know that wasn’t really fair to you. But you know, it was probably just a phase, right? We’re dating other people, and college starts soon, and it was probably just a phase. And then she pulled me toward her, awkwardly bending over the box on her lap, and kissed my neck as she hugged me. You’ll always be my Ivy, she said.
Alex went to a state college in conservative East Texas and started going by the name “Xan.” She began to brush her hair and wear jean skirts and button down tops, and pearl earrings. When I declared Creative Writing as my major, she counseled caution. “Best go into teaching. At least then you won’t starve. God, the ideas those hippie northerners come up with.” I wanted to point out that this was the path she had told me to take, written in my senior memory book. “I’ll curse you if you don’t make something of yourself. We need to be published so the world may tremble! Love you, always will, despite myself.” I should have understood that last line better.
After a two-year long engagement, she married in December of her junior year in college, with me as her maid of honor. She literally bounced with excitement the whole time, much to the dismay of the congregation. Her last name changed to Garvin as I held her bouquet at the altar. At the reception, she made out with her new husband and danced with me the whole night through, her hand on my waist, my forehead resting on her shoulder. Her friends from college made speeches to Xan, but I don’t, because I told her everything I could think to say in the dressing room, earlier, as I fastened her train onto the back of her gown, and I’m not going to try and top myself in front of a country club filled with her husband’s family. When it’s time for her to leave in her limo to her honeymoon suite, I hold the umbrella over her head as she dashes out, her gown gathered up into her arms, white stocking legs exposed. I’m soaked through, but it doesn’t matter anyway because I’m just driving home alone after this, so what does it matter if my mascara runs down my cheeks and my eyes sting as I help her into the vehicle. She grabs my hand, pulling me down and half way into the limo before I can shut the door. And then it’s everything all over again as she puts her hand behind my neck and kisses me, her thumb brushing the skin there, her husband dead-tired in his rumpled officer’s uniform and blearily staring out the other window at the rain. And then she smiles and says goodbye, taking the umbrella with her so I’m left wet and cold in a ruined blue satin dress, watching that black sleek thing slide across the parking lot as the rest of the wedding party disperses to their own cars.
A few weeks later, I call her, upset because I’ve been dumped by my boyfriend. It rings and I wonder where she is at eight in the evening on a Wednesday that she can’t answer her phone. Her voicemail disorients me, making me hesitate for a second too long after the beep, not recognizing the sound of her new name. “Yo, this is Xan Garvin, leave a message and all that shit.” She sings her last name, and somewhere between her dragging out the first syllable and lilting sharply upward on the second, I’m lost. I hang up and try again, this time leaving my message.
She calls back a few days later to cheer me up, and says that my ex is android who can suck her vibrating purple cock. She says other nice things, too, nice in her own way, like how all the other frosty bitches of the world can’t hold a candle to me, and she’d totally fuck me, except, you know, everyone needs one friend who’s attracted to them but won’t fuck them. We laugh, and I tell her how much I love and miss her and she says, “I know, babe.” We talk about how in the fall I’ll be in Chicago and her husband will be in Iraq, and so she’ll drive up and spend Thanksgiving with me. She’s looking forward to seeing one of those big lakes, which she’s been told has sand and even small waves, like it’s trying to pass itself off as an ocean. The Windy City, she says, remember how we met? I remember, I say. I’m still waiting for the dust to settle.
The African winds arrived in San Antonio in the late summer and the dust they brought obscured the skyline during the day and created twilight shows of red, orange and violet, colors too vibrant to be normal. The winds blew all through August, and then disappeared. The grime that coated the city and the brilliant sunsets it produced washed away by a day of sudden thunderstorms.
The school year began in mid-August, when the city was still covered in a dull haze and the meteorologist gave science lessons every morning on the five am news, gesturing excitedly over the world map behind him, tracing the path of Sahara sands across the Atlantic, a natural phenomenon occurring every few years made unnatural by the pollutants it now carried. Ozone Action Day flashed on the TV screen in my parents’ bedroom, as I sat on the bed and waited for my mother to finishing ironing my white uniform blouse. Stay inside, the meteorologist taught us.
Don’t breathe the air.
It met her on my second day of classes at Incarnate Word School for Girls when skies were hot, clear, faded blue. It was after lunch and I was hurrying to my biology class, still excited about attending high school, thinking about the shine of my Tommy Hilfiger loafers and newness of my black watch plaid uniform. Then she just smashes into me, notebooks out of our arms, Chanel clutch gone, papers sailing off into the pond. She’s cussing, and I’ve never even heard some of the words she’s using, but the ones I do know are awful enough. And who actually uses the word ‘fuck,’ besides, you know, public schoolers?
She helps me pick up everything, the whole time complaining about how we’re not allowed to study outside, and how some old lady reprimanded her for sitting on the bench outside of the science building. Why, she asks, would someone put a bench outside if no one was allowed to sit on it? Then she turns to run after the papers that haven’t made it into the pond, yet.
I’m wondering whether to tell her not to bother, because I just want to get away from this girl who is talking to me like she knows me, with her wild curly hair hanging in her face. The matching black watch ribbon we all wear in our hair is tied around her throat, a dark collar, strange. And then she’s already back in front of me, her blue eyes too big for her face, like a bug, and she sticks her hand out. I take it, and she squeezes so hard that my ring loses its shape. Alexandria Jo Carollo, she says. Alex.
It turns out she’s a friend of friend, she used to go to public school, but she said that yeah, she was technically Catholic. We sit next to each other in theology class. She writes poetry about blood, love and broken mirrors in our workbooks, and rips out pages from her bible to make paper cranes. Thin strips of Matthew and Mark collect under her desk, and when the teacher says, Alejandra, explain yourself, she pretends not to hear because her name is not Alejandra. I’m like, dumb-ass gringa, just answer her. Then we both are sent into the hall with demerits, because I cussed and she blasphemed. So we sit around in the hall with her destroyed Bible, reading about Onan and the Song of Songs, and talking about how “dumb ass” is about as colorful as I get.
In the morning we’d meet in the hallway of the Theology wing, in front of our lockers, an hour and a half before classes started because our mothers had other things to do besides drop us off at school. Alex with dark bruises under her blue blue bright eyes, having slept three hours that night, same as always, from insomnia or nightmares or whatever she feels like blaming that week. She leans against the lockers and slides slowly down, her too-short plaid skirt riding up in the back, showing off black silk boxers. I hand her plastic cup, lop-sided and bulging on one side because it’s not microwave safe, but it’s all I had to make the Easy Mac in. She doesn’t mind because she knows I stole both the cup and the spoon from the teacher’s lounge, and I think she appreciates the sentiment. I sit down next to Xan, pressing my side against her side, and eat out of my own deformed cup. Our shoulders and hips line up, bare thigh to bare thigh, knees knocking, the knit of our knee-high socks making static and we stay close because the mornings are getting colder every day. We watch the sky lighten from navy blue to Crayola-crayon blue through the window at the end of the hall. A sudden gust of wind rattles the plastic windows, and we hear a loud bang and then the wind is pushing past us down the hall, harsh cold, blowing Alex’s curls into my face. I can taste her shampoo and my Easy Mac, and I sputter, pushing her hair away.
Alex smiles and drapes her arm around my shoulder. “Oh c’mon,” she says, “You know you like my taste. Eat me.” I roll my eyes and eat another spoonful of yellow noodles.
Until my mother finds out, stops giving me money for “in case” and forbids me leaving the campus, everyday after school Alex and I hold hands and walk over the little hills of rain lilies and past the brambles of bougainvillea and under the boughs of mountain laurels to the bridge that connects the cliffs of the high school and university. The bridge is a narrow strip of concrete wrapped up with a chain-link cage to prevent people from throwing things like rocks, trash, and themselves on to highway 281’s eight lanes, some four stories down. We cross it, swinging our clasped hands between us, and tell each other secrets, the noise of the highway below swallowing up our words, keeping them safe from eavesdropping friends. I cling to the chain-link wall as I confess, and she stands in the middle of the bridge, not too close too either side, her only fear exposed as she refuses to look down. She only ventures close enough to loop her arms around my waist and tug me away from the side and push me towards the other end, and we laugh when the truck drivers blew their horns at us because our skirts have flipped up in the rush hour wind. On the other side, across the parking lot shaded by thin china berry trees, we go the Intercultural Center and take the elevator to the fourth floor where the Starbucks is, across from the University bookstore, where we buy our overpriced textbooks. The Starbucks, with the cute guy who just stares at the game on the TV, featuring two teams from someplace that speaks Spanish and is not Mexico. We order a chocolate-mocha-brownie bit frappacino to share and leave our change in the tip jar so the guy might smile at us, but he doesn’t, so we figure he’s gay. On the walk back we make up a story about him and his lover, who we figure would be from California and probably blond. Of course, their love is tragic and doomed and all that, since Californians are crazy, and besides, they live far apart. Around the time we finish our drink, we’re sharing one of the plush maroon chairs in the air-conditioned lobby of our school, and Paco from Texas has just discovered that Chad from California left him for Suzie Floozy from New Hampshire, and we have an audience of girls lounging on the worn Persian carpet, picking at the dirty fringe until our mothers honk their horns in the driveway. Then we swing our backpacks on to a shoulder and run for those battered vans whose sliding doors always get stuck.
Alex and I always told stories, and sometimes they were just made up on the spot, but mostly the stories were over-thought epics that always focused on the two of us as the main characters. I told fairytales with magic, islands, kingdoms and gardens, with me as princess and Alex as general, with lengthy descriptions of stained glass windows and parapets, gossamer gowns and codes of chivalry. Battle erupted in tandem with arguments with friends, and princes came rushing in only to be brushed away as crushes came and went. I talked until I went hoarse, croaking out an ending, my throat dry and aching, and Alex pulled me close and hugged me tight, saying, “Your story is very pretty, and fun.” I waited. “And sort of insipid and ridiculous. Like you, I guess.” She had already grabbed my wrists so I couldn’t smack her or scratch her eyes out as she screeched that hey, she called me pretty, too, but I just threw my head back to try and break her nose.
I did not succeed and instead Alex began telling me her stories, just as long as mine but with the beginnings always getting erased and retold. All the versions had a red-headed grey-eyed heroine that I recognized as her, re-cast into something even stranger than what she already was. Red-gold wild curls instead of the glints of the color in her chestnut hair, grey eyes instead of her strange neon blue. Her tongue flicked out and licked the scar on her top lip as she told me about razors, chains and boarding schools stories in goth colors. Sometime she gave her characters wings, huge wings that they could fly away on, not that it mattered, because everyone always died at the end of the story. All her stories were every bit as predictable as mine, but I still cried.
We began to talk in a code meant for only each other, laughing as non sequiturs piled one after another, leaving our friends confused. “Ivy, my tetra of a luffer,” she’d coo, and I’d dramatically collapse into arms, crying, “Oh, Pomegranate Salvation! Take me on blue-flowered sheets!” On a note she stuck on my locker, it read, “Always speak your mind and remember to smile with potassium. Jesus wants to eat your eyes.” She signed it, “Your Salvation.”
Alex couldn’t even laugh like the other girls. Her laugh came bubbling up from deep inside her, a throaty sound that would shake her shoulders until it came pouring out, loud and deep like a man’s laugh, her head thrown back so I can see her throat, long white graceful thin. The kind of throat that suggests reaching out to run a finger down it to the dip in the collar bone, or wrapping both hands around and strangling her because she’s flipped up my skirt again in the hall, flashing everyone my unicorn boxers.
People mistook us as twins. Never our friends, because our personalities made it impossible for them to see us as we were—they always insisted Alex was larger than me, even though she was slimmer, and that my features were more feminine, while it was Alex who had porcelain skin, a small nose and high cheek bones. But teachers and nuns only saw that we were the same height, with curly brown hair and light eyes, and assumed that we were the same person, or sisters. Never mind that she was white, and I had excellent manners and a perfect pony tail. One Halloween we dressed up like each other and switched places. All it got me was two demerits by the end of the day, for talking back.
“We are sisters, lost through the generations,” Says Alex, sitting cross-legged in front of me, mimicking my motions, so that we could impress our friends later with our mastery of the mirror game. “I bet,” she says, and we both reach to caress the other’s cheek, “That my gypsy ancestors seduced your noble relatives.” My hand falters and draws away as Alex reaches up with her other, breaking the mirror. Alex rolls her eyes. “Seven years bad luck. But still, I can see it. Your pretty, tight-laced distant relative taking a turn in their Spanish rose garden on the edge of their villa, and then up rolls my family in their wagon, all loud color, silk scarves and tambourines, and the two are knockin’ boots out by stable before the day’s done. That’s why we look the same.”
“That’s disgusting,” I say, re-creating the mirror. “My family would never mix with gypsies.”
Alex adored my family, eating their food on weekends and using them to irritate me on school days. “Christ,” she would exclaim, “Where are your earrings? How is anyone going to see you without your earrings?” mimicking my grandmother. Or maybe, “I saw the strangest thing just now. I could have sworn I saw a boy in our school, wearing our uniform,” she’d pause, allowing for my eye roll since I knew what was coming, “But then I realized it was you. Where’s your make-up, mija? How is anyone going to tell you’re a girl?”
But by the time she gets to “girl” she’s already laughing, ruining the impersonation of my grandfather. The most annoying part of it is that my grandparents are convinced that Alex never leaves the house without make-up, even though she doesn’t even own lipgloss, because of her naturally rosy cheeks and purplish tint of her eye lids. “Don’t you white people have anything better to do than mock well-bred Mexican girls?” I huff. “Go steal someone’s land, or something.”
“Been there, done that. We call it the King Ranch.” That’s another sore point in my family, particularly for my father, who brings it up every time he has to pay a bill. Alex finds it hilarious that he can complain about something that happened a hundred and fifty years ago, but she doesn’t understand history the way we do. Alex’s father died when she was ten, and her mom’s her only family. It’s strange enough that she never attended Catholic school before high school, her mom doesn’t go to church and she’s not Mexican, not even a little bit, not even a little bit of anything that speaks Spanish. But no family, too? So none of the girls ever tease her about her family, because some things are just rude to bring up.
My mother stopped giving me money and so after school our stomachs growled and we sat around and talked, the heat and our hunger making us lazy. Alex and I would hang out by the rose bushes and the overgrown honeysuckle and wait for our moms to pick us up. Alex would lay right on top of that honeysuckle, like it was a couch, and pull me on with her, leaves like feather down and pink-orange trumpets stuck between our lips to satisfy our sugar cravings.
In the spring, Alex and I picked all the roses, each one full of rain, and wove them wet into our hair. Rose water, we said, hoping it would make our curls magic or manageable. We stuck the petals to our skin in swirling lines, and called ourselves rose warriors. That’s when Alex kissed me and I kissed her. It short and tasted green because we’d been hungry and eaten some of the roses.
Then my mom showed up and I went home, ripping flowers out of my hair and frantically pulling it into a ponytail as I ran to the car. It didn’t work, and I got in trouble anyway, for making a mess of myself.
Alex and I loved each other in simple ways. We went to the movies together sometimes, just us, not our friends. She’d buy me Mayan chocolate ice cream and I’d buy her a book, or a shiny rock. Maybe in the hall, when her arm was slung around my shoulders like any friend might do, her thumb would brush along my neck. Or when she would hug me, one of her hands would find the place where my shirt ended, and my back would feel her palm, hot. During sleepovers, we’d share a sleeping bag, my head under her chin. In the summers we’d meet up on weekends, get a smoothie with two straws and sit around in a bookstore reading trash fantasy novels and flipping through stacks of comic books.
Our friends knew about it; mostly, they pretended it wasn’t happening. Alex and I were just best friends, they reasoned, and weren’t all the girls really affectionate, kissing hello and goodbye, sitting on each other’s laps at lunch to steal a fry? What made Alex and I different were the smallest increments of time, that when added together, gave the other girls an uneasy feeling—a hug that is too long, with hips pressed too close together. A kiss on the lips that lingered a fraction of a second too long to be playful. The way our gaze lingered on one another, always watching the curve of her back, the bend of my wrist, the turn of her head.
We stopped hanging around the gardens near the parking lot and would sneak up onto the roof instead, sprawled out staring straight up into the clean blue sky, Alex’s eyes absorbing the color into her own. Her shirt riding up and my arm slung over her exposed stomach, fingers stroking her side, but neither of us caring or really feeling anything beside the sun pressing on us, burning us into the stone under our bodies. Sometimes we’d just sit around and bitch about Math, or watch the white pigeons as they flew in and out of the school’s bell tower, and wonder how they became so different from the other pigeons. Mostly, we were just worried about keeping our mothers waiting, and we spent a lot of time peering nervously over the edge of the roof.
As the days cooled we’d find the energy to argue, happy and sarcastic, for hours up there. I would reach behind her neck and let my hand rest there, while my fingers played with the knot of her ribbon-choker, so that it would come loose at a sudden gust of November wind. She caught me at it once, grabbing my wrist and squeezing until the bones made a wet, snapping sound as they slid past each other. “Stop that,” she said, her eyes narrowed, electric blue from the sky.
“It doesn’t look,” and I stop myself before I say ‘good,’ and finish, “right.”
“It’s what I do. Deal with it.”
And I did, because that was the only way to have her. I never told her it was also the only way I wanted her. Alex, bold and reckless, flipping off the principal as we drive away in my jeep, ditching class for Chinese food. I chided her for her wild irresponsibility, and lectured her about her violent streak, but I loved her and everything about her. I collected demerits for tying my tie like a boy’s, for drawing on my shoes and cussing after chapel. I let my hair go free like hers, although it never looked quite as pretty, the curls never as defined, and my grandma started addressing me as “Bruja.” Alex was everything in world worth having: all that loudness, color, bang fuck shit smash it all to hell. “Don’t be afraid to cut your tongue as you lick up the shards of life,” she’d say. She was strong, unstoppable, afraid of nothing, and I swore I would never let her go.
When I told my parents that I was in love with Alex, my mother told me to go to my room and spent the rest of the night talking to my father. Laying on my bed, I watched the overhead fan beating the dying spring air and the mosquitoes the size of avocado pits dance on the wall. Eventually I pulled out my Math textbook and wrote down some problems, not really intending to solve any of them, only wanting to look productive if my father came in. There were words, I knew, that would be attached to these feeling I had for Alex. I had read books about it to satisfy my curiosity, but it was different from Alex and me, I thought. That movement, the politics, those women were not Alex. They were certainly not me, with my altar to the Virgen in the corner of my room, well decorated with dried roses, honeysuckle scented-candles and my Clinique compacts dropped there from this morning. But if my parents came in, and demanded answers, I would have to claim something, I would have to give them some reason, some understanding, and I knew that I would point to that word, the one that everyone understood and I still could not bring myself to say while thinking of how much I loved her. Over the hum of the fan, mosquitoes, and the flipping pages of my textbook, I could hear nothing. There was no yelling, no slamming doors, no hint of tense whispers beyond my bedroom. I was ready to defend my right to love, to run away into the San Antonio night, or maybe even be kicked out of my home, a choice which seemed the most preferable in consideration to romantic notions, but I just waited. When my ten o’clock bedtime came, I washed my face, brushed my teeth and tucked myself into bed. Hours later, my door opened briefly to shed light on my bed, and they whispered “I love you,” and “Goodnight,” and then shut the door, assuming I was asleep.
The next day, when my mother drove me to school, she talked about how young people sometimes experiment and go through these phases. Young people can develop such intense friendships that they get confused and think they’re in love. But of course, they’re not really in love, and it all goes away once they start to date members of the opposite sex, and once they really fall in love, they forget all about that other person. After that, we didn’t talk about it anymore. And once I realized that Alex had no intention of ever telling her mom about her feelings for me, not even Alex and I talked about it.
She wrote me first, wrote to me first. It was just a short story, some little ficlet about two boys who were best friends, but one of them died. She could never break her habit of killing characters, but one, at least, would always survive. It was overly sentimental for anyone, especially Alex, but I appreciated it anyway: “And I'm rambling aren't I, boring you with melodramatic chunks of my musings. At least I'm not there to see you roll your eyes at me. Roll your eyes, I'm sorry, I want to be there more then I can stand. Our friendship shall be the stuff of legends—it already is to me.” Maybe I was more touched by it because it was the only time the character that represented me managed to survive the story. She called me her muse, and I spontaneously combusted, was crucified on a mantle place, and tenderly murdered by her. She was sweet, in her own ways. “Mint eyes,” she wrote, describing me. “Her resplendent dress a nearly incandescent pale green, so shiny it looked moist to the touch. A fairy gown, light and airy as she turned to scold in hushed tones, the social vampire at my wrist.” Green eyes she found so fitting for her Ivy, the dress I wore at that formal when I sent my date home and spent the evening with her, instead. Back then, I never wrote her. I didn’t want to compete, didn’t know if I even could, didn’t know what I even was allowed to say.
I started dating boys, and so did Alex. Neither of us talked about this with each other; when guys asked us out we just shrugged and said okay, or blushed and said thank-you, depending on the guy and the occasion. Alex went out with guys who had names like Valentine, Wolf, and Laterrious Starks. I dated boys who kept their hands to themselves, didn’t expect me to kiss them, paid for everything, and even proposed. I told them I was going to college out of state, and stopped calling.
On the last day of school, Alex helped me clear out my locker. We rested at the on the back stairwell, overlooking the drained pond. Alex sucked on one of her curls. I’m sorry about everything, she said. I know it sucked, but I couldn’t tell my mom. I know that wasn’t really fair to you. But you know, it was probably just a phase, right? We’re dating other people, and college starts soon, and it was probably just a phase. And then she pulled me toward her, awkwardly bending over the box on her lap, and kissed my neck as she hugged me. You’ll always be my Ivy, she said.
Alex went to a state college in conservative East Texas and started going by the name “Xan.” She began to brush her hair and wear jean skirts and button down tops, and pearl earrings. When I declared Creative Writing as my major, she counseled caution. “Best go into teaching. At least then you won’t starve. God, the ideas those hippie northerners come up with.” I wanted to point out that this was the path she had told me to take, written in my senior memory book. “I’ll curse you if you don’t make something of yourself. We need to be published so the world may tremble! Love you, always will, despite myself.” I should have understood that last line better.
After a two-year long engagement, she married in December of her junior year in college, with me as her maid of honor. She literally bounced with excitement the whole time, much to the dismay of the congregation. Her last name changed to Garvin as I held her bouquet at the altar. At the reception, she made out with her new husband and danced with me the whole night through, her hand on my waist, my forehead resting on her shoulder. Her friends from college made speeches to Xan, but I don’t, because I told her everything I could think to say in the dressing room, earlier, as I fastened her train onto the back of her gown, and I’m not going to try and top myself in front of a country club filled with her husband’s family. When it’s time for her to leave in her limo to her honeymoon suite, I hold the umbrella over her head as she dashes out, her gown gathered up into her arms, white stocking legs exposed. I’m soaked through, but it doesn’t matter anyway because I’m just driving home alone after this, so what does it matter if my mascara runs down my cheeks and my eyes sting as I help her into the vehicle. She grabs my hand, pulling me down and half way into the limo before I can shut the door. And then it’s everything all over again as she puts her hand behind my neck and kisses me, her thumb brushing the skin there, her husband dead-tired in his rumpled officer’s uniform and blearily staring out the other window at the rain. And then she smiles and says goodbye, taking the umbrella with her so I’m left wet and cold in a ruined blue satin dress, watching that black sleek thing slide across the parking lot as the rest of the wedding party disperses to their own cars.
A few weeks later, I call her, upset because I’ve been dumped by my boyfriend. It rings and I wonder where she is at eight in the evening on a Wednesday that she can’t answer her phone. Her voicemail disorients me, making me hesitate for a second too long after the beep, not recognizing the sound of her new name. “Yo, this is Xan Garvin, leave a message and all that shit.” She sings her last name, and somewhere between her dragging out the first syllable and lilting sharply upward on the second, I’m lost. I hang up and try again, this time leaving my message.
She calls back a few days later to cheer me up, and says that my ex is android who can suck her vibrating purple cock. She says other nice things, too, nice in her own way, like how all the other frosty bitches of the world can’t hold a candle to me, and she’d totally fuck me, except, you know, everyone needs one friend who’s attracted to them but won’t fuck them. We laugh, and I tell her how much I love and miss her and she says, “I know, babe.” We talk about how in the fall I’ll be in Chicago and her husband will be in Iraq, and so she’ll drive up and spend Thanksgiving with me. She’s looking forward to seeing one of those big lakes, which she’s been told has sand and even small waves, like it’s trying to pass itself off as an ocean. The Windy City, she says, remember how we met? I remember, I say. I’m still waiting for the dust to settle.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Tony Meyer 2
Basketball and Barbeque: My Experience in a Fraternity
Every year for Christmas I ask my mom for a brother. My request went through cycles of joking and real desperation. No, my mom is not giving me a brother for Christmas. But, my request, regardless of my motivation behind it, points to a deep longing. It is an unconscious desire I have for brotherhood and homosociality, a relationship that, as one of my fraternity brothers pointed out, “can only exist between a man and another man.”
Sandwiched between two sisters, I never experienced what it is like to wrestle with a brother, or talk about girls with him late at night. I do not intend to whine; life without a brother is bearable for a young boy, and I have never honestly been lonely going through life without a brother, but I do believe there is something in a fraternal bond worth examining.
I developed a tendency to cope with my life without a brother: I adopt brothers of my own. One of my oldest friends is Tom Kohler, a kindergarten classmate of mine who also has no brothers, but three sisters. Tom and I played together after school and swam on the same team for ten years. We grew up together, and I have always thought of him as my brother.
My tendency to adopt brothers has remained a tenant of my personality throughout my whole life. I would have a hard time trying to count all the brothers I adopted at my all-boys Jesuit high school. This trait may seem to be a strange one; however, I know that Tom also thinks of me as a brother. So, the tendency is not uncommon. I have had a hard time, though, pinpointing the exact motivations Tom and I had when we first ‘adopted’ each other.
I do not believe that Tom and I adopted one another as brothers because we needed to escape life with five sisters between us. Nor do I believe that the bonds between Tom and me were formed out of convenience. There must be something inherent in the fraternal relationship itself that is important to the identity and development of a young man. Brothers motivate each other; they keep each other safe; they help determine identity. With few exceptions, no one in my life is more loyal than my brothers.
Although I may seem predetermined to join a fraternity, I came to college with nothing but disdain for fraternities; I’m here to learn, after all. Most people have seen the canonical film Animal House or at least aware of the stereotype and negative associations fraternities bring about. Why would anyone join what is often perceived as a collection of drinking buddies. Furthermore, there are other pressing issues surrounding fraternities, such as discrimination based on race and sexual orientation. Why would any open-minded, liberal-arts-college student wish to associate himself with an system that has continuously barred minorities from joining it?
I do believe fraternities are valuable places for young men to form their identities, however. I know the value of brotherhood from my own experience. I pledged Phi Gamma Delta, or Fiji, because I believe in this value. But, how should one define brotherhood? Furthermore, how is the definition of masculinity related?
In her book Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler attempts to define gender. She argues that it is a performative gesture rather than a set of innate characteristics. This is an important distinction to make and one that applies directly to the Greek system. Masculinity is determined by males through actions. Likewise, brotherhood is defined through gesture and action rather than any predetermined rules. To generalize even further, Fiji is defined through its actions, and more specifically the actions of its members. This theory is important when considering the specific identities of fraternities themselves and how the fraternities influences the identities of its members (and vice versa).
Frank Mort agrees with Butler. He writes in his essay “Boy’s Own? Masculinity, Style, and Popular Culture” that “That what we are as men and women is not natural or God-given, but constructed socially, by practices and institutions that shape our experience.” Fraternities are such an institution that shapes identities. They exist inside the umbrella of masculinity. Rules then exist inside these fraternities to help determine the identity of the fraternity itself and the identity of its members. These rules are often unwritten and unstated. They rely on the collective unconscious of the fraternity members. For instance, in his book Male Myths and Icons, Roger Horrocks discusses how athleticism and the perception of the ideal male body helps in determining masculinity. With the unstated laws of a fraternity in mind, one could argue that fraternities police their members to maintain a certain acceptable appearance in connection with the ideal male form. When a brother breaks these rules, the brothers of a fraternity intervene and bring their brother back to the confines of the rules. For instance, if a brother may have put on weight, one of his brothers may chide him to go to the gym once in a while.
William A. Scott contends in his book Values and Organizations: A Study of Fraternities and Sororities that there is a correlation between the already established values of pledges and the values of the fraternities they join. To carry this assertion further, one could argue that the members of a fraternity do not police each other, but police themselves. No one wants to be the one to break the rules; that only leads to ostracism. In this sense, fraternities can maintain a certain identity without doing much work at all. Maintaining the place of a fraternity will often be an invisible act, and a difficult one to quantify.
Likewise, William A. Bryan asserts that that a pressing issue facing fraternities today is discrimination based on race and sexual preference in his essay “Contemporary Fraternity and Sorority Issues.” This discrimination is a type of policing. He contends that fraternities do not give bids (ask young men to join) who are of a different race or sexual preference than that of the collective fraternity.
If fraternities only exist as a collective of people with the same values, however, then I am without an argument. I believe that fraternities can do more than that: a certain type of fraternity has the ability to make its members step outside of their comfort zones, to evaluate those values. I have been seeing this since I first pledged Fiji. Also, while I do believe that masculinity and brotherhood are performative acts, I do not believe that they create a cultural hegemony for the brothers of a fraternity.
I asked my brothers in Fiji some of the questions that I have been considering thus far. I interviewed one graduate brother, three current brothers, and three pledges. I asked all of them what their motivations for joining Fiji were, what is the ‘Fiji’ identity (if they believed Fiji has an identity), and how they believe that identity is maintained.
I will not mention the different identities of the interviewees, of course. It should be noted though that they have different races, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
My first concern was what motivated young men to join fraternities: “I came to college not wanting to join a fraternity and opposed to the Greek system in general,” a Fiji brother told me. “Then one of the brothers that I had met outside the context of Fiji introduced me to it, and I started hanging out here. I liked the guys and decided to try it. It changed my perspective on the Greek system.”
“How so?” I asked.
“From what friends of mine have told me, I know that the social life at large schools is centered around Greek life and there is a rift between those who are not Greek and those who are, but I don’t find that at Knox, and my friends at other liberal arts schools tell me it’s the same way there.”
Why would this be? What is different about liberal arts schools? I believe the sense of community here at Knox contributes to the general egalitarian characteristics of the Greek system.
I conducted a few of my interviews in the common room at Fiji, a place where at any given hour of the day, brothers will be interacting with each other. At the time I interviewed this brother, five other Fijis were present, again with all different backgrounds. I asked him what his motivations for joining were. “I had never planned on joining a fraternity, but I really liked the Fiji guys, so I figured I would give it a shot and if I didn’t like it I could always de-pledge. The people were my main motivation.”
“The brotherhood,” one of my pledge brothers chimed in.
I asked the activated brother to define brotherhood. “It’s nice to come back in the house and feel like you are around family. Your fraternity brothers are your best friends, but they’re also your brothers. You can piss them off and know that you will be cool. You can get in a fight and a half hour later it will be resolved.” Although I agree that this statement shows a manifestation of brotherhood, I do not think that it is an all-encompassing definition.
“Is there a certain Fiji identity?” I asked.
“I think it is a strong social identity. Everyone is involved around campus. The brothers are usually laid back and relaxed.”
“Diversity is part of it,” another brother said.
Indeed, as brothers we believe that our fraternity is diverse; however, not a single brother would deny that fraternities often are not diverse institutions.
I asked this brother why he thought there was a lack of diversity in the Greek system. “We have never made a conscious effort to rush minorities,” he said. “We just try to get to know the freshmen. We try to find out which ones will fit in here.” This response presupposes, however, that there is a certain Fiji identity. In that sense it is contradictory.
“Is there a certain identity that makes a Fiji?” I asked the graduate brother.
“No, not anymore,” he said. “At one time maybe. When I was in school every house had stereotypes, but now Fiji has all different sorts.” I see this evidenced in Fiji and in other fraternities at Knox, but I still believe fraternities attempt to maintain (whether consciously or unconsciously) a homogenous identity.
I asked another brother whether he believes there is a Fiji identity. “No, not at all,” he said. “You just have to be a cool guy. Everyone in this room is different from each other. Our identity has to do with drive and ambition and personality above all.”
“That is an identity then,” one of my pledge brothers interjected. The three of us agreed then that there inevitably has to be a Fiji identity, but none of us could quantify it in an articulate manner.
So, the results in the search for a Fiji identity were inconclusive at best. But most brothers agreed that there are certain trait’s a Fiji possesses.
“Fiji decides who receives bids based on judgments of character more than anything else,” one of my pledge brothers told me when we discussed identity. What are the criteria then for judging people’s characters? How is the identity maintained?
“I don’t think there is a way we maintain an identity other than spending time with the brothers,” an active brother told me. He is correct. Spending time with each other alone polices the actions of the members of the fraternity, and identity is thus maintained.
Phi Gamma Delta did not update its international laws to officially eliminate discrimination based on race until the 1980’s. I asked a brother how he felt about this. “I don’t have too much of a problem with that,” he said. “Everyone has their own support groups.”
His comment is poignant: everyone does have their own support groups based on identity. However, Fiji has decentralized identity to classify it based on personality rather than something that can be discriminated against, race or sexual orientation for instance. Therefore, identity is irrelevant. As a result, the search to determine what maintains that identity is open-ended. Identity and the policing of that identity are nothing worth writing about because every support group has an identity. It is the support part that interests me.
The responses Fiji’s gave for their motivations for joining were diverse. One of my pledge brothers said he joined for future opportunities and a chance to make connections for later in life. Another of my pledge brothers said he joined for scholarship opportunities. Brotherhood usually came up in an enigmatic way.
I enjoyed one of my pledge brother’s definition of brotherhood: “It means always having people around in any situation, whether I’m having family trouble and need a car to drive home, or I just want someone to shoot hoops with outside.” It’s true.
When I asked the graduate brother how he defined brotherhood, he said, “For lack of a better word, it is a strong bond between you and the guys you live with formed through experience, hardship, and overcoming adversity.” he stumbled over his words as though this was not what he intended to say. “I guess you can’t really define it; you have to experience it.” There was a hesitation in his mannerisms that made me think that brotherhood is more experiential than intellectual.
I have my own experience of brotherhood manifested. I can only assume that I knew this moment would occur when I decided to pledge Fiji. As I stated, I entered college with a negative perception of fraternities. After talking to several members of the fraternity who held the same perceptions when they entered college though, I was convinced to give it a try. At the very least I could de-pledge, and I liked the other pledges at least.
Many weeks into the pledge process, after one could argue that the pledges had been socialized into Fiji, the house decided to barbeque. It was a brotherhood event. We bought burgers, chips, pop, and plenty of beer. While one of my pledge brothers manned the grill, I switched between seasoning burgers and playing games of three on three basketball. The sun was setting as we shot hoops and ate and laughed about things that I’m sure no one could remember now. The basketball was intense and the burgers were juicy; it was an Eden for college age males.
The intellectual rhetoric that I have tried to quantify brotherhood with cannot possibly encompass that moment. We weren’t just cooking burgers and playing basketball. That moment defined brotherhood in my life. It was a transcendental experience for me, although it may have not been as important to some of my brothers as it was to me. It was the moment when I knew that this group of people would do anything for me. I realized this group of people would support me when I decided to take a year off school. They would joke around with me after a breakup to lift my spirits. They would drive me back home to go to a funeral. It is a moment that I hope I will think back to years later when I want to reminisce of my college days as a Fiji.
I recognize that it is difficult to understand brotherhood if you have not experienced it, but everyone has experienced a bond with another person. The desire for homosociality that I share with countless other fraternity members is only part of a larger desire for sociality. And if fraternities continue down the road of judging by character, then fraternities will have unadulterated brotherhood.
Fraternities in that sense are no different than any other support network. Because people will inevitably form support networks in any situation, most people, I contend, have experienced the same types of feelings that I have experienced in a fraternity.
The women in ENG 206: Introduction to Nonfiction writing have undoubtedly experienced these feelings as well. I do not believe that ‘fraternity’ in the most rudimentary form is something alien to them.
Every year for Christmas I ask my mom for a brother. My request went through cycles of joking and real desperation. No, my mom is not giving me a brother for Christmas. But, my request, regardless of my motivation behind it, points to a deep longing. It is an unconscious desire I have for brotherhood and homosociality, a relationship that, as one of my fraternity brothers pointed out, “can only exist between a man and another man.”
Sandwiched between two sisters, I never experienced what it is like to wrestle with a brother, or talk about girls with him late at night. I do not intend to whine; life without a brother is bearable for a young boy, and I have never honestly been lonely going through life without a brother, but I do believe there is something in a fraternal bond worth examining.
I developed a tendency to cope with my life without a brother: I adopt brothers of my own. One of my oldest friends is Tom Kohler, a kindergarten classmate of mine who also has no brothers, but three sisters. Tom and I played together after school and swam on the same team for ten years. We grew up together, and I have always thought of him as my brother.
My tendency to adopt brothers has remained a tenant of my personality throughout my whole life. I would have a hard time trying to count all the brothers I adopted at my all-boys Jesuit high school. This trait may seem to be a strange one; however, I know that Tom also thinks of me as a brother. So, the tendency is not uncommon. I have had a hard time, though, pinpointing the exact motivations Tom and I had when we first ‘adopted’ each other.
I do not believe that Tom and I adopted one another as brothers because we needed to escape life with five sisters between us. Nor do I believe that the bonds between Tom and me were formed out of convenience. There must be something inherent in the fraternal relationship itself that is important to the identity and development of a young man. Brothers motivate each other; they keep each other safe; they help determine identity. With few exceptions, no one in my life is more loyal than my brothers.
Although I may seem predetermined to join a fraternity, I came to college with nothing but disdain for fraternities; I’m here to learn, after all. Most people have seen the canonical film Animal House or at least aware of the stereotype and negative associations fraternities bring about. Why would anyone join what is often perceived as a collection of drinking buddies. Furthermore, there are other pressing issues surrounding fraternities, such as discrimination based on race and sexual orientation. Why would any open-minded, liberal-arts-college student wish to associate himself with an system that has continuously barred minorities from joining it?
I do believe fraternities are valuable places for young men to form their identities, however. I know the value of brotherhood from my own experience. I pledged Phi Gamma Delta, or Fiji, because I believe in this value. But, how should one define brotherhood? Furthermore, how is the definition of masculinity related?
In her book Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler attempts to define gender. She argues that it is a performative gesture rather than a set of innate characteristics. This is an important distinction to make and one that applies directly to the Greek system. Masculinity is determined by males through actions. Likewise, brotherhood is defined through gesture and action rather than any predetermined rules. To generalize even further, Fiji is defined through its actions, and more specifically the actions of its members. This theory is important when considering the specific identities of fraternities themselves and how the fraternities influences the identities of its members (and vice versa).
Frank Mort agrees with Butler. He writes in his essay “Boy’s Own? Masculinity, Style, and Popular Culture” that “That what we are as men and women is not natural or God-given, but constructed socially, by practices and institutions that shape our experience.” Fraternities are such an institution that shapes identities. They exist inside the umbrella of masculinity. Rules then exist inside these fraternities to help determine the identity of the fraternity itself and the identity of its members. These rules are often unwritten and unstated. They rely on the collective unconscious of the fraternity members. For instance, in his book Male Myths and Icons, Roger Horrocks discusses how athleticism and the perception of the ideal male body helps in determining masculinity. With the unstated laws of a fraternity in mind, one could argue that fraternities police their members to maintain a certain acceptable appearance in connection with the ideal male form. When a brother breaks these rules, the brothers of a fraternity intervene and bring their brother back to the confines of the rules. For instance, if a brother may have put on weight, one of his brothers may chide him to go to the gym once in a while.
William A. Scott contends in his book Values and Organizations: A Study of Fraternities and Sororities that there is a correlation between the already established values of pledges and the values of the fraternities they join. To carry this assertion further, one could argue that the members of a fraternity do not police each other, but police themselves. No one wants to be the one to break the rules; that only leads to ostracism. In this sense, fraternities can maintain a certain identity without doing much work at all. Maintaining the place of a fraternity will often be an invisible act, and a difficult one to quantify.
Likewise, William A. Bryan asserts that that a pressing issue facing fraternities today is discrimination based on race and sexual preference in his essay “Contemporary Fraternity and Sorority Issues.” This discrimination is a type of policing. He contends that fraternities do not give bids (ask young men to join) who are of a different race or sexual preference than that of the collective fraternity.
If fraternities only exist as a collective of people with the same values, however, then I am without an argument. I believe that fraternities can do more than that: a certain type of fraternity has the ability to make its members step outside of their comfort zones, to evaluate those values. I have been seeing this since I first pledged Fiji. Also, while I do believe that masculinity and brotherhood are performative acts, I do not believe that they create a cultural hegemony for the brothers of a fraternity.
I asked my brothers in Fiji some of the questions that I have been considering thus far. I interviewed one graduate brother, three current brothers, and three pledges. I asked all of them what their motivations for joining Fiji were, what is the ‘Fiji’ identity (if they believed Fiji has an identity), and how they believe that identity is maintained.
I will not mention the different identities of the interviewees, of course. It should be noted though that they have different races, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
My first concern was what motivated young men to join fraternities: “I came to college not wanting to join a fraternity and opposed to the Greek system in general,” a Fiji brother told me. “Then one of the brothers that I had met outside the context of Fiji introduced me to it, and I started hanging out here. I liked the guys and decided to try it. It changed my perspective on the Greek system.”
“How so?” I asked.
“From what friends of mine have told me, I know that the social life at large schools is centered around Greek life and there is a rift between those who are not Greek and those who are, but I don’t find that at Knox, and my friends at other liberal arts schools tell me it’s the same way there.”
Why would this be? What is different about liberal arts schools? I believe the sense of community here at Knox contributes to the general egalitarian characteristics of the Greek system.
I conducted a few of my interviews in the common room at Fiji, a place where at any given hour of the day, brothers will be interacting with each other. At the time I interviewed this brother, five other Fijis were present, again with all different backgrounds. I asked him what his motivations for joining were. “I had never planned on joining a fraternity, but I really liked the Fiji guys, so I figured I would give it a shot and if I didn’t like it I could always de-pledge. The people were my main motivation.”
“The brotherhood,” one of my pledge brothers chimed in.
I asked the activated brother to define brotherhood. “It’s nice to come back in the house and feel like you are around family. Your fraternity brothers are your best friends, but they’re also your brothers. You can piss them off and know that you will be cool. You can get in a fight and a half hour later it will be resolved.” Although I agree that this statement shows a manifestation of brotherhood, I do not think that it is an all-encompassing definition.
“Is there a certain Fiji identity?” I asked.
“I think it is a strong social identity. Everyone is involved around campus. The brothers are usually laid back and relaxed.”
“Diversity is part of it,” another brother said.
Indeed, as brothers we believe that our fraternity is diverse; however, not a single brother would deny that fraternities often are not diverse institutions.
I asked this brother why he thought there was a lack of diversity in the Greek system. “We have never made a conscious effort to rush minorities,” he said. “We just try to get to know the freshmen. We try to find out which ones will fit in here.” This response presupposes, however, that there is a certain Fiji identity. In that sense it is contradictory.
“Is there a certain identity that makes a Fiji?” I asked the graduate brother.
“No, not anymore,” he said. “At one time maybe. When I was in school every house had stereotypes, but now Fiji has all different sorts.” I see this evidenced in Fiji and in other fraternities at Knox, but I still believe fraternities attempt to maintain (whether consciously or unconsciously) a homogenous identity.
I asked another brother whether he believes there is a Fiji identity. “No, not at all,” he said. “You just have to be a cool guy. Everyone in this room is different from each other. Our identity has to do with drive and ambition and personality above all.”
“That is an identity then,” one of my pledge brothers interjected. The three of us agreed then that there inevitably has to be a Fiji identity, but none of us could quantify it in an articulate manner.
So, the results in the search for a Fiji identity were inconclusive at best. But most brothers agreed that there are certain trait’s a Fiji possesses.
“Fiji decides who receives bids based on judgments of character more than anything else,” one of my pledge brothers told me when we discussed identity. What are the criteria then for judging people’s characters? How is the identity maintained?
“I don’t think there is a way we maintain an identity other than spending time with the brothers,” an active brother told me. He is correct. Spending time with each other alone polices the actions of the members of the fraternity, and identity is thus maintained.
Phi Gamma Delta did not update its international laws to officially eliminate discrimination based on race until the 1980’s. I asked a brother how he felt about this. “I don’t have too much of a problem with that,” he said. “Everyone has their own support groups.”
His comment is poignant: everyone does have their own support groups based on identity. However, Fiji has decentralized identity to classify it based on personality rather than something that can be discriminated against, race or sexual orientation for instance. Therefore, identity is irrelevant. As a result, the search to determine what maintains that identity is open-ended. Identity and the policing of that identity are nothing worth writing about because every support group has an identity. It is the support part that interests me.
The responses Fiji’s gave for their motivations for joining were diverse. One of my pledge brothers said he joined for future opportunities and a chance to make connections for later in life. Another of my pledge brothers said he joined for scholarship opportunities. Brotherhood usually came up in an enigmatic way.
I enjoyed one of my pledge brother’s definition of brotherhood: “It means always having people around in any situation, whether I’m having family trouble and need a car to drive home, or I just want someone to shoot hoops with outside.” It’s true.
When I asked the graduate brother how he defined brotherhood, he said, “For lack of a better word, it is a strong bond between you and the guys you live with formed through experience, hardship, and overcoming adversity.” he stumbled over his words as though this was not what he intended to say. “I guess you can’t really define it; you have to experience it.” There was a hesitation in his mannerisms that made me think that brotherhood is more experiential than intellectual.
I have my own experience of brotherhood manifested. I can only assume that I knew this moment would occur when I decided to pledge Fiji. As I stated, I entered college with a negative perception of fraternities. After talking to several members of the fraternity who held the same perceptions when they entered college though, I was convinced to give it a try. At the very least I could de-pledge, and I liked the other pledges at least.
Many weeks into the pledge process, after one could argue that the pledges had been socialized into Fiji, the house decided to barbeque. It was a brotherhood event. We bought burgers, chips, pop, and plenty of beer. While one of my pledge brothers manned the grill, I switched between seasoning burgers and playing games of three on three basketball. The sun was setting as we shot hoops and ate and laughed about things that I’m sure no one could remember now. The basketball was intense and the burgers were juicy; it was an Eden for college age males.
The intellectual rhetoric that I have tried to quantify brotherhood with cannot possibly encompass that moment. We weren’t just cooking burgers and playing basketball. That moment defined brotherhood in my life. It was a transcendental experience for me, although it may have not been as important to some of my brothers as it was to me. It was the moment when I knew that this group of people would do anything for me. I realized this group of people would support me when I decided to take a year off school. They would joke around with me after a breakup to lift my spirits. They would drive me back home to go to a funeral. It is a moment that I hope I will think back to years later when I want to reminisce of my college days as a Fiji.
I recognize that it is difficult to understand brotherhood if you have not experienced it, but everyone has experienced a bond with another person. The desire for homosociality that I share with countless other fraternity members is only part of a larger desire for sociality. And if fraternities continue down the road of judging by character, then fraternities will have unadulterated brotherhood.
Fraternities in that sense are no different than any other support network. Because people will inevitably form support networks in any situation, most people, I contend, have experienced the same types of feelings that I have experienced in a fraternity.
The women in ENG 206: Introduction to Nonfiction writing have undoubtedly experienced these feelings as well. I do not believe that ‘fraternity’ in the most rudimentary form is something alien to them.
Laura Anderman 2
Safe
I live on a college campus.
Everyday, I walk over the sloping lawns to my red-brick class buildings, where I sit among a dozen other students and work through the curriculum. I know some of the people in my classes; others are strangers. Afterwards, we leave the classroom to resume our lives, laughing and talking. There are always one or two people who are pretty quiet most of the time, but usually I don’t think about it too much. I usually just enjoy the time with my friends, as we sit on the grass drinking smoothies and talking about whatever comes to mind. If it starts getting dark, I don’t worry. I’ve made the walk across campus so many times. Late at night, sometimes. And alone. But it’s never really bothered me.
After all, I’ve always felt safe here.
Sometimes, though, things happen that draw to my attention to my perceived safety. This time, it was the tragedy at Virginia Tech. A 23-year-old Korean man named Cho Seung-hui shot two students in a campus dormitory, then proceeded to another campus complex and systematically moved from classroom to classroom, firing at everyone in sight. After killing thirty students and wounding another twenty nine, the rogue student took his own life with one of his two handguns.
I first became aware of it through an overheard conversation. Two girls, passing by me in a hallway, were talking. “Yeah, did you hear?” one asked, “Sounds like Virginia Tech had some kind of murder or something earlier. I saw it on the news.” I stopped in my tracks and turned around. By then, though, they were too far away, their conversation carried away with them.
I didn’t have to wait too long to find out for myself what had happened. Within an hour of Cho’s death, news had already started filtering from the crime scene, leaking into television and radio briefs and postings on news websites. I saw a hastily written article on the BBC News website. “Shots fired at Virginia Tech...15 deaths confirmed so far,” the article said. There was little else it said. It was too soon for a more detailed account, and it appeared as though the reporter had spent all of his information on the grisly yet compelling headline. The sparse information gradually began to expand into something more substantial. News sources were clamoring for estimates of the death toll, grasping at eyewitness reports and desperately attempting to fit the first few pieces of the puzzle together.
Even with what little information had been released so far, I was stunned by the act. I remember the nation’s response to the Columbine school shooting years ago. The voices of politicians bickering over gun-control would mix with those concerned parents blaming the schools and each other for the conflict. But for now, the only voices heard were the reporters, telling us what had been discovered so far.
Within the next few hours, things began to come together. The identity of the shooter and many of the victims were still unknown, but the events were forming a more coherent timeline. At 7:15 that morning, two victims were killed in West Ambler Johnston Hall. A girl had spent the night with her boyfriend, and she was returning to her dorm room to get ready for her 8 AM class. She had been shot once in the head, from behind. She never saw the face of her attacker. The noise attracted the attention of the Resident Advisor. He rushed toward the sound of the gunshots, hoping to defuse whatever tense situation might be occurring. Upon arriving at the dorm, though, he was shot and killed. Less than ten minutes later, the campus police responded the emergency call, but believed it to be an isolated incident, a shooting borne out of jealousy of a love-triangle gone awry. They started looking for connections, and began searching for a perpetrator. After deciding to focus on the female victim’s current and previous boyfriends, they believed the matter to be simple and complete. They didn’t know then that the bloody footprints they saw leaving the building were not the end of the affair.
Two hours later, in the classrooms of Norris Hall, the murderer struck again. It started in room 206, a graduate class in advanced hydrology. The shooter didn’t give any warning or make a sound; he just opened the door and started firing. The first shot connected with the head of the professor, which sent the thirteen students scrambling for cover. He aimed two handguns around the room, picking off the students one by one, before reloading. He circled the room a second time, counter-clockwise. At the farthest point during his circle, a few of the wounded students attempted to bolt for the door. The gunman was quicker, however, and fatally wounded them a few more quick shots. After looking around for any survivors, he moved on to the room across the hall.
The sound had filtered into the elementary German class, and students were starting to get edgy. Someone suggested pushing something in front of the door, just in case. It was then that the door opened and the shots began. Like the other classroom, the professor died first of a gunshot to the head. The gunman fired thirty shots before he stepped back into the hall. Three students seized the small opportunity, and they closed the door to the hall. It would not lock, so they wedged their feet against the bottom of the door to keep it closed. It saved their lives; a few minutes later the shooter tried to reenter the room. He threw himself against the door in an attempt to open it, and then fired four shots into the wood. After finding himself unable to enter, he eventually moved down the hall to next room.
In the brief break from the German class, he moved on to the intermediate French class next door. Like their neighbors, the students had suspected something was amiss. A panicked student pushed a heavy table against the door, and another student started to call 911. The desk did not delay the shooter for long, however, and he forced his way into the room. He methodically fired his shots, before continuing his migration from classroom to classroom.
Between the noise from the gun and the muffled screams of wounded, the other people on the floor had a pretty clear idea that something was wrong. This feeling caused a girl in a ten-person computer class to peer outside her classroom door. She saw an Asian man “dressed like a boy scout” carrying two guns. He was headed toward her. She quickly alerted her classmates, and they secured a table in front of the door. Three students threw their weight against the heavy table, hoping it would be enough to barricade the entrance. The shooter rammed into the door from the outside, forcing it open about six inches, but was unable to enter the room. He fired two shots into the room, one embedding itself in the wall, the other connecting with the lectern. They heard the sound of an empty clip dropping to the floor, and a new one being inserted with a click. But the fresh bullets were not for them, and heavy footsteps continued down the hall away from them.
A professor in his office on the third floor heard the commotion, and he believed he could stop it. He locked his students in his office to protect them, and ran down the stairs to confront the shooter. He was quickly gunned down. Below, from an office on the ground floor, a professor and a research assistant attempted to flee the building. They rushed to the front doors, only to find them chained and padlocked shut. Several frightened students rushed toward them, looking for a place to hide. The group returned the professor’s office, and locked the door. They remained there until the police cleared the building twenty minutes later.
There was only one remaining classroom on the second floor: solid mechanics, taught by Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor. It is in this room that one of the most lasting stories of the incident’s heroism started. The gunshots and screams had given all the warning the students needed, and most of the twelve students were crouched on the concrete window ledge outside the building. They were prepared to take their chances jumping onto the grass and shrubs below. It offered more of a chance than a crazed shooter who had already killed almost everyone on the second floor. Librescu was positioned against the door, holding it closed because it wouldn’t lock. The gunman fired shots through the door, with five rounds striking Librescu in the arm, leg, and torso. Eventually the wounded elderly man was overpowered, and the killer forced the door open. The professor stepped between the shooter and his students, giving them a split-second of protection before the man killed Librescu with one clean shot to the head. Three people jumped to the ground below. Several others lowered themselves along the ledge before attempting to drop gently onto the grass. The remaining students were shot several times each, just as in every other room. Yet again, the killer stepped into the hallway, and out of sight.
It was now 9:45 AM. The whole rampage had taken around 30 minutes from start to finish. By now, the survivors in the building and bystanders in the surrounding area were flooding the local 911 call center with a deluge of reports. The Virginia police and SWAT teams were already on their way to the building. Their progress was slowed by the chained doors, but they entered the building within ten minutes. When the team first entered the building, they heard gunshots echoing through the quiet halls. Though he had gone through the entire floor by that point, the killer was occupying himself by firing additional rounds into the unmoving bodies of the students. The noise of breaking down the chained door must have alerted him that his time was up. As the SWAT team ascended the stairs to the second floor, they heard one final resounding gun blast, followed by an eerie silence. By the time they arrived, the gunman was lying on the floor. He had taken his own life with a single shot to the temple. The time was 9:55 AM.
We now have a timeline for the horrifying events, but it doesn’t mean much to me. This is not what I have been looking for, or what I hope to read. As Joseph Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” There are numbers of people who have been killed, but we don’t know anything about them. We don’t know their names or their stories, their hopes or their dreams. And without that information, the story seems hollow. Without information about the participants, I cannot mourn those lives lost. So I do the only thing I can do: wait a bit longer.
Initially, the most crucial player in the story was the most enigmatic. The gunshot that had taken his life had disfigured his features too terribly for reliable facial recognition, and he carried no identification cards or characteristic items at the time of his death. So the infamous shooter, for the time being, remained a mystery. The first two victims identified were the first ones shot, at the initial shooting in the campus dormitory. Emily Hilscher and Ryan Clark were killed nearly two hours before the massacre in Norris Hall. Slowly, they identified the victims in the classrooms and hallways of Norris. A list was released of professors and students killed that day: Alameddine, Bishop, Bluhm, Cloyd, Couture-Nowak, Granata, Gwaltney, Hammaren, Herbstritt, Hill, Lane, La Porte, Lee, Librescu, Loganathan, Lumbantoruan, McCain, O'Neil, Ortiz, Panchal, Perez Cueva, Peterson, Pohle, Pryde, Read, Samaha, Shaalan, Sherman, Turner, White. They came from many different countries and all walks of life. Essentially the only thing they had in common was that they were in one place at one time. The wrong time, it seemed.
Now there was but one person left to identify: the killer himself. After withholding the information for a day, the media finally named the culprit. His name was Cho Seung-Hui. He was a Korean citizen with a United States green card, and he was a student at Virginia Tech. He also had a history of mental problems and instability. He had stalked several women on campus; written plays about torture, death, and social alienation; and even been committed to a mental asylum back in 2005.
He was best known on campus as “the question mark boy,” from his reputation to write a question mark instead of his name on class sign-in sheets. He would obsess over girls, but he would never give them his name; he would introduce himself by saying his name was “question mark.” During one of his stalking incidents, he also wrote a line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on a whiteboard in the girl’s dorm room. It is from Act 2, scene II, where Romeo laments to Juliet “My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself…Had I it written, I would tear the word.” Cho told his roommate once that he barely knew himself, and it didn’t bother him. In his own mind, Cho was as foreign as he was to his classmates.
Cho was the anonymous kid who sits in the back of the room, picked on by some and ignored by the rest. It was pretty apparent that he had been picked on as a kid, over and over again by many different people, in his classes and in the halls, even in his church’s youth group. Eventually, he stopped speaking in classes, and he only exchanged a few words with his roommates. Psychologists speculate that he had a mild form of autism that kept him from being socially adept with his peers; the burden of learning English as his non-native language probably didn’t help. He was overshadowed at home, as his older sister was a graduate of Princeton who works for the United States government. Still, he went to the reputable – if not quite prestigious – Virginia Tech, attempting a degree in business information management. It was one of the most difficult and respected majors at the school, but Cho dropped out of the department to become an English major instead. Though the school can’t legally reveal any of the reasons for his switch in major, a few theories can be posited. It was unlikely that he did it simply for the love of writing. More likely, Cho attempted the classwork but was not able to maintain the grades he needed. It left him with no real choice but to abandon his dream and concoct another plan. This picture of Cho is a bleak one: a friendless, poor student and unappreciated son.
In that sense, it’s no real surprise that Cho concocted an identity for himself. He never once mentioned his name in the multi-media manifesto he sent to NBC. He refers to himself as a savior, even calling himself “Jesus Christ” before the cameras. During his tirades, he mentions other names: John Mark Karr, a former schoolteacher who claimed to have killed JonBenet Ramsey; Debra LaFave, another schoolteacher who was convicted of molesting one of her students; and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two teenagers responsible for the Columbine school shooting eight years earlier. He cited their names and attributed their power to himself. For him, the shooting was an attempt at acquiring power. He couldn’t get it through his own actions, but by allying himself with people in roles of authority, Cho insures that he is remembered. He has set himself apart from being just another school shooter; he has given himself a new rank, in a new order. For Cho, this massacre was the ultimate act of empowerment. Unfortunately, the warning signs were left unheeded until it was too late.
Everyone claims they could have predicted Cho stepping over the edge and lashing out…but they didn’t. Investigators believe that he started planning the murders in February, when he bought the first of the handguns and started working out. I wondered what had set him off; what could have triggered him to do this. I wondered if it could have been avoided. After all, so many people had pegging him as a dangerous individual. Yet dangerous is a fluid concept. I can’t specifically blame them for it, after all. You can’t always tell who is dangerous just by looking at them. If that were the case, we could simply isolate dangerous individuals before they are given a chance to threaten others. The dangerous individual is dangerous because they are, overly, no different than the rest of us. And that’s why Cho is a particular ominous figure to me; he didn’t stand out in a crowd.
It has been several days since the shooting, but I still can’t get my mind off of it. It wanders around my brain, providing me with a constant preoccupation in classes and in social circles. I sit in economics wondering what the students sitting around me would do if a murderous gunman came in shooting. In Japanese class, I wonder how one best translates the phrase “multiple fatality school shooting”. I neglect my schoolwork to browse the news sites, constantly loading and refreshing the webpages, waiting for the next tidbit of information to soak into the mainstream. I wait for the moment that new reports are posted; I crave the tang of the adrenaline flowing through my bloodstream when I se the latest update. But even as I watch the stories unfold on the screen, my own reactions scare me.
I’ve always had an interest in forensic science, and the step-by-step processes of solving and recreating a crime. But even so, my sudden, macabre interest in this particular case disconcerts me to the point of distraction. Usually, I am attracted to a case that has a peculiar mystery or burning question attached to it. There is no such problem here. Although Cho cannot legally be called the murderer – technicality states that he must be brought to court and found guilty before such a moniker can be attached to his name – almost all of the evidence supports him being the sole perpetrator of the act. There is, then, no question of guilt, or any extenuating circumstances that usually otherwise draws my attention. I can’t understand why a mass murder in a place I’ve never been literally has brought my life to halt. This is the core of my problem: I’m not sure what it is about Virginia Tech that has grabbed my attention so entirely, and the implications of it worry me.
I certainly hope I’m not another Cho, interested in plotting the murder of complete strangers for bizarre and unintelligible reasons. What was the model that Cho fit? What caused Cho to become the shooter? Personally, I’ve had my rough patches in life. I’ve gotten not-so-stellar grades in school. I’ve switched my major. I’ve even been teased and bullied. But I’ve never pulled a gun on my classmates. I’ve never wanted to kill or injure those who have hurt me. What is that strange X-factor that causes some to progress unscathed while others resort to violence? It scares me to think that this potential to cause great pain lies within all of us. We’re all dangerous if we don’t police ourselves appropriately. So although I can’t completely exonerate myself from Cho’s actions, I do my best to view the proceedings at an arm’s length. All the while, I cannot help but listen to that little nagging voice inside my head asking Why? Why do you care so much? There must be something wrong with you to be concerned about something like this.
The answers come in a strange, sudden epiphany. It is not the case itself that attracted my attention. It is the people. I see myself in the participants that day. The victims were around my age. They were college kids, like me, attempting to find their way through a constantly changing and unfamiliar world. They had dreams and aspirations and fears and problems. There was nothing that specifically held them to that foreign world of Blacksburg, Virginia. They could have easily been anyone, anywhere. This day, this crime could have been anywhere in the world. The victims could have been my friends. My brothers or sisters. My professors. Me.
This point is driven home emphatically later that week. A few days after the original incident, the administration of my school sends out an email. It says that earlier that morning, during an altercation with his family, a town resident had threatened his family. He said that he understood how the murderer at Virginia Tech felt, and that he ought to get a gun and go to my school.
For a moment, my heart stops. I clench the side of the table and wonder if Virginia Tech was only the beginning. I suspect that Cho’s madness is infectious, and suddenly the whole United States – the whole world – might be gripped with some feverish thirst for blood. But the moment passes. I continue reading the email. It says the man’s family had the presence of mind to report his threats to the police, and law enforcement removed him from the town. He is on his way to a mental facility in a different county, the email assures me. There is no danger. We’re all safe.
Even so, that day I kept a wary eye open during my usual walks across campus. My daily routine became anything but ordinary, as I kept jumping at any strange sounds and peering around corners to spy anyone who might look dangerous. No matter how often I told myself that no gunman was going to jump out of the bushes, my heart still raced every time a squirrel darted out in front of me. The only thing I that calmed me down was occasionally catching a glimpse of the Campus Security officers walking the sidewalks around the school. When I see them, they act as a temporary source of safety, and I can breathe easy again, if only for a few minutes.
Safe; it’s a strange word that encompasses physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, emotional, occupational, and psychological well-being. Protection is the key to safety, but protection isn’t always reliable. And how can one protect oneself from stray, random chance? Cho’s killing was planned, but that doesn’t make it sensical or even coherent. Of those who lived, there was no set pattern. It was chance, not safety, that guided them through their ordeal.
As I hear more details of that day, I realize that I aspire to be like these people. They showed bravery, quick thinking, and a sense of compassion even in the face of tragedy. Stories of heroic acts and lucky breaks continue to appear on television reports and websites. Professors confronting the gunman in a final attempt to save their students, if only by buying them a few crucial seconds. Students pulling strangers into closets or locked rooms away from the shooting. The slightly wounded providing first aid to those who were gravely injured, trying desperately to save their lives. It did not matter in those moments who you were, so long as you were there, together.
This sense of human connection is what captivates me. In most cases, these people were not the best of friends. In fact, some of them were complete strangers. The survivors tell of their time under fire, and they don’t tell you the names of the people who helped them. They can’t; most of them didn’t know each other prior to the incident. But even though these figures were nameless, they certainly won’t be forgotten any time soon. These strangers sheltered and protected each other when the administration and police couldn’t save them.
Most professors are remembered by their students for their lectures in the classroom. But the professors at Virginia Tech made the ultimate sacrifice for their students. The five faculty members killed in the attack did what they could to protect their students. Especially Liviu Librescu, whose tale is both inspiring and saddening. He survived the Holocaust, only to die during another mass act of hatred and violence. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, nonetheless. Although Librescu’s tale is the most widely publicized, he was not alone in protecting the students. Take Kevin Granata, the professor who rushed down from the third floor to confront Cho. Granata probably would have survived the attack if he had stayed in his office. But he cared about the students far too much to stay out of harm’s way. He put himself in the line of danger in hopes of contributing to the greater good.
Another tale comes from Clay Violland, from the French class. As Cho fired around the room, Violland fell to the ground, acting as though he had already been shot. While on the ground, he made eye contact with another girl on the ground. They stared at each other, focusing on the living and not on the dead, until Cho left the room several minutes later. Violland did not know who she was, but for that moment it did not seem to matter. They provided each other with a moment of connection, of support, in the middle of a catastrophe.
It seems I am not the only one drawn in by the strength of this universal human connection. On the Virginia Tech memorial website, there are over 600 pages of comments from concerned individuals. Most of them never knew the victims. A lot of them have never been to Virginia Tech. Some of them have never even set foot on US soil. But they heard the tale of this random act of hate and anger, and they care. They send out condolences to the families and friends and communities. It does not matter anymore that these people are strangers; it simply matters more that they are people who care.
Yet this human connection serves as a somber reminder of the one who perpetrated these acts in the first place. Cho was a loner, and the outpouring of care and support is something he probably did not know in life. It seems to be the ultimate irony: the person who could not understand and appreciate such things in life unintentionally created a fresh start for them in death.
I’ve heard many people say that Cho was “an evil man” and that the events at Virginia Tech “proved that people are capable of atrocious things.” Indeed, people sometimes do terrible things to each other. However, the events of April 16th proved to me that people are capable of great kindness and compassion as well. And Cho…he did a terrible thing, to be sure, but I don’t think he was inherently evil. He was misguided, perhaps. And lonely. He was never safe, not even from himself.
Virginia Tech is a tragedy because so many young lives were lost without rhyme or reason. Their promise and potential were snuffed out in an instant. The faculty, too, their professors and mentors, had done great things in their fields of study, and they were still easily capable of more. Yet, despite these losses, I find it somehow comforting that people can band together and express hope for the future when things seem bleak.
Safety isn’t found in locked doors or bolted windows. It’s found in the people around us. And that’s why Cho’s case is so scary. He was in the midst of a crowd of people; he was an “insider” to the situation, so his sudden betrayal immediately compromises that feeling of safety. Cho was his own enemy, and thus became everyone else’s, as well. It comes down to knowing one’s boundaries, and policing them. Cho was socially awkward enough to not be entirely sure of his own boundaries or anyone else’s. He was teased, and he withdrew. He was suicidal when he was committed to the mental institution. His family and roommates were concerned that he would be unable to control his self-destructive urge, so they sent him for psychiatric evaluation. Initially, the psychiatrist checked the box stating that Cho presented a physical risk “to himself or others.” Later, after another evaluation, they determined that Cho only presented a risk to himself, not to anyone else. On this judgment, the decided to release him from the psychiatric facilities to be kept under watch at home. They didn’t know then that because of Cho’s inability to control his own actions, he already presented a risk to everyone around him, as well as himself. Because, for Cho, the threat was deep inside.
We are taught and hard-wired to believe that threats come from outside our boundaries; outside our space. We prepare ourselves that way too, always assuming that the person with malicious intent is someone we do not know. We build walls and guard the outer perimeter. But this insulation acts both ways; the outsiders cannot enter, but everyone inside is trapped. Take, for example, the heavy metal doors to Norris Hall. They were reinforced to protect those inside, but when Cho chained them shut, they suddenly became a death sentence, condemning those inside to remain in danger. Perhaps the same is true of Cho himself. When he put up walls to protect himself from the world, he found that he still wasn’t able to keep control of himself. Unfortunately, no one could really help him keep order within himself. So he eventually found his own way out, and it cost others their lives and safety..
We can’t be safe from the things we cannot predict. We may buckle our seatbelts whenever we’re in a car, but there’s no way of knowing beforehand whether we will end up needing to swerve or brace for impact. The seatbelt’s a worse-case scenario, and although seatbelts save lives every year, they don’t assure survival in back wrecks. In fact, the seatbelt has caused fatalities, too; although it’s not too common, sometimes seatbelts snap the wearer’s neck or trap crash victims in the shell of their destroyed vehicle. Yet most of us do it anyway, because we feel that there might come a point where we’re glad we did.
School shootings, however, don’t come equipped with a safety feature. Students can’t buckle into their chairs and desks don’t come with airbags. How, then, to create a safer school shooting? Drills? Perhaps, but there are some problems with standardizing a response to something that is very much an individual incident. Some elementary school teachers in Murfreesboro, Tennessee learned that the hard way. They conducted a mock school shooting, warning the students that it “wasn’t a drill”. They told the students to hide under tables or lie on the floor. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweatshirt, banged and rattled locked doors, while the terrified kids cried and pleaded for their lives. Clearly, this was a poorly-implemented attempt at preparation for what might become a real event. But in addition to some questionable judgment calls, school shooting drills have a key structural flaw. Imagine if every school develops strict protocol in response to school shootings. During an attack, the students will turn off the lights, close the shades on the window, lock the door, and huddle under desks. Drills are run a few times a year, and all the kids know exactly what to do should an attack occur. Sounds plausible, but keep in mind that most school shootings are perpetrated by students who attend the schools they target. Suddenly, a decent plan of action becomes a veritable death sentence. The shooter knows exactly how they’ve prepared for his or her arrival, and doubtlessly they will have planned out a countermeasure. If they break the lock or force open a window, then the shooter has easy access to dozens of helpless, huddling targets. Even worse, imagine if one of the students had thought to fight back against the supposed shooter during the unannounced drill. The mock-up could have easily escalated into a genuinely dangerous situation. So I think any form of prepared response is simply a bad idea in this situation. It’s like handing any potential gunman a map to the building.
We’ll never be “safe” from school shootings in the traditional sense, as we will never really be able to preempt or prepare for every possible attack. The foreknowledge of safety, then, must simply be replaced with a bit of common sense. In the heat of the moment, even some of the bravest people at Virginia Tech made mistakes that cost them their lives. Kevin Granada is a prime example of this. His desire to protect the students was brave and noble, without a doubt, but he rushed into a perilous situation without a weapon or any real plan of attack. He wasn’t even originally marked to be victim, either, since his office was on the third – not second – floor. He compromised his own safety in a futile effort to protect his students.
How, then, do we become truly safe? Cho teaches us we can’t really be safe. It’s an absolute ideal, and like most similar extremes it’s impossible to initiate them effectively in reality. “Safe” is an all-encompassing concept of protection. To be safe is to be without risk of harm, and it’s a condition that can’t be implemented on a wide scale without adverse effects. Ensuring safety in this sense isn’t feasible; it would require everyone to lock themselves in their houses, surrounded by padded furniture and antiseptic surfaces. It’s an elimination of risk, to be sure, but it can hardly be called “living”.
Obviously, being “safe” is out of the question. From here, though, we must shift our focus from being “safe” to being “safer”. The emphasis on comparison helps put such a vague and cumbersome concept into perspective. We can’t be safe from people like Cho, but we can be safer by preparing ourselves mentally and being aware of our surroundings. We can force ourselves to create a contingency plan, even if we suspect we’ll never use it. Apart from that, there’s nothing we can really do to protect ourselves from stray products of fate. If it can’t be foreseen, there’s no reason to worry ourselves sick about it. It’s why people tried to resume a “normal” life as quickly as possible after September 11th. It was an unfortunate experience, to be sure, but there was no reason to believe it would be a recurring event. And if even if it was attempted again….well, this time we’d be ready for it. After all, we watch our borders pretty closely. It’s just when we ignore the interior that we get into trouble.
Paranoia isn’t an admirable quality. But if you can strike a balance of awareness and relaxation, then there’s nothing really to worry about. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t let it consume me. I’ve wondered what I would do if a classmate suddenly pulled out a gun and went on a rampage. I’ve pondered a response to someone leaning out of a window in one of the red brick buildings, shooting the passersby with a sniper rifle. It’s made me confront exactly what it means to be safe in a world where no protection is guaranteed and everyone, everyone is potentially dangerous.
Luckily, not everyone is dangerous. We may cast our glances warily over our shoulders, but when the time comes and a threat appears, a polarization occurs instantly. Looking down the barrel of a gun acts as an instantaneous catalyst; suddenly, the shooter has to deal with people who outnumber him and are willing to do whatever they can to stop him. In that moment, everything becomes clear. Everyone is dangerous, but some of the dangerous people are on your side. And together you’re united against a common enemy. Having others around is the closest we’ll ever truly come to being safe, because as long as we’re with someone else, at least we won’t be alone. People tend to subscribe to the “buddy system”; as long as we have someone else with us, we won’t need to worry. There’s some degree of safety in numbers. If we’re together, as long as we’re not alone, we’ll all be okay.
As flawed as our search for the perfect haven might be, it’s evident everywhere, especially in response to a large-scale tragedy like September 11th or Virginia Tech. It’s the epitome of so many phone calls placed by students after the massacre. At the heart of every message were the words the world wanted to hear, summed up in every phone call to a parent, sibling, or friend:
“Don’t worry…I’m safe.”
I live on a college campus.
Everyday, I walk over the sloping lawns to my red-brick class buildings, where I sit among a dozen other students and work through the curriculum. I know some of the people in my classes; others are strangers. Afterwards, we leave the classroom to resume our lives, laughing and talking. There are always one or two people who are pretty quiet most of the time, but usually I don’t think about it too much. I usually just enjoy the time with my friends, as we sit on the grass drinking smoothies and talking about whatever comes to mind. If it starts getting dark, I don’t worry. I’ve made the walk across campus so many times. Late at night, sometimes. And alone. But it’s never really bothered me.
After all, I’ve always felt safe here.
Sometimes, though, things happen that draw to my attention to my perceived safety. This time, it was the tragedy at Virginia Tech. A 23-year-old Korean man named Cho Seung-hui shot two students in a campus dormitory, then proceeded to another campus complex and systematically moved from classroom to classroom, firing at everyone in sight. After killing thirty students and wounding another twenty nine, the rogue student took his own life with one of his two handguns.
I first became aware of it through an overheard conversation. Two girls, passing by me in a hallway, were talking. “Yeah, did you hear?” one asked, “Sounds like Virginia Tech had some kind of murder or something earlier. I saw it on the news.” I stopped in my tracks and turned around. By then, though, they were too far away, their conversation carried away with them.
I didn’t have to wait too long to find out for myself what had happened. Within an hour of Cho’s death, news had already started filtering from the crime scene, leaking into television and radio briefs and postings on news websites. I saw a hastily written article on the BBC News website. “Shots fired at Virginia Tech...15 deaths confirmed so far,” the article said. There was little else it said. It was too soon for a more detailed account, and it appeared as though the reporter had spent all of his information on the grisly yet compelling headline. The sparse information gradually began to expand into something more substantial. News sources were clamoring for estimates of the death toll, grasping at eyewitness reports and desperately attempting to fit the first few pieces of the puzzle together.
Even with what little information had been released so far, I was stunned by the act. I remember the nation’s response to the Columbine school shooting years ago. The voices of politicians bickering over gun-control would mix with those concerned parents blaming the schools and each other for the conflict. But for now, the only voices heard were the reporters, telling us what had been discovered so far.
Within the next few hours, things began to come together. The identity of the shooter and many of the victims were still unknown, but the events were forming a more coherent timeline. At 7:15 that morning, two victims were killed in West Ambler Johnston Hall. A girl had spent the night with her boyfriend, and she was returning to her dorm room to get ready for her 8 AM class. She had been shot once in the head, from behind. She never saw the face of her attacker. The noise attracted the attention of the Resident Advisor. He rushed toward the sound of the gunshots, hoping to defuse whatever tense situation might be occurring. Upon arriving at the dorm, though, he was shot and killed. Less than ten minutes later, the campus police responded the emergency call, but believed it to be an isolated incident, a shooting borne out of jealousy of a love-triangle gone awry. They started looking for connections, and began searching for a perpetrator. After deciding to focus on the female victim’s current and previous boyfriends, they believed the matter to be simple and complete. They didn’t know then that the bloody footprints they saw leaving the building were not the end of the affair.
Two hours later, in the classrooms of Norris Hall, the murderer struck again. It started in room 206, a graduate class in advanced hydrology. The shooter didn’t give any warning or make a sound; he just opened the door and started firing. The first shot connected with the head of the professor, which sent the thirteen students scrambling for cover. He aimed two handguns around the room, picking off the students one by one, before reloading. He circled the room a second time, counter-clockwise. At the farthest point during his circle, a few of the wounded students attempted to bolt for the door. The gunman was quicker, however, and fatally wounded them a few more quick shots. After looking around for any survivors, he moved on to the room across the hall.
The sound had filtered into the elementary German class, and students were starting to get edgy. Someone suggested pushing something in front of the door, just in case. It was then that the door opened and the shots began. Like the other classroom, the professor died first of a gunshot to the head. The gunman fired thirty shots before he stepped back into the hall. Three students seized the small opportunity, and they closed the door to the hall. It would not lock, so they wedged their feet against the bottom of the door to keep it closed. It saved their lives; a few minutes later the shooter tried to reenter the room. He threw himself against the door in an attempt to open it, and then fired four shots into the wood. After finding himself unable to enter, he eventually moved down the hall to next room.
In the brief break from the German class, he moved on to the intermediate French class next door. Like their neighbors, the students had suspected something was amiss. A panicked student pushed a heavy table against the door, and another student started to call 911. The desk did not delay the shooter for long, however, and he forced his way into the room. He methodically fired his shots, before continuing his migration from classroom to classroom.
Between the noise from the gun and the muffled screams of wounded, the other people on the floor had a pretty clear idea that something was wrong. This feeling caused a girl in a ten-person computer class to peer outside her classroom door. She saw an Asian man “dressed like a boy scout” carrying two guns. He was headed toward her. She quickly alerted her classmates, and they secured a table in front of the door. Three students threw their weight against the heavy table, hoping it would be enough to barricade the entrance. The shooter rammed into the door from the outside, forcing it open about six inches, but was unable to enter the room. He fired two shots into the room, one embedding itself in the wall, the other connecting with the lectern. They heard the sound of an empty clip dropping to the floor, and a new one being inserted with a click. But the fresh bullets were not for them, and heavy footsteps continued down the hall away from them.
A professor in his office on the third floor heard the commotion, and he believed he could stop it. He locked his students in his office to protect them, and ran down the stairs to confront the shooter. He was quickly gunned down. Below, from an office on the ground floor, a professor and a research assistant attempted to flee the building. They rushed to the front doors, only to find them chained and padlocked shut. Several frightened students rushed toward them, looking for a place to hide. The group returned the professor’s office, and locked the door. They remained there until the police cleared the building twenty minutes later.
There was only one remaining classroom on the second floor: solid mechanics, taught by Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor. It is in this room that one of the most lasting stories of the incident’s heroism started. The gunshots and screams had given all the warning the students needed, and most of the twelve students were crouched on the concrete window ledge outside the building. They were prepared to take their chances jumping onto the grass and shrubs below. It offered more of a chance than a crazed shooter who had already killed almost everyone on the second floor. Librescu was positioned against the door, holding it closed because it wouldn’t lock. The gunman fired shots through the door, with five rounds striking Librescu in the arm, leg, and torso. Eventually the wounded elderly man was overpowered, and the killer forced the door open. The professor stepped between the shooter and his students, giving them a split-second of protection before the man killed Librescu with one clean shot to the head. Three people jumped to the ground below. Several others lowered themselves along the ledge before attempting to drop gently onto the grass. The remaining students were shot several times each, just as in every other room. Yet again, the killer stepped into the hallway, and out of sight.
It was now 9:45 AM. The whole rampage had taken around 30 minutes from start to finish. By now, the survivors in the building and bystanders in the surrounding area were flooding the local 911 call center with a deluge of reports. The Virginia police and SWAT teams were already on their way to the building. Their progress was slowed by the chained doors, but they entered the building within ten minutes. When the team first entered the building, they heard gunshots echoing through the quiet halls. Though he had gone through the entire floor by that point, the killer was occupying himself by firing additional rounds into the unmoving bodies of the students. The noise of breaking down the chained door must have alerted him that his time was up. As the SWAT team ascended the stairs to the second floor, they heard one final resounding gun blast, followed by an eerie silence. By the time they arrived, the gunman was lying on the floor. He had taken his own life with a single shot to the temple. The time was 9:55 AM.
We now have a timeline for the horrifying events, but it doesn’t mean much to me. This is not what I have been looking for, or what I hope to read. As Joseph Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” There are numbers of people who have been killed, but we don’t know anything about them. We don’t know their names or their stories, their hopes or their dreams. And without that information, the story seems hollow. Without information about the participants, I cannot mourn those lives lost. So I do the only thing I can do: wait a bit longer.
Initially, the most crucial player in the story was the most enigmatic. The gunshot that had taken his life had disfigured his features too terribly for reliable facial recognition, and he carried no identification cards or characteristic items at the time of his death. So the infamous shooter, for the time being, remained a mystery. The first two victims identified were the first ones shot, at the initial shooting in the campus dormitory. Emily Hilscher and Ryan Clark were killed nearly two hours before the massacre in Norris Hall. Slowly, they identified the victims in the classrooms and hallways of Norris. A list was released of professors and students killed that day: Alameddine, Bishop, Bluhm, Cloyd, Couture-Nowak, Granata, Gwaltney, Hammaren, Herbstritt, Hill, Lane, La Porte, Lee, Librescu, Loganathan, Lumbantoruan, McCain, O'Neil, Ortiz, Panchal, Perez Cueva, Peterson, Pohle, Pryde, Read, Samaha, Shaalan, Sherman, Turner, White. They came from many different countries and all walks of life. Essentially the only thing they had in common was that they were in one place at one time. The wrong time, it seemed.
Now there was but one person left to identify: the killer himself. After withholding the information for a day, the media finally named the culprit. His name was Cho Seung-Hui. He was a Korean citizen with a United States green card, and he was a student at Virginia Tech. He also had a history of mental problems and instability. He had stalked several women on campus; written plays about torture, death, and social alienation; and even been committed to a mental asylum back in 2005.
He was best known on campus as “the question mark boy,” from his reputation to write a question mark instead of his name on class sign-in sheets. He would obsess over girls, but he would never give them his name; he would introduce himself by saying his name was “question mark.” During one of his stalking incidents, he also wrote a line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on a whiteboard in the girl’s dorm room. It is from Act 2, scene II, where Romeo laments to Juliet “My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself…Had I it written, I would tear the word.” Cho told his roommate once that he barely knew himself, and it didn’t bother him. In his own mind, Cho was as foreign as he was to his classmates.
Cho was the anonymous kid who sits in the back of the room, picked on by some and ignored by the rest. It was pretty apparent that he had been picked on as a kid, over and over again by many different people, in his classes and in the halls, even in his church’s youth group. Eventually, he stopped speaking in classes, and he only exchanged a few words with his roommates. Psychologists speculate that he had a mild form of autism that kept him from being socially adept with his peers; the burden of learning English as his non-native language probably didn’t help. He was overshadowed at home, as his older sister was a graduate of Princeton who works for the United States government. Still, he went to the reputable – if not quite prestigious – Virginia Tech, attempting a degree in business information management. It was one of the most difficult and respected majors at the school, but Cho dropped out of the department to become an English major instead. Though the school can’t legally reveal any of the reasons for his switch in major, a few theories can be posited. It was unlikely that he did it simply for the love of writing. More likely, Cho attempted the classwork but was not able to maintain the grades he needed. It left him with no real choice but to abandon his dream and concoct another plan. This picture of Cho is a bleak one: a friendless, poor student and unappreciated son.
In that sense, it’s no real surprise that Cho concocted an identity for himself. He never once mentioned his name in the multi-media manifesto he sent to NBC. He refers to himself as a savior, even calling himself “Jesus Christ” before the cameras. During his tirades, he mentions other names: John Mark Karr, a former schoolteacher who claimed to have killed JonBenet Ramsey; Debra LaFave, another schoolteacher who was convicted of molesting one of her students; and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two teenagers responsible for the Columbine school shooting eight years earlier. He cited their names and attributed their power to himself. For him, the shooting was an attempt at acquiring power. He couldn’t get it through his own actions, but by allying himself with people in roles of authority, Cho insures that he is remembered. He has set himself apart from being just another school shooter; he has given himself a new rank, in a new order. For Cho, this massacre was the ultimate act of empowerment. Unfortunately, the warning signs were left unheeded until it was too late.
Everyone claims they could have predicted Cho stepping over the edge and lashing out…but they didn’t. Investigators believe that he started planning the murders in February, when he bought the first of the handguns and started working out. I wondered what had set him off; what could have triggered him to do this. I wondered if it could have been avoided. After all, so many people had pegging him as a dangerous individual. Yet dangerous is a fluid concept. I can’t specifically blame them for it, after all. You can’t always tell who is dangerous just by looking at them. If that were the case, we could simply isolate dangerous individuals before they are given a chance to threaten others. The dangerous individual is dangerous because they are, overly, no different than the rest of us. And that’s why Cho is a particular ominous figure to me; he didn’t stand out in a crowd.
It has been several days since the shooting, but I still can’t get my mind off of it. It wanders around my brain, providing me with a constant preoccupation in classes and in social circles. I sit in economics wondering what the students sitting around me would do if a murderous gunman came in shooting. In Japanese class, I wonder how one best translates the phrase “multiple fatality school shooting”. I neglect my schoolwork to browse the news sites, constantly loading and refreshing the webpages, waiting for the next tidbit of information to soak into the mainstream. I wait for the moment that new reports are posted; I crave the tang of the adrenaline flowing through my bloodstream when I se the latest update. But even as I watch the stories unfold on the screen, my own reactions scare me.
I’ve always had an interest in forensic science, and the step-by-step processes of solving and recreating a crime. But even so, my sudden, macabre interest in this particular case disconcerts me to the point of distraction. Usually, I am attracted to a case that has a peculiar mystery or burning question attached to it. There is no such problem here. Although Cho cannot legally be called the murderer – technicality states that he must be brought to court and found guilty before such a moniker can be attached to his name – almost all of the evidence supports him being the sole perpetrator of the act. There is, then, no question of guilt, or any extenuating circumstances that usually otherwise draws my attention. I can’t understand why a mass murder in a place I’ve never been literally has brought my life to halt. This is the core of my problem: I’m not sure what it is about Virginia Tech that has grabbed my attention so entirely, and the implications of it worry me.
I certainly hope I’m not another Cho, interested in plotting the murder of complete strangers for bizarre and unintelligible reasons. What was the model that Cho fit? What caused Cho to become the shooter? Personally, I’ve had my rough patches in life. I’ve gotten not-so-stellar grades in school. I’ve switched my major. I’ve even been teased and bullied. But I’ve never pulled a gun on my classmates. I’ve never wanted to kill or injure those who have hurt me. What is that strange X-factor that causes some to progress unscathed while others resort to violence? It scares me to think that this potential to cause great pain lies within all of us. We’re all dangerous if we don’t police ourselves appropriately. So although I can’t completely exonerate myself from Cho’s actions, I do my best to view the proceedings at an arm’s length. All the while, I cannot help but listen to that little nagging voice inside my head asking Why? Why do you care so much? There must be something wrong with you to be concerned about something like this.
The answers come in a strange, sudden epiphany. It is not the case itself that attracted my attention. It is the people. I see myself in the participants that day. The victims were around my age. They were college kids, like me, attempting to find their way through a constantly changing and unfamiliar world. They had dreams and aspirations and fears and problems. There was nothing that specifically held them to that foreign world of Blacksburg, Virginia. They could have easily been anyone, anywhere. This day, this crime could have been anywhere in the world. The victims could have been my friends. My brothers or sisters. My professors. Me.
This point is driven home emphatically later that week. A few days after the original incident, the administration of my school sends out an email. It says that earlier that morning, during an altercation with his family, a town resident had threatened his family. He said that he understood how the murderer at Virginia Tech felt, and that he ought to get a gun and go to my school.
For a moment, my heart stops. I clench the side of the table and wonder if Virginia Tech was only the beginning. I suspect that Cho’s madness is infectious, and suddenly the whole United States – the whole world – might be gripped with some feverish thirst for blood. But the moment passes. I continue reading the email. It says the man’s family had the presence of mind to report his threats to the police, and law enforcement removed him from the town. He is on his way to a mental facility in a different county, the email assures me. There is no danger. We’re all safe.
Even so, that day I kept a wary eye open during my usual walks across campus. My daily routine became anything but ordinary, as I kept jumping at any strange sounds and peering around corners to spy anyone who might look dangerous. No matter how often I told myself that no gunman was going to jump out of the bushes, my heart still raced every time a squirrel darted out in front of me. The only thing I that calmed me down was occasionally catching a glimpse of the Campus Security officers walking the sidewalks around the school. When I see them, they act as a temporary source of safety, and I can breathe easy again, if only for a few minutes.
Safe; it’s a strange word that encompasses physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, emotional, occupational, and psychological well-being. Protection is the key to safety, but protection isn’t always reliable. And how can one protect oneself from stray, random chance? Cho’s killing was planned, but that doesn’t make it sensical or even coherent. Of those who lived, there was no set pattern. It was chance, not safety, that guided them through their ordeal.
As I hear more details of that day, I realize that I aspire to be like these people. They showed bravery, quick thinking, and a sense of compassion even in the face of tragedy. Stories of heroic acts and lucky breaks continue to appear on television reports and websites. Professors confronting the gunman in a final attempt to save their students, if only by buying them a few crucial seconds. Students pulling strangers into closets or locked rooms away from the shooting. The slightly wounded providing first aid to those who were gravely injured, trying desperately to save their lives. It did not matter in those moments who you were, so long as you were there, together.
This sense of human connection is what captivates me. In most cases, these people were not the best of friends. In fact, some of them were complete strangers. The survivors tell of their time under fire, and they don’t tell you the names of the people who helped them. They can’t; most of them didn’t know each other prior to the incident. But even though these figures were nameless, they certainly won’t be forgotten any time soon. These strangers sheltered and protected each other when the administration and police couldn’t save them.
Most professors are remembered by their students for their lectures in the classroom. But the professors at Virginia Tech made the ultimate sacrifice for their students. The five faculty members killed in the attack did what they could to protect their students. Especially Liviu Librescu, whose tale is both inspiring and saddening. He survived the Holocaust, only to die during another mass act of hatred and violence. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, nonetheless. Although Librescu’s tale is the most widely publicized, he was not alone in protecting the students. Take Kevin Granata, the professor who rushed down from the third floor to confront Cho. Granata probably would have survived the attack if he had stayed in his office. But he cared about the students far too much to stay out of harm’s way. He put himself in the line of danger in hopes of contributing to the greater good.
Another tale comes from Clay Violland, from the French class. As Cho fired around the room, Violland fell to the ground, acting as though he had already been shot. While on the ground, he made eye contact with another girl on the ground. They stared at each other, focusing on the living and not on the dead, until Cho left the room several minutes later. Violland did not know who she was, but for that moment it did not seem to matter. They provided each other with a moment of connection, of support, in the middle of a catastrophe.
It seems I am not the only one drawn in by the strength of this universal human connection. On the Virginia Tech memorial website, there are over 600 pages of comments from concerned individuals. Most of them never knew the victims. A lot of them have never been to Virginia Tech. Some of them have never even set foot on US soil. But they heard the tale of this random act of hate and anger, and they care. They send out condolences to the families and friends and communities. It does not matter anymore that these people are strangers; it simply matters more that they are people who care.
Yet this human connection serves as a somber reminder of the one who perpetrated these acts in the first place. Cho was a loner, and the outpouring of care and support is something he probably did not know in life. It seems to be the ultimate irony: the person who could not understand and appreciate such things in life unintentionally created a fresh start for them in death.
I’ve heard many people say that Cho was “an evil man” and that the events at Virginia Tech “proved that people are capable of atrocious things.” Indeed, people sometimes do terrible things to each other. However, the events of April 16th proved to me that people are capable of great kindness and compassion as well. And Cho…he did a terrible thing, to be sure, but I don’t think he was inherently evil. He was misguided, perhaps. And lonely. He was never safe, not even from himself.
Virginia Tech is a tragedy because so many young lives were lost without rhyme or reason. Their promise and potential were snuffed out in an instant. The faculty, too, their professors and mentors, had done great things in their fields of study, and they were still easily capable of more. Yet, despite these losses, I find it somehow comforting that people can band together and express hope for the future when things seem bleak.
Safety isn’t found in locked doors or bolted windows. It’s found in the people around us. And that’s why Cho’s case is so scary. He was in the midst of a crowd of people; he was an “insider” to the situation, so his sudden betrayal immediately compromises that feeling of safety. Cho was his own enemy, and thus became everyone else’s, as well. It comes down to knowing one’s boundaries, and policing them. Cho was socially awkward enough to not be entirely sure of his own boundaries or anyone else’s. He was teased, and he withdrew. He was suicidal when he was committed to the mental institution. His family and roommates were concerned that he would be unable to control his self-destructive urge, so they sent him for psychiatric evaluation. Initially, the psychiatrist checked the box stating that Cho presented a physical risk “to himself or others.” Later, after another evaluation, they determined that Cho only presented a risk to himself, not to anyone else. On this judgment, the decided to release him from the psychiatric facilities to be kept under watch at home. They didn’t know then that because of Cho’s inability to control his own actions, he already presented a risk to everyone around him, as well as himself. Because, for Cho, the threat was deep inside.
We are taught and hard-wired to believe that threats come from outside our boundaries; outside our space. We prepare ourselves that way too, always assuming that the person with malicious intent is someone we do not know. We build walls and guard the outer perimeter. But this insulation acts both ways; the outsiders cannot enter, but everyone inside is trapped. Take, for example, the heavy metal doors to Norris Hall. They were reinforced to protect those inside, but when Cho chained them shut, they suddenly became a death sentence, condemning those inside to remain in danger. Perhaps the same is true of Cho himself. When he put up walls to protect himself from the world, he found that he still wasn’t able to keep control of himself. Unfortunately, no one could really help him keep order within himself. So he eventually found his own way out, and it cost others their lives and safety..
We can’t be safe from the things we cannot predict. We may buckle our seatbelts whenever we’re in a car, but there’s no way of knowing beforehand whether we will end up needing to swerve or brace for impact. The seatbelt’s a worse-case scenario, and although seatbelts save lives every year, they don’t assure survival in back wrecks. In fact, the seatbelt has caused fatalities, too; although it’s not too common, sometimes seatbelts snap the wearer’s neck or trap crash victims in the shell of their destroyed vehicle. Yet most of us do it anyway, because we feel that there might come a point where we’re glad we did.
School shootings, however, don’t come equipped with a safety feature. Students can’t buckle into their chairs and desks don’t come with airbags. How, then, to create a safer school shooting? Drills? Perhaps, but there are some problems with standardizing a response to something that is very much an individual incident. Some elementary school teachers in Murfreesboro, Tennessee learned that the hard way. They conducted a mock school shooting, warning the students that it “wasn’t a drill”. They told the students to hide under tables or lie on the floor. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweatshirt, banged and rattled locked doors, while the terrified kids cried and pleaded for their lives. Clearly, this was a poorly-implemented attempt at preparation for what might become a real event. But in addition to some questionable judgment calls, school shooting drills have a key structural flaw. Imagine if every school develops strict protocol in response to school shootings. During an attack, the students will turn off the lights, close the shades on the window, lock the door, and huddle under desks. Drills are run a few times a year, and all the kids know exactly what to do should an attack occur. Sounds plausible, but keep in mind that most school shootings are perpetrated by students who attend the schools they target. Suddenly, a decent plan of action becomes a veritable death sentence. The shooter knows exactly how they’ve prepared for his or her arrival, and doubtlessly they will have planned out a countermeasure. If they break the lock or force open a window, then the shooter has easy access to dozens of helpless, huddling targets. Even worse, imagine if one of the students had thought to fight back against the supposed shooter during the unannounced drill. The mock-up could have easily escalated into a genuinely dangerous situation. So I think any form of prepared response is simply a bad idea in this situation. It’s like handing any potential gunman a map to the building.
We’ll never be “safe” from school shootings in the traditional sense, as we will never really be able to preempt or prepare for every possible attack. The foreknowledge of safety, then, must simply be replaced with a bit of common sense. In the heat of the moment, even some of the bravest people at Virginia Tech made mistakes that cost them their lives. Kevin Granada is a prime example of this. His desire to protect the students was brave and noble, without a doubt, but he rushed into a perilous situation without a weapon or any real plan of attack. He wasn’t even originally marked to be victim, either, since his office was on the third – not second – floor. He compromised his own safety in a futile effort to protect his students.
How, then, do we become truly safe? Cho teaches us we can’t really be safe. It’s an absolute ideal, and like most similar extremes it’s impossible to initiate them effectively in reality. “Safe” is an all-encompassing concept of protection. To be safe is to be without risk of harm, and it’s a condition that can’t be implemented on a wide scale without adverse effects. Ensuring safety in this sense isn’t feasible; it would require everyone to lock themselves in their houses, surrounded by padded furniture and antiseptic surfaces. It’s an elimination of risk, to be sure, but it can hardly be called “living”.
Obviously, being “safe” is out of the question. From here, though, we must shift our focus from being “safe” to being “safer”. The emphasis on comparison helps put such a vague and cumbersome concept into perspective. We can’t be safe from people like Cho, but we can be safer by preparing ourselves mentally and being aware of our surroundings. We can force ourselves to create a contingency plan, even if we suspect we’ll never use it. Apart from that, there’s nothing we can really do to protect ourselves from stray products of fate. If it can’t be foreseen, there’s no reason to worry ourselves sick about it. It’s why people tried to resume a “normal” life as quickly as possible after September 11th. It was an unfortunate experience, to be sure, but there was no reason to believe it would be a recurring event. And if even if it was attempted again….well, this time we’d be ready for it. After all, we watch our borders pretty closely. It’s just when we ignore the interior that we get into trouble.
Paranoia isn’t an admirable quality. But if you can strike a balance of awareness and relaxation, then there’s nothing really to worry about. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t let it consume me. I’ve wondered what I would do if a classmate suddenly pulled out a gun and went on a rampage. I’ve pondered a response to someone leaning out of a window in one of the red brick buildings, shooting the passersby with a sniper rifle. It’s made me confront exactly what it means to be safe in a world where no protection is guaranteed and everyone, everyone is potentially dangerous.
Luckily, not everyone is dangerous. We may cast our glances warily over our shoulders, but when the time comes and a threat appears, a polarization occurs instantly. Looking down the barrel of a gun acts as an instantaneous catalyst; suddenly, the shooter has to deal with people who outnumber him and are willing to do whatever they can to stop him. In that moment, everything becomes clear. Everyone is dangerous, but some of the dangerous people are on your side. And together you’re united against a common enemy. Having others around is the closest we’ll ever truly come to being safe, because as long as we’re with someone else, at least we won’t be alone. People tend to subscribe to the “buddy system”; as long as we have someone else with us, we won’t need to worry. There’s some degree of safety in numbers. If we’re together, as long as we’re not alone, we’ll all be okay.
As flawed as our search for the perfect haven might be, it’s evident everywhere, especially in response to a large-scale tragedy like September 11th or Virginia Tech. It’s the epitome of so many phone calls placed by students after the massacre. At the heart of every message were the words the world wanted to hear, summed up in every phone call to a parent, sibling, or friend:
“Don’t worry…I’m safe.”
Need Extra Credit?
Attend Ernesto Quiñónez's reading at 4 PM today in the Alumni Room in Old Main, write a 2-paged response paper, and turn in in by class time 23/5.
Missy Kalbrenner 2
Little Lady
Prior to entering grade school my father explained to me that although I was expected to become an educated young woman, the real skills that I would ever need in life were the ones passed down to me by my mother: cooking, cleaning and ironing. Skills that my father never showed much appreciation for, but his good mood made a better day for us all when he climbed into a made bed and all his shirts were dryer warm and starch stiff. My father and I had been sitting on the futon in our family room, he watching Seinfeld and I doodling in my My Little Pony coloring book, and upon filling in Melody’s tail magenta I learned that the first five years of my life had been spent learning not only my abc’s and 123’s but the difference between cold and warm water wash and how to properly remove the dust from the tops of the ceiling fans. I was an only child that was taught to be seen and not heard, I did what I was told. I went about these acts for years without resistance and was taught by the best, my mother, the domestic goddess. She was a woman who began her life successfully as a cosmetologist and gave up her salon for a child. She has shown me her feet spread wide and a size larger just from carrying me in her stomach, a protrusion hanging off of her 4’10” frame, and has told me that someday I too will experience the joy of childbearing for my overfed executive husband. I was to become a woman, I was being trained to become her.
My parents hated my knees. I came out of my mother’s womb pigeon toed, and eventually my feet straightened out, but my knees failed to follow and they still hit and scrape themselves on everything they can reach: doorjambs, table legs, trees. I used to look forward to the weekends where I could play with my cousins, squish my bare toes in the mud with them, take turns between the seven of us riding the one scooter we had up and down the sidewalks. I could fall down on the gravel and not worry about getting yelled at by mom and dad when I came home with blood dripping from my knees down my calves. My mother clothed me in dresses to hide them and would pinch my ears when I sat down cross-legged and pressed my skirts between my legs exposing the scars and bruises from jumping off swings and too many cartwheels in the dirt. From then on it became her goal to teach me what it is to be “lady like”.
At least once a month my parents would hold dinner parties that would fill our house with twenty to fifty of my father’s middle aged employees who usually left dizzy and in cabs. I would be shoved into the purple velvet dress my great grandmother gave me, that lint covered sack made of fabric for cheap royalty, and a wide black headband would keep my hair out of my eyes so that I could converse properly with my father’s guests like any good seven-year-old daughter should. My mother loved to paint my nails the night before, usually soft pink, and put my hair up in curlers so that my it would fall soft on my shoulders instead of their usual stringy locks. This is what a young lady should look like, she’d tell me as I looked at myself in the mirror, clean and tidy, then I’d have to practice my smile so that I could appropriately answer the door. And the guests came one by one hugging me and telling me how cute I was and how much of a heartbreaker I was going to be when I grew up.
I began telling boys that I was going marry them in preschool. My parents thought it would be cute to hold a faux-marriage between a young boy named Lucas and myself at their own wedding. Our parents laughed about how they were sure that we would end up together and would dream up our future occupations, our children’s names. In kindergarten I told Andy Kim that I was going to marry him while we carved pumpkins at Halloween. I told him that I had to marry him in order to keep my initials, his glasses were smeared with pumpkin strings. A boy named Clinton sat in front of me in sixth grade and while everyone else studied the civil war, I studied the mole on the back of his neck, that tiny piece of him the size of a pencil eraser. We played tennis together and he made fun of my weak serve and I cut out letters to spell out his name and pasted them in my diary. I would lay in my yard pretending to be Snow White and lift my lips into the air accepting the kiss my prince laid upon my sleeping mouth. I’d unscrew the screen off my window and throw my hair over the ledge and watch all twelve inches of it blow around in the ocean air with no male arm reaching up to climb.
My parents were always really straightforward when it came to their rules about boys. Like they always had to meet them and preferably have a meal with them. Boys couldn’t drive me anywhere or pick me up at my house, my parents always had to drop me off and walk me to every date, and no date could last more than three hours, but they sure never said anything about how to pick them. Without putting much thought into it I can easily say that I’ve dated more than four drug dealers, two auto parts thieves, a religious radical, and one mentally disabled young man. Three have cheated on me and two were gay. Oddly enough, my parents never said a thing, not even when I was running around in cropped halter tops and shorts with my ass hanging out. Maybe the occasional “Has Boy-X gotten a job yet?” but anything else awkward beyond that made me feel like I was five years old again sitting on the kitchen counter asking what sex is because that’s what my friend said she wanted to do with Michael Jackson when she grew up. It was the kind of situation that deserved one of those really uncomfortable mother-daughter talks where the mother sits and reminisces about all the boys she encountered in her high school days, but my mother isn’t the kind of person who has enough courage or even knowledge on the subject to do something like that. Both of my parents were married previously, so I guess they figured that like them I’d discover and learn from my mistakes on my own.
I entered high school with an older public school boyfriend that my parents did not approve of. They did not like his shifty eyes that would not look into theirs or his convict father and drugstore clerk mother. But I liked him, and he liked to buy me things with the money he made off of small time drug dealing. He’d buy me necklaces of the finest cubic zirconia, pleather skirts, and skimpy tops made of nothing but translucent sequins and I became a sparkling lure for him to cast, told to lead various military men and tourists from the front of clubs to the back parking lots where he would wait selling his finest. This relationship soon became meaningless and waking up in the backseat of his car no longer a shiver of bliss but disgust and just when I was thinking of getting out clean, his best friend tied a rope around his own neck. He didn’t speak for two whole weeks after it happened and it was my duty to sit with him on the curb rocking the dead weight of his body in my arms. He had me trained, as my parents had, to be a dutiful young lady aiming to please. I knew he cheated on me more than once and had also treated those girls the exact same way he treated me, dressing them up to his advantage, pressing their faces in between his legs, but they were smart and got out early. I didn’t want to leave yet, I wanted to be that one girl that could change him, not because I really cared about him but because it was what I felt meant to do, it was what Cosmo told me to do, it was what Jane did for Tarzan, tamed something wild, make it civilized by my standards. I had an image of men, as many of the girls around me did, similar to the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast,” and an impossible and pointless quest to better each of them. But things don’t work like this in girl-world. Between classes in freshman year, I passed by two girls in the bathroom standing by the sinks eyeing me on my way into a stall. Right after I closed the door I could hear one of them mutter under her breath “slut”, and walked back out into the hall. At the time I was dating this bum that was a year out of high school and working full time bagging groceries at Times Supermarket. Now I really wish that my mother had explained to me the politics of girls and boys, and maybe more importantly, the politics of girls and girls, because in this situation I didn’t put two and two together, I just cried over being called a name. I had entered, as every woman has before me, without warning, the cult of women.
So, some in my own cult thought of me as promiscuous, and I beg to disagree; it may not be this simple, but, I was, and still am, trying to learn about my position in this world through understanding the opposite sex. Naomi Wolf captures this sentiment perfectly in her book “Promiscuities”: “The progression through the “bases” was not only a physical exploration, it was also a social one: it told us about who we might be in the social hierarchy. And it was about trying on personas. Who we could be was determined by who we were allowed to touch.” The cult of American women has changed dramatically over the last hundred or so years. Society’s feminine themes and the media’s ideas of womanhood have gone from, as Marjorie Ferguson cites, “The Working Wife is a Bad Wife” and “Getting and Keeping Your Man” to “The Working Wife is a Good Wife” and “Getting and Keeping Your Man”. We, women, have gone from thinking that perfection is the ultimate goal, specifically perfection as a wife, to loving our woman selves and convincing ourselves that we will find love just by being the who we are. Every woman I have ever known has said that, “Be yourself”, and it’s always been in the context of finding “the one”. My family gathers often at my house to barbeque on the weekends and as they enter they kiss, they hug, then they divide: men in the backyard with the grill and the game, women in the kitchen with the gossip. While my father, my uncles and my female cousins’ significant others discuss the number of touchdowns Green Bay made the week before and how my uncle is doing at his new job, my mother, her sisters and my female cousins discuss the men. How so and so is unable to pay the rent on time, how so and so still hasn’t gotten around to cleaning out the garage, how so and so might be having an affair. And all of this was discussed while they made spinach dip, laid crackers out on trays and loaded coolers with ice and beer for the men. I was, and still am, the one to deliver these items and I always hang around the men until my mother calls me for another duty, often to relieve myself of all the talk I endured back inside the house. Things are always simpler outside with them—discussion of impersonal things, world issues, television—its masculinity at it’s finest. As E.M. Forster says in A Room with a View, “Men…move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive.” Using that as a definition of masculinity, my father is masculine. Using society’s macho man, look at how many hot dogs I can scarf down, how many baskets I can make and how many bears I can take down with my bare hands definition, my father is not masculine. Although he supported us easily with his six figure income, it was my mother who took out the garbage, mowed the lawn and installed our ceiling fans. She’s the one we buy worktables and jigsaws for at Christmas; we buy my father books and Bose headphones. When they go walking in the morning my father prefers the sidewalk near the beach or the air-conditioned mall, my mother goes on muddy hikes and still attends kickboxing afterwards.
There’s a strange push and pull that comes from having two parents that are so different from each other. I still can’t figure out what they have in common, but in terms of raising me they had the same mixed feelings of how much I was allowed to think on my own, how much I was to be exposed to. They shied my eyes away from all the “negative” attributes of the world, they’d cover my eyes when anyone kissed on television, changed the channel after someone cursed and I would sneak into my mother’s sewing room after dinner and watch the Simpsons or Beavis and Butthead, follow my cousin into his bathroom and watch him shoot up heroin with his best friend. I also never got a sex talk from mom and dad, instead a book was slipped under my door, “A Doctor Talks to 8-12 Year Olds”. Boys were always a serious matter to them, but sex is still something we do not discuss. My father is a conservative white man from a small town in Minnesota. He did what any respectable Midwestern male was supposed to do, go to college, play football, marry your college girlfriend and get a comfortable job. My mother is a Filipina from Hawaii who went into cosmetology and ended her career for a family. Long distance phone servicing was what brought my parents together. My father was at the time running Sprint’s Asia-Pacific region, and my mother was a sales representative who walked in his office one day and began their unlikely flirtation by noticing that his socks didn’t match. I still can’t see where the spark came from. Opposites attract is the only kind answer I can think of, but from what I can see, my father just looked like a good provider and my mother a good wife, plus they both realized that time wasn’t on their side anymore.
Every woman on my mother’s side of the family has gotten pregnant in high school or shortly after graduation and most of them now have multiple children from various fathers. At our regular weekend gatherings or Christmas dinners each of my female cousins would show up with a new man, if a man at all. We don’t talk about this, we just treat him like he’s one of the family and even though we know he won’t be back again, we make him feel like he’s invited and welcome anyway. My mother was the exception. She was told that she was virtually unable to have children after trying for years, so when I showed up they thought me to be some kind of miracle. But my cousins who were pregnant at sixteen weren’t punished in the same manner as I would have been if I had been pregnant at such an age. They were supported, their mistake was overlooked and the problem was not seen as such, it was seen as something that just plain happens because it had happened to her mother and her mother before that. My mother’s half of the family is Filipino, yet another culture in which women marry and bear children as teens. My great-grandmother had her first child at fourteen on a sugar cane plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii, the father was a white military man twice her age. And here my cousins and I stand as the fourth generation in Hawaii continuing something that is not socially acceptable in the U.S. I came into the world just as they began to have kids, but by the time they were on their second or third I was aware of what was happening.
My family and I have always considered ourselves to be Filipino-Hawaiians rather than Filipino-Americans. Hawaiian culture has dominated our beliefs, our customs, our hobbies, so to be able to fully understand my family and the women in it, I had to take a step back in time to Hawaii in the early 1800’s. The first Westerner to explore Hawaii was Captain James Cook in 1778. Along with disease and foreign creatures, he introduced the Hawaiian people to military technology and western trade as well as western customs and systems. The establishment of private property was what still haunts the Hawaiian people today, but what haunted them then was the treatment of their women. Death rates were high due to what is thought to be cholera and bubonic plague, so women made it their duty to bear ten or more children in hopes that one would make it to adulthood. Up to this point, Hawaiian women were equal amongst men, but with businesses and port towns rising they felt the need to find work as nurses, washerwomen, prostitutes, all of which they received about half of men’s wages. Prior to 1845, women could vote, own property and divorce. Beginning in 1845 their rights were stripped, property had to be forked over to their husbands, by 1860 women were required by law to take their husband’s name. Status, usually dictated by blood, was what kept women in power and they seemed ahead of their time from a western point of view, they spoke up and created protest groups when their Queen and the Hawaiian Monarchy was overthrown. Hawaii became America’s 50th state in 1959 and by that time Native Hawaiian women had married all kinds of men, Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino. In a span of 100 years the Hawaiian people had gone from being completely unexposed to having their culture and language banned, their monarchy taken and replaced with a foreign system, then back to reviving their culture and adapting to a legislation and new inhabitants. My family enters in the early 1910’s when my great-grandmother came over on a boat with many other Filipinos, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese, to work in the sugar cane and coffee fields, and the pineapple canneries. They were separated by ethnicity, then within their ethnicity they were separated by gender and class. Some of the only men those women were exposed to that were outside of their ethnicity and class were white men, military men who slept with them and were never seen again. This is where the cycle begins.
Kathleen Uno states the Western idea of Asian women as such: “‘Lotus blossom’,’ ‘submissive,’ ‘exotic,’ and ‘sexy.’” When it comes to Filipino women my guy friends say they think of porn stars. My girl friends equate Filipino women in Hawaii to what MTV or BET makes black women out to be in what is modern mainland U.S.A. We’re a little darker and usually mistaken for Polynesian of a sort, we’re a little louder and edgier than the Chinese or Japanese, and in the end, the sad stereotype is that we all end up knocked up and alone. This is not specific to Hawaii. A study done in San Fransisco by the Pilipino Health Mini-Forums Committee in 1993 found that Filipino teens had the highest pregnancy rate of amongst Asians, and the highest rate of increase in number of births in coparison to African-Americans, Latinas and Asians. In the Philippines, women function much like Native Hawaiian women did, as equals, but after the Spanish colonization it was the domesticity that we still have today that prevailed. Mix this in with the Hawaiian culture, a culture that also once had women who were treated as equals, toss in a few 1950’s Midwestern ideals and you end up with my family.
After realizing my cultural and social history I began to understand that I wasn’t at all like them, my family I mean. I especially wasn’t anything like my cousins. I attended a private school, it was almost certain that I would graduate and go on to college, and I didn’t go job searching the minute I turned fifteen. A certain alienation happened and I maintained a distance from them, which not only stemmed from my privileged life but also from our age difference; my closest cousin is five years older, the next is twelve. It wasn’t until I left home at sixteen that I noticed it, the judgement, the way they looked at me and the way I looked at them. We are all judgmental whether or not we like to admit it. It’s how we make choices and decisions and form opinions; it’s imperative for us to judge and evaluate the world around us. I’ve judged my family, my mother, and found that babies, GEDs and welfare weren’t for me, instead I’ve chosen to surround myself with friends, higher education and maybe in the future I’ll be knocking on welfares door. If only they knew how alike we really are.
We’ve all felt out this world through men and the same kind of men, the difference is they left their men (or rather their men left them) as soon as a child was conceived, I leave mine when I get curious, not bored, just curious. I try on the outfit until the clothes have holes and then I change. I’ve ended up with a diverse wardrobe, each reminds me of a different era of my life and a time where I’ve resurrected and rebuilt myself to fit the next outfit. Now I’m picking out my own clothes, but I will never throw out the rest. It’s often a song that will bring me back to these boys. I am reminded of my very first boyfriend whenever I hear that Ja Rule and Jennifer Lopez song “I’m Real”. When I met my first serious boyfriend’s parents, his father sat down at the piano and serenaded me in Italian high as a kite. His parents grew pot in their backyard and every now and then that song comes into my head, often when I smell marijuana. My next serious boyfriend was from Idaho and was a drummer in a Christian rock band, sometimes, my iTunes will play one of their songs while on shuffle and I will be instantly brought shot back into his 1987 Buick LeSabre with my hand out the window holding up the right side-view mirror. The Beatles’ often overlooked song “Honey Pie” takes me back to music camp and the Jew-fro sporting jazz pianist I will never forget. Anything off of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album sparks the blue eyes of my sole companion for the last two years of high school in my head. These were the important ones, although they were all very different from each other, they taught me the most. They have created who I am today. They sewed my sleeves and hemmed the pants of the clothes I tried on through the kinds of music they liked, the movies we saw together, their families, their bedrooms. And I’ve judged them all through exploring these things, I even judged them as marriage material, but I find myself now at a crossroad. For the first time I see no future in dating. I’ve always dated for the companionship, kept them around long enough to get to know them better than they knew themselves, now I’ve lost that urge, lost that urge for exploration. Now I want freedom, I want to travel and not have to call whoever I’m with every night, I want to sleep in my own bed, alone and I want to govern when I retire for the night. Through these men, I’ve acquired knowledge, whether it be about culture and heritage or drugs and cars. I’ve found that I almost like doing their laundry for them and bringing them meals for no reason at all. And in the end I’ve learned to respect them, and that although they’ve hurt me through their lying and their cheating, I’ve lied and cheated just the same.
I carry the women of my family with me whether they like it or not, they’re my family, they’ve raised me. I will continue to judge them and extract those things that make them beautiful, they’ve sent themselves back to school, loved their children and teach them lessons through their own lives, the mistakes they’ve made, and those children have got some big dreams now. I like to think that I could have done what they did, but I got dealt an easy hand and a part of me wanted to experience what they had and I did that through men. I will never be a housewife, I might not even be a wife or a mother for that matter, but I will continue to learn this world through men until I find one who will come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner and will return for Christmas. My parents, although they blindfolded me for many years, have produced a child that can cross her ankles, smile and hold airy conversation for hours as well as belch like a sailor and dance on tables. They showered me with the kind of love that restricted me from playing with the two boys next door that let chickens loose in our yard, closing my door for any reason, and from being able to stay out until midnight even at my best friend’s house a block away. I will always carry them with me, my mother especially. We will never have talks of birth control or the men in my life, but her influence is what will remain. And I know that everyday I become more like her sweeping and vacuuming daily, dusting the shelves before I stack my books, but in the end its not because I’m female and that’s the role I’ve been raised into, it’s just because I like clean floors.
Prior to entering grade school my father explained to me that although I was expected to become an educated young woman, the real skills that I would ever need in life were the ones passed down to me by my mother: cooking, cleaning and ironing. Skills that my father never showed much appreciation for, but his good mood made a better day for us all when he climbed into a made bed and all his shirts were dryer warm and starch stiff. My father and I had been sitting on the futon in our family room, he watching Seinfeld and I doodling in my My Little Pony coloring book, and upon filling in Melody’s tail magenta I learned that the first five years of my life had been spent learning not only my abc’s and 123’s but the difference between cold and warm water wash and how to properly remove the dust from the tops of the ceiling fans. I was an only child that was taught to be seen and not heard, I did what I was told. I went about these acts for years without resistance and was taught by the best, my mother, the domestic goddess. She was a woman who began her life successfully as a cosmetologist and gave up her salon for a child. She has shown me her feet spread wide and a size larger just from carrying me in her stomach, a protrusion hanging off of her 4’10” frame, and has told me that someday I too will experience the joy of childbearing for my overfed executive husband. I was to become a woman, I was being trained to become her.
My parents hated my knees. I came out of my mother’s womb pigeon toed, and eventually my feet straightened out, but my knees failed to follow and they still hit and scrape themselves on everything they can reach: doorjambs, table legs, trees. I used to look forward to the weekends where I could play with my cousins, squish my bare toes in the mud with them, take turns between the seven of us riding the one scooter we had up and down the sidewalks. I could fall down on the gravel and not worry about getting yelled at by mom and dad when I came home with blood dripping from my knees down my calves. My mother clothed me in dresses to hide them and would pinch my ears when I sat down cross-legged and pressed my skirts between my legs exposing the scars and bruises from jumping off swings and too many cartwheels in the dirt. From then on it became her goal to teach me what it is to be “lady like”.
At least once a month my parents would hold dinner parties that would fill our house with twenty to fifty of my father’s middle aged employees who usually left dizzy and in cabs. I would be shoved into the purple velvet dress my great grandmother gave me, that lint covered sack made of fabric for cheap royalty, and a wide black headband would keep my hair out of my eyes so that I could converse properly with my father’s guests like any good seven-year-old daughter should. My mother loved to paint my nails the night before, usually soft pink, and put my hair up in curlers so that my it would fall soft on my shoulders instead of their usual stringy locks. This is what a young lady should look like, she’d tell me as I looked at myself in the mirror, clean and tidy, then I’d have to practice my smile so that I could appropriately answer the door. And the guests came one by one hugging me and telling me how cute I was and how much of a heartbreaker I was going to be when I grew up.
I began telling boys that I was going marry them in preschool. My parents thought it would be cute to hold a faux-marriage between a young boy named Lucas and myself at their own wedding. Our parents laughed about how they were sure that we would end up together and would dream up our future occupations, our children’s names. In kindergarten I told Andy Kim that I was going to marry him while we carved pumpkins at Halloween. I told him that I had to marry him in order to keep my initials, his glasses were smeared with pumpkin strings. A boy named Clinton sat in front of me in sixth grade and while everyone else studied the civil war, I studied the mole on the back of his neck, that tiny piece of him the size of a pencil eraser. We played tennis together and he made fun of my weak serve and I cut out letters to spell out his name and pasted them in my diary. I would lay in my yard pretending to be Snow White and lift my lips into the air accepting the kiss my prince laid upon my sleeping mouth. I’d unscrew the screen off my window and throw my hair over the ledge and watch all twelve inches of it blow around in the ocean air with no male arm reaching up to climb.
My parents were always really straightforward when it came to their rules about boys. Like they always had to meet them and preferably have a meal with them. Boys couldn’t drive me anywhere or pick me up at my house, my parents always had to drop me off and walk me to every date, and no date could last more than three hours, but they sure never said anything about how to pick them. Without putting much thought into it I can easily say that I’ve dated more than four drug dealers, two auto parts thieves, a religious radical, and one mentally disabled young man. Three have cheated on me and two were gay. Oddly enough, my parents never said a thing, not even when I was running around in cropped halter tops and shorts with my ass hanging out. Maybe the occasional “Has Boy-X gotten a job yet?” but anything else awkward beyond that made me feel like I was five years old again sitting on the kitchen counter asking what sex is because that’s what my friend said she wanted to do with Michael Jackson when she grew up. It was the kind of situation that deserved one of those really uncomfortable mother-daughter talks where the mother sits and reminisces about all the boys she encountered in her high school days, but my mother isn’t the kind of person who has enough courage or even knowledge on the subject to do something like that. Both of my parents were married previously, so I guess they figured that like them I’d discover and learn from my mistakes on my own.
I entered high school with an older public school boyfriend that my parents did not approve of. They did not like his shifty eyes that would not look into theirs or his convict father and drugstore clerk mother. But I liked him, and he liked to buy me things with the money he made off of small time drug dealing. He’d buy me necklaces of the finest cubic zirconia, pleather skirts, and skimpy tops made of nothing but translucent sequins and I became a sparkling lure for him to cast, told to lead various military men and tourists from the front of clubs to the back parking lots where he would wait selling his finest. This relationship soon became meaningless and waking up in the backseat of his car no longer a shiver of bliss but disgust and just when I was thinking of getting out clean, his best friend tied a rope around his own neck. He didn’t speak for two whole weeks after it happened and it was my duty to sit with him on the curb rocking the dead weight of his body in my arms. He had me trained, as my parents had, to be a dutiful young lady aiming to please. I knew he cheated on me more than once and had also treated those girls the exact same way he treated me, dressing them up to his advantage, pressing their faces in between his legs, but they were smart and got out early. I didn’t want to leave yet, I wanted to be that one girl that could change him, not because I really cared about him but because it was what I felt meant to do, it was what Cosmo told me to do, it was what Jane did for Tarzan, tamed something wild, make it civilized by my standards. I had an image of men, as many of the girls around me did, similar to the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast,” and an impossible and pointless quest to better each of them. But things don’t work like this in girl-world. Between classes in freshman year, I passed by two girls in the bathroom standing by the sinks eyeing me on my way into a stall. Right after I closed the door I could hear one of them mutter under her breath “slut”, and walked back out into the hall. At the time I was dating this bum that was a year out of high school and working full time bagging groceries at Times Supermarket. Now I really wish that my mother had explained to me the politics of girls and boys, and maybe more importantly, the politics of girls and girls, because in this situation I didn’t put two and two together, I just cried over being called a name. I had entered, as every woman has before me, without warning, the cult of women.
So, some in my own cult thought of me as promiscuous, and I beg to disagree; it may not be this simple, but, I was, and still am, trying to learn about my position in this world through understanding the opposite sex. Naomi Wolf captures this sentiment perfectly in her book “Promiscuities”: “The progression through the “bases” was not only a physical exploration, it was also a social one: it told us about who we might be in the social hierarchy. And it was about trying on personas. Who we could be was determined by who we were allowed to touch.” The cult of American women has changed dramatically over the last hundred or so years. Society’s feminine themes and the media’s ideas of womanhood have gone from, as Marjorie Ferguson cites, “The Working Wife is a Bad Wife” and “Getting and Keeping Your Man” to “The Working Wife is a Good Wife” and “Getting and Keeping Your Man”. We, women, have gone from thinking that perfection is the ultimate goal, specifically perfection as a wife, to loving our woman selves and convincing ourselves that we will find love just by being the who we are. Every woman I have ever known has said that, “Be yourself”, and it’s always been in the context of finding “the one”. My family gathers often at my house to barbeque on the weekends and as they enter they kiss, they hug, then they divide: men in the backyard with the grill and the game, women in the kitchen with the gossip. While my father, my uncles and my female cousins’ significant others discuss the number of touchdowns Green Bay made the week before and how my uncle is doing at his new job, my mother, her sisters and my female cousins discuss the men. How so and so is unable to pay the rent on time, how so and so still hasn’t gotten around to cleaning out the garage, how so and so might be having an affair. And all of this was discussed while they made spinach dip, laid crackers out on trays and loaded coolers with ice and beer for the men. I was, and still am, the one to deliver these items and I always hang around the men until my mother calls me for another duty, often to relieve myself of all the talk I endured back inside the house. Things are always simpler outside with them—discussion of impersonal things, world issues, television—its masculinity at it’s finest. As E.M. Forster says in A Room with a View, “Men…move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive.” Using that as a definition of masculinity, my father is masculine. Using society’s macho man, look at how many hot dogs I can scarf down, how many baskets I can make and how many bears I can take down with my bare hands definition, my father is not masculine. Although he supported us easily with his six figure income, it was my mother who took out the garbage, mowed the lawn and installed our ceiling fans. She’s the one we buy worktables and jigsaws for at Christmas; we buy my father books and Bose headphones. When they go walking in the morning my father prefers the sidewalk near the beach or the air-conditioned mall, my mother goes on muddy hikes and still attends kickboxing afterwards.
There’s a strange push and pull that comes from having two parents that are so different from each other. I still can’t figure out what they have in common, but in terms of raising me they had the same mixed feelings of how much I was allowed to think on my own, how much I was to be exposed to. They shied my eyes away from all the “negative” attributes of the world, they’d cover my eyes when anyone kissed on television, changed the channel after someone cursed and I would sneak into my mother’s sewing room after dinner and watch the Simpsons or Beavis and Butthead, follow my cousin into his bathroom and watch him shoot up heroin with his best friend. I also never got a sex talk from mom and dad, instead a book was slipped under my door, “A Doctor Talks to 8-12 Year Olds”. Boys were always a serious matter to them, but sex is still something we do not discuss. My father is a conservative white man from a small town in Minnesota. He did what any respectable Midwestern male was supposed to do, go to college, play football, marry your college girlfriend and get a comfortable job. My mother is a Filipina from Hawaii who went into cosmetology and ended her career for a family. Long distance phone servicing was what brought my parents together. My father was at the time running Sprint’s Asia-Pacific region, and my mother was a sales representative who walked in his office one day and began their unlikely flirtation by noticing that his socks didn’t match. I still can’t see where the spark came from. Opposites attract is the only kind answer I can think of, but from what I can see, my father just looked like a good provider and my mother a good wife, plus they both realized that time wasn’t on their side anymore.
Every woman on my mother’s side of the family has gotten pregnant in high school or shortly after graduation and most of them now have multiple children from various fathers. At our regular weekend gatherings or Christmas dinners each of my female cousins would show up with a new man, if a man at all. We don’t talk about this, we just treat him like he’s one of the family and even though we know he won’t be back again, we make him feel like he’s invited and welcome anyway. My mother was the exception. She was told that she was virtually unable to have children after trying for years, so when I showed up they thought me to be some kind of miracle. But my cousins who were pregnant at sixteen weren’t punished in the same manner as I would have been if I had been pregnant at such an age. They were supported, their mistake was overlooked and the problem was not seen as such, it was seen as something that just plain happens because it had happened to her mother and her mother before that. My mother’s half of the family is Filipino, yet another culture in which women marry and bear children as teens. My great-grandmother had her first child at fourteen on a sugar cane plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii, the father was a white military man twice her age. And here my cousins and I stand as the fourth generation in Hawaii continuing something that is not socially acceptable in the U.S. I came into the world just as they began to have kids, but by the time they were on their second or third I was aware of what was happening.
My family and I have always considered ourselves to be Filipino-Hawaiians rather than Filipino-Americans. Hawaiian culture has dominated our beliefs, our customs, our hobbies, so to be able to fully understand my family and the women in it, I had to take a step back in time to Hawaii in the early 1800’s. The first Westerner to explore Hawaii was Captain James Cook in 1778. Along with disease and foreign creatures, he introduced the Hawaiian people to military technology and western trade as well as western customs and systems. The establishment of private property was what still haunts the Hawaiian people today, but what haunted them then was the treatment of their women. Death rates were high due to what is thought to be cholera and bubonic plague, so women made it their duty to bear ten or more children in hopes that one would make it to adulthood. Up to this point, Hawaiian women were equal amongst men, but with businesses and port towns rising they felt the need to find work as nurses, washerwomen, prostitutes, all of which they received about half of men’s wages. Prior to 1845, women could vote, own property and divorce. Beginning in 1845 their rights were stripped, property had to be forked over to their husbands, by 1860 women were required by law to take their husband’s name. Status, usually dictated by blood, was what kept women in power and they seemed ahead of their time from a western point of view, they spoke up and created protest groups when their Queen and the Hawaiian Monarchy was overthrown. Hawaii became America’s 50th state in 1959 and by that time Native Hawaiian women had married all kinds of men, Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino. In a span of 100 years the Hawaiian people had gone from being completely unexposed to having their culture and language banned, their monarchy taken and replaced with a foreign system, then back to reviving their culture and adapting to a legislation and new inhabitants. My family enters in the early 1910’s when my great-grandmother came over on a boat with many other Filipinos, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese, to work in the sugar cane and coffee fields, and the pineapple canneries. They were separated by ethnicity, then within their ethnicity they were separated by gender and class. Some of the only men those women were exposed to that were outside of their ethnicity and class were white men, military men who slept with them and were never seen again. This is where the cycle begins.
Kathleen Uno states the Western idea of Asian women as such: “‘Lotus blossom’,’ ‘submissive,’ ‘exotic,’ and ‘sexy.’” When it comes to Filipino women my guy friends say they think of porn stars. My girl friends equate Filipino women in Hawaii to what MTV or BET makes black women out to be in what is modern mainland U.S.A. We’re a little darker and usually mistaken for Polynesian of a sort, we’re a little louder and edgier than the Chinese or Japanese, and in the end, the sad stereotype is that we all end up knocked up and alone. This is not specific to Hawaii. A study done in San Fransisco by the Pilipino Health Mini-Forums Committee in 1993 found that Filipino teens had the highest pregnancy rate of amongst Asians, and the highest rate of increase in number of births in coparison to African-Americans, Latinas and Asians. In the Philippines, women function much like Native Hawaiian women did, as equals, but after the Spanish colonization it was the domesticity that we still have today that prevailed. Mix this in with the Hawaiian culture, a culture that also once had women who were treated as equals, toss in a few 1950’s Midwestern ideals and you end up with my family.
After realizing my cultural and social history I began to understand that I wasn’t at all like them, my family I mean. I especially wasn’t anything like my cousins. I attended a private school, it was almost certain that I would graduate and go on to college, and I didn’t go job searching the minute I turned fifteen. A certain alienation happened and I maintained a distance from them, which not only stemmed from my privileged life but also from our age difference; my closest cousin is five years older, the next is twelve. It wasn’t until I left home at sixteen that I noticed it, the judgement, the way they looked at me and the way I looked at them. We are all judgmental whether or not we like to admit it. It’s how we make choices and decisions and form opinions; it’s imperative for us to judge and evaluate the world around us. I’ve judged my family, my mother, and found that babies, GEDs and welfare weren’t for me, instead I’ve chosen to surround myself with friends, higher education and maybe in the future I’ll be knocking on welfares door. If only they knew how alike we really are.
We’ve all felt out this world through men and the same kind of men, the difference is they left their men (or rather their men left them) as soon as a child was conceived, I leave mine when I get curious, not bored, just curious. I try on the outfit until the clothes have holes and then I change. I’ve ended up with a diverse wardrobe, each reminds me of a different era of my life and a time where I’ve resurrected and rebuilt myself to fit the next outfit. Now I’m picking out my own clothes, but I will never throw out the rest. It’s often a song that will bring me back to these boys. I am reminded of my very first boyfriend whenever I hear that Ja Rule and Jennifer Lopez song “I’m Real”. When I met my first serious boyfriend’s parents, his father sat down at the piano and serenaded me in Italian high as a kite. His parents grew pot in their backyard and every now and then that song comes into my head, often when I smell marijuana. My next serious boyfriend was from Idaho and was a drummer in a Christian rock band, sometimes, my iTunes will play one of their songs while on shuffle and I will be instantly brought shot back into his 1987 Buick LeSabre with my hand out the window holding up the right side-view mirror. The Beatles’ often overlooked song “Honey Pie” takes me back to music camp and the Jew-fro sporting jazz pianist I will never forget. Anything off of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album sparks the blue eyes of my sole companion for the last two years of high school in my head. These were the important ones, although they were all very different from each other, they taught me the most. They have created who I am today. They sewed my sleeves and hemmed the pants of the clothes I tried on through the kinds of music they liked, the movies we saw together, their families, their bedrooms. And I’ve judged them all through exploring these things, I even judged them as marriage material, but I find myself now at a crossroad. For the first time I see no future in dating. I’ve always dated for the companionship, kept them around long enough to get to know them better than they knew themselves, now I’ve lost that urge, lost that urge for exploration. Now I want freedom, I want to travel and not have to call whoever I’m with every night, I want to sleep in my own bed, alone and I want to govern when I retire for the night. Through these men, I’ve acquired knowledge, whether it be about culture and heritage or drugs and cars. I’ve found that I almost like doing their laundry for them and bringing them meals for no reason at all. And in the end I’ve learned to respect them, and that although they’ve hurt me through their lying and their cheating, I’ve lied and cheated just the same.
I carry the women of my family with me whether they like it or not, they’re my family, they’ve raised me. I will continue to judge them and extract those things that make them beautiful, they’ve sent themselves back to school, loved their children and teach them lessons through their own lives, the mistakes they’ve made, and those children have got some big dreams now. I like to think that I could have done what they did, but I got dealt an easy hand and a part of me wanted to experience what they had and I did that through men. I will never be a housewife, I might not even be a wife or a mother for that matter, but I will continue to learn this world through men until I find one who will come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner and will return for Christmas. My parents, although they blindfolded me for many years, have produced a child that can cross her ankles, smile and hold airy conversation for hours as well as belch like a sailor and dance on tables. They showered me with the kind of love that restricted me from playing with the two boys next door that let chickens loose in our yard, closing my door for any reason, and from being able to stay out until midnight even at my best friend’s house a block away. I will always carry them with me, my mother especially. We will never have talks of birth control or the men in my life, but her influence is what will remain. And I know that everyday I become more like her sweeping and vacuuming daily, dusting the shelves before I stack my books, but in the end its not because I’m female and that’s the role I’ve been raised into, it’s just because I like clean floors.
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