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The land is so flat, stretching to the horizon in every direction, it induces vertigo. I fight the urge to tip over and cling to the surface.
Not precisely the same, but I *feel* like I know that feel. I always felt like a bug on a plate in Texas.
When the sky is clear, the expanse is crushing. We should be cowering, but there’s nowhere to hide except in our meager temples to science.
a geodesic dome half-buried in snow like a postapocalyptic Epcot—now
Ha!
She’s still staring. Jesper’s side piece? But he’s not organized nor ambitious enough to juggle two women, let alone two Asian scientists, both likely smarter than he. But why am I even playing myself into this narrative when I know Jesper isn’t like that? As if the assumptions of others—when seeing a white guy and Asian girl (or two!) together—can override what I know to be true. Am I letting others dictate my reality, or is racialized sexual jealousy a symptom of sleep deprivation?
I love this paragraph.
No, this woman puts me on edge for other reasons than the usual when two of our kind exist in a white male setting, thus making us interchangeable or defined in relation to each other—who’s the hot one, who’s more Americanized, which one’s the bitch?
And this one.
He’s the only one who looks annoyed that I’m speaking, but I’m no longer the mute Asian scholarship kid who’d assumed invisibility, felt safer anonymous, sneaking to first place out of nowhere.
cringed. Academia requires performance too, but since the arena is still mostly white, streaked with gold, the politics are more gendered. My women physicist friends, for example, keep their voices calm and low during discussions lest they come across shrill, even if the men scream at the whiteboard. My voice is already husky and loud, but since only 20 percent of physics PhDs are women, I claim aural space for five. So for PhDick’s benefit, when he tries to talk over me, I become a goddamn Greek chorus.
<3
This state of mind is distressing, as I haven’t been whimsical since puberty.
“Typisch,” mutters Florian. German, I’m guessing, meaning “typical,” similar to its Swedish counterpart. I’ve gotten it a few times in Stockholm, once for laughing too loudly in a hipster bar. At least, the “typiskt” insult was for me being an obnoxious American, not for being Asian. Progressive in its own way.
Anyhow, the winter-over application was unnecessarily fussy, with far too many psych tests.
Ha, that makes sense. Tests I would absolutely fail.
The crystals refract light and create this atmospheric phenomenon called parhelia. No need for embellishment, simply glorious. And that’s what’s truly beautiful, how we can elucidate physical reality, strip away its symbols and foretelling. Mystery is for the suckers of the world, its romantics and martyrs.
Definitely irony or foreshadowing or both. Whee!
I say I forgot, but really, I want to ask for a hug. I want Kate to reassure me that mistakes will be forgiven, that I’m still a good scientist and deserve to be here even if I don’t play well with others, that I won’t be sent back whence I came. “No worries, luv,” she says. “Plenty by the bar.”
Would’ve been less disturbing if people were in full costume, but these slight disfigurements unsettle because I can still see what’s familiar lurking underneath.
The policewoman took my father away. The day I’d wished for had finally come.
Ööf. That's so hard to read.
“This pain is real,” she said. “Only real can save you. Feel the difference.” Each time she hit me, I shut another drawer inside. “Anything not real, you must kill before it’s too late.” Ribbons wrapped all around, covering every last bit of my friend’s face.
When younger, my brother fancied himself a Byronic hero, but for the last decade, he’s settled with: “Mad, fat, sad, and dangerous to know.”
And here I thought white dudes had the market cornered on fancying oneself a Byronic hero. TIL
Soon, we were surrounded by rust-colored plateaus, stone piles, and squat towers—sculptures made by toddler giants. The scattered trees, coated in beige fur, also dreamt up by some weirdo child-god. They sprouted green only at the ends of their stubby branches, thrusting spike-leafed pom-poms to the sky.
Their parents were doctors and professors, but I was the true devotee because science was my survival, the language my mother couldn’t understand—how I disproved and refuted her.
Maybe Mom did have tricks up her sleeve, pleating time like a closed paper fan. And even after her occasional drinking binges and Old Testament histrionics, she could cast a glamour, so all we saw the morning after were beer bottles lined up serpentine, sprouting rolled pieces of ink-scribbled paper.
I asked her why she didn’t take extra care on those days if she knew something was going to happen. She explained, “We can’t live in fear, waiting for tragedy. I write these dates not to warn myself, but to console myself after the fact, that there was nothing I could do to prevent it.”
There is a lot here.
Perhaps it’s not just the women in our family anyhow—our entire people have been telling the wrong stories, making a wretched mess of our history. As if anybody wants to be told that their ability to endure is their greatest virtue. No wonder we get invasions and occupations, war and asshole husbands. What kind of stories, I wonder, do the white countries tell of themselves?”
I couldn’t understand all the Korean in “Sister Nymph,” but enough to recognize the folktale, enough to know which victim my mother believed she was and what the rest of her stories would be like.
“We’re here to solve the mysteries, not add to them. Scientists are supposed to—” “Conquer, monetize, weaponize—sorry, not about you. Some American asked me today if I was wintering over to postpone my job hunt, if I had the luxury to do so because I was Swedish with a ‘socialist safety net.’ ” “Why are you wintering over, for realsies?” “To fully confront myself and surrender to the unknowable—to be in awe.” “Yup, you’re a product of the Swedish welfare system.” I laugh, shaking my head.
Afterward, I kiss every part of his face. My kisses tell him everything I can’t—goodbye, thank you, wish I’d met you as a different woman.
Ööf
Physically, in my childhood, I rarely ventured out beyond the walls of the house or even my room, but there was so much more that I explored inside in closets, cabinets, and secret portals. The curiosity and hunger to see what others couldn’t, the willingness to believe in the unexpected—that’s not why I became a physicist, but it can make me a better one now.
The national ethos purports to be all about Jantelagen here, but even longtime expats know of this name game, though the Brits care the most.
Surely this isn’t kismet. Still, how unnerving—I’d grown up thinking of my life as some immigrant’s kid bildungsroman, but then things took a sci-fi supernatural turn in Antarctica with some recent feathery flourishes of gothic horror. Now I’m tripping into a rom-com setup. How do I seize control of my life when I can’t even maintain a stable genre?
So many girls tossed into oceans or vats of molten bronze—drowned or smelted. One myth flowing into the rest. You all have your own stories, but something common flows throughout.
I’ve always kept my own offices stark naked, without even an xkcd comic on the wall.
It reminds me of my own childhood books, with their translated dual texts and bland watercolor illustrations. Were these made by the propaganda office for the children of diaspora?
“Think of it this way,” he says as I slowly spin to face him. “The terrors of childhood are mysterious, rooted in the inexplicability of the world and its people. Easier for a child to process her fear if it’s about being eaten; best if the child overcomes it by sticking the witch in the oven. Childhood is its own dark, wild wood, Elsa—fairy tales help us through it.”
“You’d be willing to spend years on this, stake the next stage of your career—only to possibly end up with mounting evidence against it?” “That’s our job. ‘The religious have their culture of faith; we scientists have our doubt.’ ” A catechism, anchoring me to this world.
“Richard Feynman,” she says, recognizing my quote. “Bit of an ass, but clever.”
LOL!
Scandi-sage, spouting cryptic wisdom through Uralic koans. Then again, Linnea’s favorite Finnish proverb, one quoted by a couple other Finns I’ve met, was: “A weak fart doesn’t rip the ass.”
Bahahahahaha
Unfortunately, the most straightforward experiment is impractical because my mother’s theory requires a longitudinal study across decades, and I don’t have the patience nor stamina to test whether my life adheres to folkloric fate. As for my mother, my dead aunt and dead grandmother and all those before her—I don’t know enough and never will.
Of course, if the theoretical family curse goes back further, there’d be plenty of cousins out there now living these destinies. Which of these women cry out when struck? Which have lost freedom and power through marriage to become trapped? Which have fled for a different life, only to be sent back into the bed of a man? I don’t need Ancestry.com to tell me these story sisters are legion across time and space.
Piblokto is an Inuit ailment, called Arctic hysteria, typically applied to women.
Aren't they always...
Piblokto is a culture-bound syndrome—like how only Americans suffer brain freeze after ice cream or feel existential dread after bingeing a TV series to completion. Korean menopausal women often exhibit hwa-byeong, fire sickness, the result of decades of pent-up rage unleashing itself, usually upon husbands, mothers-in-law, and ungrateful children. The psychosomatic symptoms often arise from an overflow of Han—itself another culture-bound syndrome. There’s no English equivalent, but it seems to afflict all Koreans—a mournful sorrow and railing against fate’s unfairness, an aching of the soul.
Wait, what? Cold-stimulus headaches are cultural? And hwa-byeong. Let me just make a list of things to look up.
Piblokto only exists among Arctic people, according to some doctors, but there’s no such word in any Inuit language. A hundred fifty years after it was first recorded, it’s still written that way in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under “culture-bound syndrome.” But if a bunch of foreigners barged into your world, dragged your men away on dangerous expeditions, studied you like you were some alien, and demanded you explain every word you had for snow—wouldn’t you also run naked and dive into the frozen sea?
I’ve done this many times here, averting my gaze when I couldn’t stand being stared at anymore—usually by men of a certain age.
I realize—this was how my mom behaved around white men. She kept her distance from white fathers of classmates, crossing the street even. I’d assumed she was being demure, immigrant, Korean. But here I am at thirty, the woman whose combat boots were the loudest on campus, along with her voice, as she stomped into lecture halls to stand in front of the whiteboard, now moving through Stockholm with head down, mincing steps—the shy, frightened, meek Asian girl she vowed never to be.
