And it Was Good

 

On March 4, 2023, three days before Gerardo took his last breath on earth, an ambulance brought him back to our home from UCLA hospital.

Gerardo's sister Lily and I raced home to beat the ambulance and to be ready to receive Gerardo and help him shift into hospice care. Everyone on that ambulance who brought him into the house did so with so much love and care that I still get welled up thinking about how beautifully they transported him.

As soon as he was placed in bed and before the hospice staff arrived, a parched Gerardo asked me for his usual beverage of choice: a cold Topo Chico with cranberry juice. I brought it for him and watched him take an unforgettable swig. His face lit up with a gigantic smile and he said "ahhh ... that's good."

He said it not necessarily to me or to Lily. His gaze was somewhere beyond the room. He loved how the cold drink made him feel and he was giving thanks. Thanks for its existence. Thanks for having tasted it. So simple. 

Lily urged me to get my phone to video record him but I didn't. Maybe I would love seeing that moment on video today. But even if I had reached for my phone, he didn't repeat that extraordinary swig and he didn't repeat what he said. It happened. And then it was gone. And his transition almost immediately started to happen. 

I am grateful that my memory bank has played that moment for me almost every day for the past three years. It remains vivid.

Recently, I was discussing the book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin with my book group and my good friend Crisynda pointed out a passage when the character Marx is dying. That passage masterfully toggles back and forth from past and present and at one point takes us to a time when Marx and his friends are eating peaches so delicious that it is impossible to describe how delicious they are. Marx says of the peaches: "I'll probably never have to do a single other thing in my life, because I tasted this peach (304)."

Crisynda is a retired nurse who has been able to witness beautiful and simple moments of people letting go. No fanfare. No melodrama. Just a simple goodbye with a recognition that they have tasted the peach. And it was good. 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 

Dear Sam,

When I read the interview you gave to Kotaku magazine in 2017 about Ichigo, I felt that you were finally saying what I've wanted to say about the topic of appropriation as follows:

The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you? I'm terrified of that world, and I don't want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don't own or have a particularly rich under understanding of references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn't be a problem for you, I guess (p. 78)?

Why I've not been able to say what you've said has something to do with the pressures of political correctness. A correctness that posits that if I don't belong to a group, I have no right to reference or depict that group in my art. Or my writing.

Shortly after I underlined this passage, I read it to my adult son who is half Korean and half Mexican. After listening intently, he said,  "Mom, I'm so glad that that paragraph exists."

As I teach middle schoolers and high schoolers at a public charter school, I find myself encouraging them to be curious and observant about the world around them. To not be oblivious. To not be overly self-absorbed. To notice things. When I ask them to tell me what they have observed and noticed, not all things that they come up with is purely about them. Thank goodness. I want them to express what they notice not just about themselves but about others. 

Contrarians could point to examples of plagiarism and explicit replication to push back on the thesis of your argument, which is that to make true art, we need freedom. Freedom to be inspired by what we observe and experience, not just what we purely belong to. I don't hate contrarians. I hate that there is never enough time.

I was grateful that you revisited the topic of appropriation toward the end of the book within the context of how technology simultaneously frees and constricts us:  

Well, if we'd been born a little bit earlier, we wouldn't have been able to make our games so easily. Access to computers would have been harder ... We wouldn't have made Ichigo Japanese, because we would have worried about the fact that we weren't Japanese. And I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren't even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game (p. 394).

Earlier in the book, this paradox about technology is brilliantly addressed by Marx's mom, Mrs. Watanabe, in response to Sadie's expressed interest of learning about her rich experience with textiles: 

Mrs. Watanabe loved hand painting, quilting, and the discipline of woven textiles, but she worried these techniques were a dying art. 'Computers make everything too easy,' she said with a sigh. 'People design very quickly on a monitor, and they print on some enormous industrial printer in a warehouse in a distant country, and the designer hasn't touched a piece of fabric at any point in the process or gotten her hands dirty with ink. Computers are great for experimentation, but they're bad for deep thinking' (p. 229-230).

She goes on to explain that a great textile like the William Morris Strawberry Thief becomes great not just because of technology's role, but because of the dirt in the garden that he tends to in order to grow the strawberries depicted in his designs. And because he experiments with fabrics to understand which fabrics can bear which dyes. And because this process is riddled with sweaty and agony-ridden failures. And because failures teach as the artist tries again. She points out that the resulting fabric is "the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist (p. 230)." 

If it is true that "in games, the thing that matters most is the order of things (p. 171)," I think it also matters most in life. There is only one order in which you and Sadie gave the unique shape you did to this book. There is only one order in which I've taken my steps of yesterday that brings me here to the present, ready to take my steps of tomorrow.

Thank you for creating games I ache to play. Thank you and Sadie for expanding and reshaping the concept of love.  

Jenny

The Courage of Carole Caroompas and Emily Brontë

 

These are my complete remarks prepared for the closing panel discussion with Exene Cervenka and Shana Nys Dambrot on July 12, 2025, 6PM at the Laguna Art Museum. This event marked the closing of the Carole Caroompas exhibit at the museum.

Wuthering Heights is one of the only artifacts that serves as evidence of the existence of 19th Century English author Emily Brontë, who passed away at the age of 30. Of course those of us who exist in the world of creativity know that to publish one novel before the age of 30 is no small feat. Especially given that (like most artists) Brontë had many interests. She played piano. She sketched. She painted. She cared for animals. She walked. She kept house. She shot guns. She studied languages.

It reminds me of what Carole Caroompas (who passed away at the age of 76) said in 1987 as follows: “I wanted to be an archeologist … then I wanted to be a poet … and then I was going to be a writer … and then I ended up being a painter, and the music and the language and the paintings all got thrown together.”

And here we are in this room to witness her body of work, where we can see firsthand the ways in which everything did get thrown together. Textiles. Paints. Literature. Prostitutes. Nipples. Ejaculations. Desire. The male gaze. That gaze volleyed back by the female. Heathcliff. Punk rock. Coercion. Free will.

This practice of juggling many interests as we work to beat the clock of mortality is something we all eventually confront. Surely Exene Cervenka doesn’t just tidily sing and only sing. Surely Shana Nys Dambrot doesn’t just tidily write art criticism and only art criticism. And surely all of us feel the tension of our impending end and our infinite interests. We write. We paint. We sing. We teach. We cook. We raise kids. We clean our cars. We have lovers. And maybe some of us shoot guns.

Emily Brontë also published several pieces of poetry and is said to have had a second manuscript for a novel that upon her death, became purposely set on fire and destroyed by her sister Charlotte Brontë. 

(Charlotte published eight novels including Jane Eyre and died at the age of 39.) 

(Another counterpart in that era of authors was Jane Austen who published seven novels including Sense & Sensibility, Emma, and Pride & Prejudice. Works that could be characterized as frilly romantic love stories. She died at the age of 42.) 

So comparatively, Emily’s literary footprint is small. But when we consider her wide and varied interests, we are called to imagine that her ambition was not small at all, and her ideas were enormously messy, as evidenced by the untamed, complicated, rage-filled and downright unpleasant characters and plot tentacles found in the pages of Wuthering Heights.

As Constance Grady (Vox) points out, Wuthering Heights is not a frilly romantic love story. It’s about the cycle of generational abuse that is rooted in the rage and vengeance that Emily Brontë allows Heathcliff to exact throughout most of the book.

HEATHCLIFF

Heathcliff was a dark-skinned outcast raised to be a servant for the Earnshaw family, and as he lived in proximity to his sister figure Catherine Earnshaw, the two fell in love. But that love was not allowed. And so Catherine ended up marrying Edgar from the Linton family instead. The rage that consumed Heathcliff based on this course of events is understandable. Understandable and unpleasant. Because no matter the injustice, vengeance is unpleasant. Vengeance creates monstrous behaviors that replicate generationally. But the irony is that it’s understandable. So is rage.

HEATHCLIFF & THE FEMME FATALE GO ON TOUR

When we learn about Carol Caroompas the visual artist, we learn that like Emily Brontë, the artifacts that she left behind to serve as evidence of her existence is also small. Her body of work is not as vast as some of her contemporaries. But when we look closely at this exhibit in particular: Heathcliff & The Femme Fatale Go on Tour, we experience an echo of Emily Brontë’s signature work, Wuthering Heights, which is that Caroompas’ ideas and her ambition were also not at all small and hugely messy with lots of plot tentacles moving here and there, some unresolved and simply presented to the viewing audience to assault our senses. Because for Caroompas, it is to “assault the senses and change the world” that is at the nexus of an artist’s purpose. 

And how exactly do we assault the senses? Caroompas would probably say:

• By not keeping vintage tapestries at arms length and tidily nestled in a drawer.

• By not keeping separated, the images of modern sex workers from the shapeshifting embodiment of Heathcliff from the 19th century English novel.

• By making us grapple with the paradoxes of gender norms when we overlay issues of race and class and unrequited love all squished together, inviting us to consider that enslavement and freedom affect not just Catherine but also Heathcliff. Not just the femme fatale but also the resurgence of young devout women aligning with the ideas of rejecting ambition and embracing gender norms of modesty—so ancient that they are modern again. 

Assaulting the senses doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to shake us a bit. It startles us and causes us to lose balance. And it causes us to experience compassion and understanding for unexpected actors. 

Ultimately, I would say that we change the world by doing what Brontë did with Wuthering Heights and what Caroompas did with Heathcliff. To lay out onto the table all the grudges, all the rage, all the screaming, all the flaws along with all the passion, all the love, and ultimately, all the end to the commotion. Intergenerationally. By crossing genres from literature to music to visual art and throwing it all together.

I think the responsibility that Caroompas is potentially imposing on me and you and we, is for us to interrogate all the untidy tentacles of the world, particularly in relation to the roles that men and women have occupied. Do occupy. And will occupy. And to examine the impulses of vengeance and rage.

How does our gaze upon a man such as Heathcliff, along with our gaze upon assorted women of the night assault our senses and change the world?

Pragmatically, it does so because vintage textiles in most of our minds stay in a drawer not to be used in paintings but cordially considered as something that used to serve a purpose and that now exists to help us remember a time other than now.

Audaciously, those textiles become completely redefined and reused. They become the substrate that holds breasts, phallic symbols, ejaculations, innocence, corruption, bondage, pleasure through bondage, and freedom.

That Heathcliff is included in this narrative tells me that Carol Coorumpus is examining her own ideas about gender stereotypes, perhaps a nod of compassion and understanding of his suffering as she juxtaposes him next to the femme fatale who also needs compassionate understanding of her suffering. Perhaps each art object captures the stereotypes forever as we anticipate an exit strategy that might be found, out from bondage and into freedom.

No Coward Soul Is Mine

By Emily Brontë

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere

I see Heaven's glories shine

And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast

Almighty ever-present Deity

Life, that in me hast rest,

As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,

Worthless as withered weeds

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thy infinity,

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of Immortality.

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be

And Thou wert left alone

Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death

Nor atom that his might could render void

Since thou art Being and Breath

And what thou art may never be destroyed.

FRICTION

 

LOST

I’ve been watching LOST lately. Actually, I watched it until the end of season 3 and with the increasingly strange turn of events, I’m literally feeling lost and finding the show unwatchable. So that’s where my journey with LOST will conclude.

One of the best episodes was in season 1 when Locke explains to Charlie about the moth struggling to get out of its cocoon. Locke explains that although tempting, humans need to refrain from helping that moth out by opening the cocoon on its behalf. He explains that the struggle to get out on its own is how the moth develops its survival skills. And if an unknowing human curtails the struggle, we likely curtail its ability to survive in nature, outside of its cocoon.

This episode makes me think about the concept of critical thinking. The way I define critical thinking for students that I teach is as follows:

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze information or opinion and articulate questions about the information with curiosity and consideration of other points of view. It is the ability to either push back against or underscore in agreement with the original information/opinion.

FRICTION

That last part about pushing back is important. It’s tempting as parents or teachers to try and smooth out all the wrinkles in life or a lesson plan so that there is no friction in the room. “Fun” and “happy” can be manufactured to no end. But friction isn’t bad and it isn’t not fun. It’s uncomfortable but it’s ok for students to feel friction or discomfort with an idea and allow them the space to state their case in response to that friction. And it’s really the only way they learn to analyze, articulate, push back or underscore. It’s the only way they learn how to exit that cocoon on their own and make it in the world.

ENVIABLE GEMS 

Right now, I am struggling with the friction of how to push back against a national narrative that seeks to destroy higher education. Not all voices within higher education align with mine but the revenge-based methods of crippling institutions that have been the brightest jewels of our nation has me shook. Couple that with cruelty-based methods to cripple the arts and public libraries—spaces that have given me and my family oxygen and identity and purpose tempts me to participate in what has become sport in our world, which is to come up with the next most grotesque chainsaw to hurl. 

I don’t want to hurl. 

And I don’t want to avoid the struggle or the fight. As Sahil Bloom writes, “The growth you asked for is hidden in the struggle you avoid.”

I want to channel my rage and find my way out of the cocoon and I want to meet others who are striving to do the same as we collectively push back to protect, and yes to thoughtfully reform one of the few enviable gems of American culture. Gems that make groundbreaking discoveries through research, and gems that with academic freedom teach in ways that ignite critical thinking.

THE RENT COLLECTOR

 

DYING ELEPHANT
Toward the end of Camron Wright's masterful novel The Rent Collector, we are immersed in a story within a story where a weary old woman encounters a weary dying elephant. The old woman has experienced the horrors of barely surviving under the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia where in the 1970s, the regime killed over a million of its people, about a quarter of Cambodia's population. The killings were first targeted toward the regime's perceived political opponents, which snowballed into a mass genocide of its educated class—with the belief that the thinking and studying and empathetic elite was at the root of what needed to be expunged for its society to become pure and loyal to its totalitarian and unchecked power.

When I learned of Cambodian history years ago, it seemed like a distant and incomprehensible story. Today, as I recall this history through Wright's historical novel, I am startled to feel the echoes of the unfathomable repeating itself in modern society where power is becoming absolute and hatred toward the educated is growing exponentially. Where free speech absolutists silence dissent with fear that money and influence can buy.

MICRO MOMENTS
As the elephant is dying a slow and sorrowful death without another elephant nearby, the old woman says to the elephant: "I am sorry you are alone today." It is a tender moment because she is saying what most of us believe, which is that no creature should die alone.

Right as she speaks those words, Wright goes on to write:

No sooner had her words been spoken than she realized that the elephant wasn't alone at all. For she, the old woman, was there by her side, helping the dying creature when comfort and friendship were most needed (page 247).

When I've been in proximity to people hurting, I've been quick to think "I wish that person could talk to someone." Only to realize that that person was talking to someone. Me. Her. Him. You. Us. Maybe not long and extensive conversations that outline a path for macro solutions to macro problems but smaller conversations. Micro moments of genuine connection.

THE PEN
It is in a micro moment where we learn of the pivotal moment when a servant girl gives up her life so that an educated teacher can survive one of the killing sprees of the Khmer regime. Wright doesn't spell out the reasons why she does this but the mystery invites theories. My theory is that in that moment, the servant girl imagined a different way of being ... a way to live without fear and a way to fight ignorance with the pen. The pen that she would end up underwriting with her life, to help unshackle her surviving family members out of the unfathomable.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

 

So Speak with Nuance

NIKE & LAMAR
Did you see that Nike commercial during the Super Bowl? I loved it. The message gave me new inspiration to consider that the best part of being a free human is the ability to think and speak freely. The psychology of human development posits that in order to express our authentic selves, we first need to feel secure. Financially, emotionally, physically and all the other adverbs. In other words, we need to know that it's safe before we take risks with our words and actions. 

The one thing I loved more than the Nike commercial was the last moment of Kendrick Lamar's performance where he was daring us to turn him off before he pulled the plug and turned us off. Such poetic nuance.

Whether I am working with college, high school, or middle school students, it seems that no one is immune from the pressures cast by our attention-driven economy to forego heart-to-heart conversations about difficult topics and instead go straight to social media to broadcast the next best insult that can potentially go viral and slash the jugular of our perceived enemy. Fuck nuance. We've got a brand to not authentically but performatively build.

TERF & WOKE

One such difficult conversation in this modern day is about gender identity. It seems almost impossible to agree with the likes of Martina Navratilova who has spoken about the need to prevent transgender women from competing in women's sports without being characterized as being a hateful TERF. It also seems impossible to say that transgender women deserve to live their best lives free from bullying, without being characterized as a WOKE Libtard. Because fuck nuance.

JANUARY 6th

Another difficult conversation is about the events of January 6th. It seems impossible to on the one hand say we need to support the police whose job it is to preserve law and order without being characterized as a right wing racist. It is also risky to say that Daniel Rodriguez, Thomas Sibick and countless others who attacked Michael Fanone and other DC police on January 6th should not have received a presidential pardon without being characterized as part of the deep state. Because fuck nuance.

REDEFINING ACTIVISM

It's tempting to define activism as loud, insulting and lacking nuance. It's tempting to chase the exhilarating viral shouts and forego the smaller connections and deep conversations laced with disagreements. In many ways, our world is saying you can't unplug, and you can't speak with nuance. 

And I say,

So speak with nuance.

The Covenant of Water

 

CHARACTER CHART
I made this chart to help me keep the main characters straight in my head and heart while reading The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. The chart doesn't include all the characters. For example, it doesn't include a minor character named Lenin, who is the lover of Mariamma. Not Mariamma AKA Big Ammachi but Mariamma AKA the daughter of Elsie and her lover Digby. 

CASTE
Baby Mariamma grows up in India to become a brilliant doctor. During her lifetime, she sees leprocy sweeping segments of the population where a person who is normal one day becomes infected and more tragically outcast the next day, as people afraid of becoming infected designate colonies where the infected live. She also sees life through the system of caste practiced by Hindus, where individuals are born into a specific financial and social rung. There will always be rungs higher than mine and rungs lower than mine, unless my rung happens to be the bottom most. Caste is not a system where aspiration is welcomed. In other words, I can be brilliant and/or work harder than most but I can never climb up the ladder of rungs. Caste is a system where only when I accept the rung I am born into can I have a chance at a higher rung in my next life.

TWO PATHS
Lenin is a radicalized revolutionary. He is willing to commit violence if such extremism can combat the oppressive system of caste. That Mariamma who has toiled to work within a conventional and traditional path of medicine falls in love with an unconventional Lenin is both tragic and poetic as excerpted from one of the most gripping scenes of the book on page 561, as follows:

"Mariamma. Marry me! Come away with me ... She feels very naked. "Listen to you!" she hisses. "Do you hear yourself? Your arrogance? You want me to give up my life? Follow you to a cave? Do you know why I shivered to hear your story? Shivered when the constables passed under the tree? I was terrified that the next thing you would say was that you killed Sivaraman because you felt it was justified. If you had had your gun, you would have, wouldn't you?"

"I've given everything to study the body. To heal, not to harm. Lenin, you understand? But my God, if you really thought I'd go down this path of bloodshed with you, this ... this stupid path you took, not a straight path at all. If you think that, then you don't know me at all."

"And let me tell you, there's nothing heroic about what you're doing. You want to help the downtrodden? Be a social worker! Or go into politics. Join your bloody Party and run for office. No, you're still standing on rooftops waiting for a lighting bolt, playing Manrake the Magician. Grow up!"

TO LIVE THE QUESTION
This scene shook me hard because though I've never condoned the Lenins of the world, I have also understood them. Just like I don't condone the actions taken by the modern day assassin Luigi Mangione, I understand how that sort of path emerges within the context of a dysfunctional health care system, and how individuals decide to get on that radicalized path. Same goes for the radicalized red and the radicalized blue. I don't like them and I understand them.

Prior to that dramatic scene, when Mariamma and Lenin exchange letters as pen pals, Lenin foreshadows the devastating paradox of the human condition, where the cruelty of a social system is answered simultaneously by the resolve of a Mariamma to work within it, and by the resolve of a Lenin or Luigi to destroy it. Writes Lenin on page 532: "He didn't disagree that God may have other plans for me, but he said sometimes we have to 'live the question,' not push for the answer."

PATTERNS
On page 5 of the book, we are invited to consider the divine significance of patterns: The chaos and hurt in God's world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath. As her father would say, "Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible."

Patterns sometimes emerge long after our patience and hope to see them dissipate. Long after the hope of understanding why her mother may have left her to be raised by her grandmother, Mariamma finds it back at a leprosarium where her mother Elsie has been living. A choice made to protect her daughter from contracting the disease, to give her a fighting chance at a brilliant life.

That brilliance can be found by many who view her long and impressively studied medical career. But really, the only brilliance of import is found by Mariamma and her mother at the leprosarium as they are able to move the immovable hurt aside and feel even through the glass that keeps them separate, their oneness, their love divine.