One Week
Corinne Young ‘26
Sunday, 9:30 pm
My family FaceTimes during their dinner—6:30 their time, a bit early so they can catch me.
They show up first, their dinner spread out before them: a wok full of stir fry, the instant pot of steaming white rice, a pan with a ring of potstickers. My dad calls this “C-style” (Chinese style). He calls the other things scattering the table “fixins”: ume, soy sauce, little Japanese curry pickles, freshly sliced green onions from the backyard, and other such things. These fixins are not necessarily C-style. Each person has a little dish of dipping sauce for their pot stickers.
“Did you eat?” My dad peers into the camera.
“Yeah,” I tell him, “Barb sandwich.”
There is a collective groan.
Monday, 5:30 PM
I order a Lyft for my friend and I to share. The woman who works the counter recognizes us.
“Karaage don?” she asks when I approach. “To go?”
My friend and I talk about classes, writing, fanfic, and our girlfriends. We make our usual H-mart rounds: fish, yogurt drinks, seaweed, chicken, tofu, instant ramen, broccoli, yuzu, eggs, mango juice, HiChews, chocolate, pocky, somen, somen sauce, mozzarella cheese, prosciutto, frozen dumplings. She orders our Lyft home and we talk about how sleepy we are, how much work we have when we get back, and if her girlfriend is happy.
Tuesday, 1:30 PM
I head out into Queens with a friend.
This is the first time I have ever been to Queens. My friend tells me to look out the window on the train, he tells me the history of the traincars, and he tells me how he grew up riding them. People play the guitar and dance, school children crowd on, and the landscape slides by, lovely trees and the corners of buildings angled against the sky.
We go out to eat Filipino breakfast, even though it’s nearly three pm, where he orders for me and tries to teach me how to use the fork and spoon. It’s the best meal I’ve had this school year. We talk love, culture, and childhood as we eat, as we walk from store to store, pausing when the train roars so loudly above us that we can’t hear each other.
“Your world is about to get so Asian,” he says, and it does.
We hit a little Filipino grocery, a huge Ranch 99, and a snack store that feels viscerally Japanese, from the lighting to the aisle arrangements. We take pictures among Halloween decorations and on the train back to campus, laden with iced tea and bakery sweets, candies and jellies and crackers, sesame oil, and instant noodles.
Wednesday, 11:30 AM
After a very late night calling my girlfriend, who’s three hours behind, I haul myself out of bed too late to eat breakfast. I complain about this into a little audio message to my girlfriend as I boil water.
Today, it’s for somen.
I peer out of the Slonim windows as people wander. Black hair, brown hair. Lots of blonde, lots of dyes. I’ve never seen a higher blonde ratio in real life than I have at Sarah Lawrence. Two blonde people dating has always unsettled me.
The water approaches boiling. I fill a bowl with ice and water, throw the somen in for 3 minutes, stir with my long cooking chopsticks. I always love an excuse to use them. They’re so long, and they have a little height discrepancy of perhaps a quarter inch, but upon inspection I can’t tell which end broke off.
I pour myself some somen sauce, run the somen through the ice water, and bring it upstairs with a little yogurt drink to reward myself for cooking.
Thursday, 9:00 AM
In class, we discuss accounts gathered from formerly enslaved people about their experiences with contraception and abortion. These accounts repeatedly frame the decision to pursue abortion and contraception as a mass movement aimed at ending slavery by ending reproduction under slavery, rather than a personal choice of wanting the child not to suffer. Three separate accounts use the word “depopulate.”
I recognize a name mentioned in the introduction to the interviews—Saidiya Hartman, a Black feminist writer. I read her in my black feminist/queer of color class, I noticed her mentioned in my art and activism class, and now she’s here. I think about how perspectives of color can be anywhere and everywhere in academia, despite how white our college may seem. I think about myself and my friends, and how we’re always running our mouths and writing our papers, adding to this vast canon of thought.
Friday
My girlfriend spends most of this day in flight, and I spend most of it doing my work and missing her. I can easily go this long without calling her, but it’s much harder to go this long unable to call her.
When she lands, she sends me pictures of herself, my brother, and the friend he’s brought along, dead tired and smiling. She captions the picture "Hong Kong!” and writes to my family, “Upon being prompted for a message to his family, CB said, ‘I love you!’”
She sends pictures of the food, and I show them to my friend as we eat dinner in Bates.
Saturday, 10:30 AM
Asian American Culture Club puts on a morning event, perhaps the only thing other than class that would get me out of my room this early. Of course, I love the food, but I go for the people.
It’s the second Filipino breakfast of my life and the second Filipino breakfast of my week. I oversleep my alarm, braid my hair and book it over. We eat and listen to music, we clean the kitchen and sit on the tables and gossip about love, families, language, and the future until it’s four pm and we say goodbye, smiling.