Apogee Journal

What I Want to Say Nancy Jooyoun Kim I call my mother twice a week. Now that she’s retired—no longer hanging women’s clothes in the small swapmeet shop she owned for over 20 years—I worry that maybe she’s lonely. I live in Seattle, and she’s in Los Angeles. Maybe she’s sitting in her house waiting for my sister and I to come home, as if we were children who had just gone off to school one morning—our backpacks full of notepads and stickers and sandwiches—and never came back. When I worry about her, the worst of my imagination takes over. I see her dying in the driver’s seat of a half blown-up car, Universal-Studios style, with an animatronic Godzilla hovering overhead, breathing fire mechanically out of its great mouth. I see her as the child in the red coat in Schindler’s List. Or, like in those commercials that make you think of the elderly as completely vulnerable, utterly broken (opinionless) birds, I see her fallen—and she can’t get up. Basically, I call her because I want to know that she is not dead. It’s a tremendous feeling really. That fear. You don’t actually want to talk to...

Poetry

The Fujianese are Badasses: an interview with Wo Chan

Apogee Journal

23 Sep 2015

Apogee Benefit Preview #2 This week we’re posting interviews and previews for our annual benefit on Friday September 25th. Today’s interview features queer Fujianese poet and drag performer Wo Chan, one of our four benefit readers. The Fujianese are badasses: an interview with Wo Chan by Melody Nixon Melody Nixon (MN): Your poetry investigates and challenges prescribed notions of identity through the personal and intimate. In the 2010s, decades after the slogan was first used by feminists, is the personal still political? What power lies in the intimate? Wo Chan (WC): Absolutely. Confession: I’ve never voted in my life. This is mostly due to timing—I was too young to vote when I was a U.S. citizen, and by the time I was old enough, I had lost my citizenship. Does this mean my life is not political? I think being a Chinese immigrant is inherently political if you look at the foundational role that Chinese Americans had in catalyzing U.S. immigration policy—namely, exclusion. To be a queer person of color fighting deportation is a burden of multiple politics that I was never ready to navigate. It’s also deeply personal, because at the core of...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams, Sophia E. Terazawa

Apogee Journal

22 Sep 2015

Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams Sophia E. Terazawa A stain on the right lens of my glasses looks like Princess Kaguya of the moon floating in the iris. I take them off. Someone must have put her there, I think. My father had shown me a photograph of her once. She used to be a parachute in the sky. Pale. A dandelion seed in her own night. “Is she watching over me now, papa?” “Yes,” he says. And I become happy. When my father finds me in front of the television at two in the morning, he slaps me so hard that the glasses fly off my face. Loud questions in male voices scare me: “What are you doing, huh? Why are you looking at me like that? What is your PROBLEM?!” The illness angers my father. He does not know why I watch television at two in the morning. I stare him down. No explanation. No answer. He slaps me so hard that it sends me into lunar orbit. “Papa, can you tell the story again? The one about the lonely princess?” “Yes,” he says. And I adore him whole. Whole....

NONFICTION: What I Want to Say by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

The Fujianese are Badasses: an interview with Wo Chan

NONFICTION: Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams, Sophia E. Terazawa

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