Letter from the Editors: Dystopia & Utopia
by Wendy Gao & Jasmine Wang
Dear reader,
Happy Asian Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month (ANHPIHM) from {in}Visible Magazine! This May marks the 31st year of celebrating ANHPI communities in the United States. ANHPIHM remembers our histories shrouded in colonization, imperialism, and genocide while celebrating our resilience, cultures, and continued resistance. ANHPIHM holds space for grief and joy, anguish and hope, struggle and harmony. Our second issue, Dystopia & Utopia, strikes a similar balance between reflecting on dystopic realities and histories and imagining utopic futures and worlds – for ourselves or our communities and perhaps for both.
This issue begins by returning to our beginning with Melanie Chuh’s poem, “Reminiscing Eden,” a poem that eulogizes the Korean diaspora through the fall of Adam and Eve and their banishment from the Garden of Eden. Scarlet carries on this biblical torch with her piece “Rubble of Babel” through the Bible’s Tower of Babel to explore humanity’s hubris and language as a barrier between understanding and unity, illuminating a path for us to emerge from the wreckage collectively.
In her piece “Under the Ginkgo Tree,” Evelyn Pak laments human destruction and exploitation of the natural world, desolation rooted in the pursuit of overambitious capitalist gain. Wendy Gao builds upon this idea of exploitation by reminiscing and critiquing the robotization of Asiatic bodies and labor in history and futuristic projections in her piece “ghost from the machine.” These pieces pull at the loose dystopian threads that hang from the fabric of our collective imagination, begging us to weave a new utopian silk to cloak our society. In her piece “rooted in harsh soil,” Aliza Susatijo reflects on what it means for her existence to be predicated upon a dystopian diaspora, recognizing a present reality where the two seemingly dissonant forces can coexist.
Bhavyasri Suggula and Cayla Celis continue with introspection, reflecting upon the unrealistic and unattainable Western beauty standards thrust upon them since they were kids. In “Chandamaama Kadalu,” Bhavyasri meditates on her childhood yearning to be just like our favorite redheaded mermaid, while in “which standards again?” Cayla contemplates how past relationships shaped conceptions of her body and self-worth, grappling with the thin line between beauty and whiteness and the voice that ate her from the inside out.
This issue holds the hauntings of our existence as Asian Pacific Islander South Asian Americans (APISAA) — the ghosts embedded in our bones and buried with our ancestors. At the same time, every rumination on dystopia in this issue dares to envision a different world where families stay together, living and conversing in Eden in harmony with the natural world and one another. Sometimes constructing better realities begins with examining the shortcomings of the present society. Maybe expelling ghosts means naming them first, and this issue unapologetically confronts the task of doing so.
As always, thank you endlessly to our staff for working so hard in the last month of the semester. To our writers, thank you for stringing us together with your words. To our artists, thank you for imbuing our stories with life and light. And to our readers and the APISAA community on Grounds, happy ANHPIHM. We hope this issue holds you in community this May, and perhaps along the way, you’ll find moments to hold onto and take with you.
With all our love,
Jasmine & Wendy <3
