A Forgotten Neon Artist, Immigrant Journeys, and 🥓🍫🥤
That's right: bacon chocolate soda, which we encountered in Texas
Greetings from Sin City!
After a long week of great film, music, and photography in Austin, Texas for SXSW, we now report to you live from Las Vegas, Nevada. The streets were a sea of green and booming with music as thousands of people were out and about all day for St. Patrick’s festivities. However, our main focus was to visit the spectacular Neon Museum, located just a couple of miles north of the famed Writer’s Block bookstore, above which Writing Atlas keeps its official legal home.
Given the rich history of neon signage in Las Vegas, The Neon Museum opened in 1996 with the intention of preserving and exhibiting said history. One of the things you learn on the tour is the often overlooked designer of the iconic Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, Betty Willis. If you’re curious to learn more, this keen 2023 essay in The Baffler by Isobel Harbison is a preview of her book. Not only does her writing chronicle Willis’ career—which curated some iconic Vegas imagery and impacted the aesthetic of the city to come—it notices the connection between neon, entertainment, and women’s status at the time.
Unfortunately, well over half of the signs in the Neon Boneyard are unrestored and don’t light up (to be fair, they are many decades old and were scrapped for a reason), but the ones that are restored are fabulous and eye-catching. The museum displays giant signs from iconic venues from the 1930s to the present day—such as Caesar’s Palace, Moulin Rouge Hotel and Casino, Hard Rock Cafe, etc. Honestly, we couldn’t stop thinking about what the museum’s electricity bill must be like.
Just as electrifying as The Neon Museum is our newsletter from Chloe Chen, a riveting exploration of immigration stories. Chloe is currently a student at Emory, a university that means a lot to us at Writing Atlas as a long-time partner and collaborator. Tracing a through-line from Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake to the works of many Asian and African diaspora writers, Chloe’s essay is a heartfelt and moving piece about what time and place means to so many of us.
“Around the World and Back Again” by Chloe Chen
Several years ago, I was sitting in a classroom of thirty-one high school seniors as we prepared to go over Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake for class discussion. After a moment of pause, someone mentioned casually that they’d felt that they could relate closely with the book, that Lahiri’s fictional account felt like their own life.
And then another student chimed in. “I had the exact same feeling,” she said. And another, and another, and another. Before long, most of the class was nodding along.
Why is that? Certainly, not everyone in the room was a second-generation Bengali American living in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a pet name derived from Russian literature. Not everyone was going to study architecture at Ivy League universities before falling in love with an American girl named Maxine, before returning home and coming to terms with the aforementioned pet name.
Why, then, did Lahiri’s book create that collective relatability?
It’s pretty simple.
Because growing up is a universal experience.
Especially for people who can trace back their ancestry to immigrants. For those who identify as first-generation and second-generation, that means that stories of our selves are especially formative in how we experience the world.
There are endless possibilities that sketch out the story of immigrants in American imagination. Students and workers on F-1, H-1 visas. Political refugees. Family members reuniting across the Pacific. But among this infinity of stories, there are a few shared experiences that transcend individual differences.
A new world, oftentimes with a new language. Assimilation versus acculturation. Intergenerational conflict and trauma. The relations between parent and child, the “old” world and the “new.”
The following four short stories grapple with some of these themes across time and place. Each of them features a different voice and a different perspective on what it means to grow up in an unfamiliar world. And as a reader, even if you or your immediate family are not immigrants, I hope that you too, will find places to say, “Me too,” or “I feel the exact same way.”
Story 1: “How to Pronounce Knife” by Souvankham Thammavongsa (full text here)
We start with Souvankham Thammavongsa’s “How to Pronounce Knife,” which details the experiences of a six-year-old girl whose family has recently immigrated from Laos.
In many ways, Thammavongsa’s story highlights some of the most visible challenges that children of immigrant families face upon arriving in an unfamiliar world. The girl, who is never referred to by name, learns to navigate between interactions with her new classmates and her family at home.
Confusion and culture clash abound – the girl’s family miss notices for picture day, bullies at school tease the girl for bringing strongly scented traditional Laotian meals to school, and the family encourages the girl to speak English outside of their home.
The girl grows up too quickly.
She isn’t bothered by most of her classmates’ teasing, and she quickly learns to become a bridge between her family’s limited language ability and the outside world. The crux of the story centers around a reading activity where the students are rewarded for reading parts of a book correctly.
The Laotian girl asks her father the pronunciation for “knife,” and he answers “Kah-nn-eye-ffff,” as that was his best guess. When she reads the word incorrectly, the girl is teased, but she does not tell her father. Instead, she shows him the reward her teacher had given her, and they celebrate quietly.
The girl is every child who served as a translator for their parents. She is someone who has matured too quickly for a child. She does not lose faith in her parents – rather, she fights to protect her parents and herself.
She is a being that, as Gloria Anzaldúa would say, lives in the borderlands. On her shoulders rest her precious burden—the simultaneous pride and shame of her ancestors—as her feet carry her deeper and deeper into the new world.
In a world where her parents have had their tongues stripped away, the child becomes their voice.
Story 2: “The Broken Wheel” by Sirak Goryan (full text here)
The story begins with a house. To be precise, a small house on Santa Clara Avenue for an Armenian immigrant family. Goryan describes the scene with careful, descriptive language to evoke the whimsy of a childhood home.
Olive trees, lilac bushes, peach trees, castor plants. Honeysuckle and Bermuda grass. Accidental gardens and pink blossoms in black vases.
In a foreign country, the Armenian family builds a home.
The house hosts frequent visits family and friends. The narrator notes one guest in particular – Uncle Vahan, a boisterous young attorney brimming with the excitement of a man who has wholeheartedly embraced his new reality. Uncle Vahan, who drives fancy cars and speaks with a kind arrogance.
Time passes, and the narrator’s brother, Krikor, brings home a cornet, intent on learning to play. (He eventually gives up when the neighborhood complains goodheartedly about his musical ability).
Time passes, and Krikor brings home a bicycle much too large for him. (The narrator’s mother convinces Krikor to trade it in for a smaller bicycle, which he and the narrator ride together).
Time passes.
Uncle Vahan is killed in France.
The narrator and his brother take the bicycle out, and the wheel breaks under their weight.
Time passes.
Their family has changed irreparably. The boys have grown up. And their house is still the same.
Looking back, the narrator cries tears (of laughter? Grief? Hope?) as he takes in the beauty and sorrows that have taken place in their home. His mother speaks to him in Armenian, their mother tongue. “It is no use to cry. We have always had our disappointments and hardships and we have always come out of them and always shall.”
Goryan writes a very different story than Thammavongsa. He tells us about a family’s trajectory over the course of years. He writes about what it feels like when an old bike breaks under a body. He writes about growing up and growing out of the shadows of ancestors.
Perhaps it is cliché to say that home is where heart is, but that certainly still holds true for this Armenian family, who clings together to build the strength to take on the challenges of life in a new world.
Story 3: “The Five Year Plan” by Steven Duong (full text here)
Where do you see yourself in five years?
It’s a common question. It’s a question you start answering as early as elementary school. It’s a question you answer until there aren’t any more five-year segments left.
The narrator, Irene, reflects on her current life where she works at a pet store with her partner, Finn, and writs a semi-autobiographical novel at night. Much of what is “cultural” in her new life has been filtered through an Americanized lens—Yoko Ono records and tofu scramble and anime.
Her five-year plan is as follows: the first two years, she will continue her day-to-day working and writing. The third year, she will change. The next two, she will live fully and freely, taking the leap to conquer her America.
There is a fierce, resolute beauty in the five-year plan. But until then, Irene floats through her daily life, lying to her father to appear more like a dutiful daughter who has achieved success.
Irene sees her family in her father’s fish – a large silver arowana that she has hated for years. “Born to hurt things,” she muses to herself. “They are hunters, even when there is nothing left to hunt. The dialogue is sparse because they speak with their eyes, which look like my eyes, only a bit off, like a reflection in a pond made foreign by the mouths breaking the surface.”
Through Irene’s story, Duong writes an often-overlooked perspective of adult immigrant children – that of letting go and reconnecting with those who came before. Irene takes her father to the fish store, where she pretends not to recognize Finn and watches her father buy a new silver arowana.
Duong ends with the father’s perspective. He writes a book, half in Vietnamese, half in English about a man with a five-year plan: two years of the same, the third year with a change. He promises to stop lying and to reunite with his daughter.
“The Five Year Plan” is, at its core, a story about a father and a daughter that is gradually coming to terms with each other and healing from the intergenerational trauma that has shaped their past. It is the story of their selves.
Story 4: “Aguanile” by Amina Gautier (full text here)
In Duong’s story, the father and daughter can find some degree of reconciliation, however tenuous. But what happens when that isn’t the case? What happens if those wounds and differences span a gap too far apart to bridge together in one lifetime?
Amina Gautier answers this question in “Aguanile,” where a young girl becomes the last (and slightly unwilling) bond between her parents and her grandfather.
In a world where the girl’s grandfather has been long estranged from the rest of his family, the girl is a peace offering. She was sent “across the ocean to knit back wounds whose ragged edges had grown frayed with each passing year.”
They bond over music and build a tentative, but promising relationship.
And then the girl returns home. Her only connection to her grandfather becomes a few phone calls, where he speaks passionately about music and favorite artists. At the same time, however, he rarely shows interest in his own family’s affairs, and the disconnect disillusions the girl.
One day, the girl receives news that her grandfather has died. To her surprise, she feels a deep grief, despite the fraying relationship they had shared in the years proceeding.
That night, she plays a tape that her grandfather had given her. “Aguanile,” Héctor Lavoe.
Aguanile. Spiritual cleansing.
In that moment, the girl understands. “We both have ghosts that needed expunging,” she thinks. “We both have ghosts haunting us.”
Ancestral ghosts are not unique to Gautier’s story. Hungry ghosts have always found a place in stories about people who have left their ancestral land. They cry out in a tongue that cannot speak and embody the regret and trauma that can span across generations.
The ghosts of the past may trace back to creatures in Buddhism and Chinese traditional religion, but they continue to haunt immigrant stories today, from Maxine Hong Kingston to Ocean Vuong to Amina Gautier.
Perhaps some of these ghosts can be released in a single lifetime. Perhaps others will span generations, until someone like Gautier’s narrator steps into the in-between to begin repairing the hurt.
A few things are clear, however.
There are experiences that shape the relationships between generations of immigrants outside the bounds of language and time – a common story, so to speak.
The ghosts of the past will always exist. We (yes, all of us!) are made of the lives and experiences and stories of those who came before us.
And finally, in growing up and embracing these stories that have intersected to create the imperfect beauty of our lives, we can live freely and fully in the present.
Chloe’s Favorite Wikipedia Page: Kintsugi
Searching up the term “kintsugi” will bring you to a Wikipedia page that describes a form of Japanese pottery, where cracked pottery is mended with lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The effect is ethereal—what was formerly simple clay pottery becomes an intricate network of gold-dusted art.
Beyond serving as a lovely art form, kintsugi also represents a philosophy on living. Suffering and breakage happens, yes, but the events and things that once brought pain can be repaired. And although a person is never the exact same afterwards, they can become even more beautiful and strong as a result of the cracks that once threatened to destroy them. Kintsugi describes the beauty found in resilience and growth from trauma.
Chloe’s Favorite Emoji: 😭
I use this emoji (😭) fairly frequently, mostly because of its versatility and ability to function as an answer. It's appropriate in salutations that call for humor, both genuine and sarcastic in nature. It's also perfect for expressing shock (as long as the situation is not overly serious). Because of its relative popularity as an emoji among my age group, the connotations of the 😭 emoji are intrinsically accepted.
It's both a conversation starter and ending - a simple “😭😭😭” can certainly signal an interesting story incoming, or it can be a response to a surprising piece of news. Because some messages over text can come across more serious or heavy than they are, the 😭 can lighten the tone of a conversation, which adds to its usefulness as an emoji.
Chloe is a junior at Emory University studying Business Administration and English. On campus, she spends her time pretending to be a fake attorney on the mock trial team, looking for good books by Asian American authors, and drinking far too much coffee.
Literary Las Vegas
Over the last decade or so, Las Vegas has become a literary hub in the West—anchored by the Black Mountain Institute, The Writer’s Block bookstore, and for a bit, The Believer magazine. The Writing Atlas-verse supports a writer’s residency above the bookstore, which is how Isobel Harbison originally found us. The Writer’s Block is packed to the brim with books, arts, and a plump bunny who lives an intellectually rich life.
Bacon, Ranch and Mustard Sodas
On our way out of Austin, we were both fascinated and horrified to discover bacon chocolate soda at a Shell gas staton. This brand, Lesters Fixins, also offers sodas flavored in buffalo wing, ranch dressing, mustard, and enchilada. We weren’t too brave, so went with the (plain) bacon soda. Our assessment: this is the beverage for people who like their bacon tasting like cough syrup.
Last not not least, this last week featured a Writing Atlas team leader’s birthday, which was celebrated with a purple ube cake and a Cat-onaut poster signed by many people in the Writing Atlas orbit!
Don’t forget that you, too, are part of our Writing Atlas orbit. As always, if you would like to curate stories, or share quirky photos, foods, cool places to visit or roaming stuffed animals with the community, please let us know by leaving a comment or otherwise reaching out to us! As always, keep visiting our Writing Atlas homepage as we keep rolling out exciting changes and updates!
Sincerely,
Your Writing Atlas team