> if you ruin her, I'll come to your house
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: a food travelogue, love stories, personal essays on capitalism, moving anxiety, and fruit études.
Hello friend,
> If you’re looking for food videos that aren’t fake, I’ve been thinking a lot about this one. It’s a mini-doc of Matty Matheson traveling to south Vietnam with his best friend/mentor, Master Rang, to visit the place where Rang grew up. It’s the first time Rang’s been back since he fled as a refugee. You can read more about Chef Rang’s story here.
> Another beautiful thing: Kathrina Espinosa’s series of illustrated love stories, “Folded Meanings,” created as part of her Soupbone Collective residency.
> Episode 7 of the Soupbone podcast, in which Genevieve and I talk about our favorite poetry books, is out!
> Reading: Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. I’m a bit biased because I love Eula Biss, but this gorgeous book is a series of essays about buying a house, which becomes a series of essays about how late capitalism manifests in our lives.
> If all goes well, I’ll be moving to Taiwan at the end of the year, but this week I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety about that—mostly about having to adjust, a fear of being displaced. I’ve talked to friends about this and I know that once I get there, the immediacy of having to do stuff will probably dissipate these anxieties. Honestly, I feel excited, lucky to go, so it surprised me how anxious I suddenly felt. Maybe moving always feels this way.
> From “Fruit Études” by Marilyn Chin (as lyric as these are on the page, they become something else when Marilyn reads them aloud—which you can hear on the VS podcast!):
CHERRY
Her grandmother says Cherry is sweet and kind
If you ruin her, I’ll come to your house
Drag you out by your ear
Take a hard branch
Off your crooked ancestry tree and beat you blind
And when I’m dead, I’ll haunt you
Curse you
Throw magic spells
Turn you into a hapless
Gonadless monkey
Just for thrills
> An interrogation of gentrification brought to you by Amanda Williams, from her Color(ed) Theory series. From the artist’s website:
Trusted friends and family joined me in covertly painting soon to be demolished, empty houses in and around Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. I’d developed a culturally coded, monochromatic color palette based on hues that are primarily found in consumer products that are marketed toward Black people. These colors dominate south side commercial corridors. The project questioned how colors possess socially constructed meanings and associations that are inextricably linked to the politics of race and class in America.
Cheers,
Tiffany