Hello, friends. It’s been six months since my last issue of the Rabbit Hole, and this cadence feels aligned with how this year is going — I’ve been very swamped with work and 2021 is going by so fast it’s scary (how is it almost September 2021?!). The Rabbit Hole is always in the back of my mind, and I often read/listen/watch something and think “Ah! That should go in an issue!,” so I am thankful that, if you’re reading this today, you’ve been patient with my newsletter delinquency.
Given how hard the world is right now 🥺, I’ve been mainly consuming things that are light and make me happy. While many of you I’m sure are watching Modern Love on Amazon Prime (based off one of my favorite NY Times columns), fewer of you may have heard of or stumbled upon a similar anthology on Netflix called Feels like Ishq (“Ishq” means Love), a six-episode Indian series that is in both English, Hindi, and other regional languages.
The entire show is sweet and optimistic, but it’s also refreshingly nuanced & diverse — it showcases different religions, classes, ages and regions in India, as well as a generation that is adept at social media and (in one episode at least) has had to adapt to a pandemic world. We typically view India through the rose-colored lens of Bollywood (or at least I have), so this series to me was unapologetic and bold without being in your face. This is India in the digital age, and how love exists and persists within that universe. The whole anthology is delightful, but my favorite episodes were “Quaranteen Crush,” which involves two teenagers falling in love while socially distanced and “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not”, a queer love story.
If you subscribe to this newsletter then you already know that I am a voracious consumer of podcasts. However, I was feeling a little stagnant in my podcast listening as of late, until the launch of We Are Supported By, a 10-episode limited-series by actress Kristen Bell and Monica Padman (who co-hosts Armchair Expert with Bell’s husband Dax Shepherd). The show interviews various women who have “shattered the glass ceiling” from Oprah Winfrey to Malala to Samantha Powers (interestingly, Shattered Glass was the original title of this podcast before they received a cease & desist letter from another podcast of the same name).
I am generally a fan of long-form interviews because they give space for texture and nuance that can often be lost in short and snappy sound bites. Bell & Padman are thoughtful and smart, and a constant through line among all the episodes is the idea that women are not just one thing, that we cannot be relegated to neat boxes. I loved the authenticity of all the interviewees, especially Malala, Reese Witherspoon, and…wait for it, Kim Kardashian West. Yes, Kim Kardashian. As a disclaimer, I am not a fan of the Kardashians, but I was surprised by how much she surprised me, and it made me realize that I can also be guilty of typecasting people, especially celebrities. In the age of social media, our outward personas are curated for consumption, and that image is more easily digestible; it’s one that leaves little room for complexity. So many women have been conditioned to be pretty and polite, to not speak out of turn or challenge the status quo. I’m so inspired by women who are not afraid to be messy and ugly, and I’m moved by portrayals of women on screen who are unabashedly themselves, in all their unapologetic glory.
In The Chair (Netflix), a six-episode limited series, Sandra Oh gives life to that kind of female character - messy, funny, smart, broken — she is all the things. Oh plays Ji-Yoon Kim who becomes the chair of a dying English department at a top tier university. The show explores a lot in its 3-hour timeframe — cancel culture & free speech, the future of education for a rising Gen Z base, what it means to be a woman or a POC in ageing white academia, the list goes on. At the center of the whole drama, though, is Oh, and she represents a Korean-American experience without being the Korean-American experience - her “Asian-ness” isn’t a footnote or an afterthought, but it’s also not so front & center that it’s all that she is. In an interview with Willie Geist, Oh talked about how Hollywood has widened, noting:
When I saw that Dr. Kim’s name is Ji-Yoon Kim…I just noted it in terms of the growth of my own career that now I can play a character who specifically has a Korean name, and all the characters are going to call her that name correctly. And that was significant to me. I think there’s been a lot of accommodation or denial…of the fact that people’s ethnicity is just in their names.
First off, I just love Sandra Oh, and loved this show (Holland Taylor is another standout to me — she’s amazing!). Oh’s statement about ethnic names and how important it is to preserve them, to lean into them, to be proud of them, especially stayed with me. I recently became part of a poetry group (!), a ragtag bunch of folks I met during a spoken word poetry workshop (led by my inimitable friend Phil Kaye, you can see one of his performances here), and I’ve been writing poetry — some okay so not so great — in an effort to be more creative this year. I’m sharing one I wrote a month ago, on the topic of my name. Enjoy 😊👇🏽.
Kalsoom
If names were garments
Bestowed upon you when you are born
Swaddling you in projected personality
And the expectations of who you are to become
Then my name was a too big house coat
Spun in a muted color with the wafting scent of mothballs
Kalsoom
A name that once belonged to my dadi
My father’s mother
She was saintly and never raised her voice
A fact my father would remind me of
When I was particularly petulant or mutinous
The truth is
I am nothing like my namesake
And for a very long time
I didn’t wear Kalsoom
She wore me
Her sleeves just slightly too long
Her fit somehow not quite right
As I got older
I tried to fashion this too big out of style coat
In ways I hoped would suit me
Call me Kay, I’d say, tying a big red belt around its waist
Call me Kals, I’d attempt, fashioning a funky broach on its lapel
Over the years there were makeovers & misfires
But it wasn’t until much much later
That I discovered that this name of mine
Was malleable from the inside out, not the outside in
That it wasn’t just an external garment
Belonging to someone else
But a part of my own skin
Kalsoom
Is a name that belongs only to messy, imperfect me
And that fit fits perfectly.
Thanks for reading this edition, folks. Stay curious & stay kind. ✌🏾