editor's note
It’s the last week of what’s quite possibly been both the longest and quickest semester of my four years here at Cal. By the time I figure out how that is or isn’t a contradiction, the week’ll be over and finals will have begun. Things will get hectic, sleep will be missed, and folks may end up just packing up and moving into Doe, Cory, or wherever it is people go to inhale books. Times like these, I tend to get nostalgic on the semester – it reminds me of when my hair wasn’t whitening exponentially and it’s a good way of putting off even more work.
This past Veteran’s Day Weekend, I attended the Students of Color Conference held at UC Santa Cruz. The three-day conference, put on by the University of California Students Association, was filled with workshops, caucuses, and random deer, but the highlight of the event for me came early on with one of the opening speakers, Eden Jequinto. Eden’s a UCSC alum who works with youth in Oakland, and for 35-plus minutes, she proceeded to deliver the most amazing address I’ve heard, period. It was like watching maggots at work the way she was breaking shit down. YouTube “Eden Jequinto,” load up all six clips of that speech, and press rewind if she hasn’t blown your mind.
While Eden was pretty much on point for her entire speech, the thing that Eden said that stuck with me the longest, that I’ve still been trying to handle since that conference, is that we need to heal ourselves. I mean, on some levels, it’s a pretty basic thing to grasp – we got to heal. We stretch ourselves more than any doll named Armstrong ever could, and we are amazing because of that. But we ain’t unbreakable, and we do need to heal. We do need to slow things down, we do need to live out what gives us joy, whatever that may be. Especially for those of y’all who not only get shit done in the classes, but are out there in the community working for change, you gots to heal. For the scholar activists and activist scholars out there, there’s a sense of urgency to the work you do because the work you do affects more than you. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to heal as well, and in many ways, it’s that much more a necessity because of how difficult it is to make the world outside right when you can’t say the same for yourself. So I plead to my activist folks to take care of yourselves too. And I’m aware of the irony/blatant hypocrisy of me calling for us to heal ourselves when I’m writing this note at 4 in the morning, day before we go to print, sipping on the 16oz can of caffeinated piss that is Rockstar Energy Drink. While I’m trying to figure out how many minutes of my life each progressive sip takes away, I’m starting to think about how little I’ve done this semester to try and heal myself. I’ve been lucky it hasn’t caught up to me just yet, but I’ll put it out there that I know I’m going to have to start getting some healing done. What good is my advice if I don’t even take it?
So hardboiled, we’re going to work on this one together. You and me are gonna work on healing ourselves. Maybe we can even work on healing each other, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One step at a time, now.
Much props to hardboiled staff for the amazing work y’all have done this semester. 14 weeks past that first meeting and we’ve produced three issues of issues, pertinent knowledge about the Asian American communities. There aren’t a whole lot of spaces on this campus for us to come together and do this sort of work, and I’m thankful for getting to work with y’all.
brian lau
story editor