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old still,” the doctor said. “Are you doing okay?” At times it was painful, but I got used to the process. I scabbed and then would peel. I chalked it up to acne issues when anyone asked at school. Like many first-generation Asian Americans, I felt a pressure to be the model minority, that I had to assimilate and adapt to Western culture in order to be successful. For me, that meant being the perfect Asian daughter—thin, sophisticated, accomplished, and with clear, porcelain skin. Soon the scabs healed, and for a brief period of time, I had achieved this uncomfortable goal: My skin was finally freckle free. My sessions eventually ended (they were pricey), but by next summer all my freckles came back. It was inevitable without proper upkeep. With ongoing sun exposure in Southern California, new freckles would find their way sprinkled across my cheeks once more. The following fall, I left for college, and in turn the drama of my childhood felt smaller and further away. As my priorities shifted, I found I was no longer preoccupied with alternate, more perfect versions of myself. Slowly, I came into focus—what I wanted to do, what interested me—and I began to appreciate the ways in which I didn’t fit the mold.
These days, I don’t see my freckles like I did as a child. These small dots, representing a constellation of insecurity for me and my family, now remind me of how I charted my path—an identity, and story, all my own. Body Language is an essay series that speaks to the ongoing conversation about beauty standards around the world—an exploration of where we came from and where we’re headed. I was raised by a mother who raged against the strictures of 1950s femininity by lacing up her Converse and sprinting in the other direction. She wore Levi’s 501s and flannel shirts and dressed her two young daughters in kind, a second-wave feminist sartorial backlash that became rigid in its own right. Find your uniform, she preached, and get on with the important things in life. Makeup was anathema, as was any effort to enhance one’s appearance. Clothing was valued, coveted even, but only if it was classic, durable, and, in large part, purchased in the men’s section. In our family, we intuitively understood boyishness to be better than girliness. To be boyish was to be natural, serious, athletic, scrappy—yar in that WASP-y Philadelphia Story Katharine Hepburn way, never mind that we were bookish Midwestern Jews.
When it came time to take control of her own appearance, my older sister, from birth smaller, more delicate, and more femme than I, eagerly broke with the house style. But I took my mother’s rejection of all things girly and ran with it. She took great pleasure as a middle-aged lady in showing up at my lawyer dad’s work parties in Annie Hall-ish tomboy drag. I, a child of 1980s Chicago, where the discourse very much did not yet include any notion of raising one’s daughter gender neutral or non-conforming, desperately wished to be a boy. So, I kept my hair short—save an ill-begotten rat tail that was more bewildering than masculine—and committed myself to a wardrobe of sweatpants and dickies, swaggering slogan tees, and oversized Chicago Bulls jackets. I played on boys’ sports teams, made almost exclusively male friends, and attended boys’ sleepover parties where, late at night, my horny, young comrades used their parents’ dial-up connections to scour the internet for the kind of pornography only adolescent straight boys might like. My presence did nothing to deter this, nor did I have the wherewithal to express my discomfort. But there was also something so deeply satisfying about being invisible in their midst, truly one of the pack. I equally thrilled to the bus driver who once mistakenly called me “son” as I paid my fare. What a feat to be so self-invented! It helped that I was the tallest person in my grade, always at the back of the school photo, and slow to puberty. I wore swim trunks to the beach right up until the moment that my sister glanced down at my 12-year-old bare chest and informed me that my nipples had gotten puffy, and please put a shirt on.
It was around this time that I, still a twiggy, prepubescent featherweight, assumed my full height of six feet tall, and perhaps you can now see where this story is going. It was the mid-1990s, and a certain kind of terribly thin, unkempt, androgynous look was very much in fashion. Even the rat tail was suddenly working for me, if one assumes I was pleased about the abrupt crush of attention from model scouts, photographers, and casting agents who seemed always to be loitering on the streets of my leafy neighborhood, waiting to press their business cards into my sticky palms. But I wasn’t happy. Modeling was as unsavory to me as makeup was to my mom, something only a girl might do, and it felt like a breach of my careful disguise that these adults saw something in me that I hadn’t wished to convey. The story from that era that sticks out was the time, around my freshman year of high school, that I accompanied a friend, a fierce vegan activist, to a protest outside a furrier on Michigan Avenue. There were six or seven of us marching in a loose ring, chanting “fur is murder” and waving signs pasted with images of sad, skinned little minks and rabbits. But I was the only one the store’s owner came out to pull aside. Would I be interested in returning the following week to shoot their new campaign?
When I scan the bookshelves in my childhood bedroom, alongside future-English-major paperbacks and fantasy novel box sets, there’s a spine that always jumps out at me. It’s a coffee table book titled Cat Walk, a sort of encyclopedic guide to ’80s supermodels. I have a vague memory of buying it from the bargain shelf at Barnes and Noble around this time, and hiding it under my bed. For all my insistence that I would never want to model, that fashion was for other people, I was clearly on some level curious, or at least trying to understand how one might see a bit of these glamazons in deliberately odd, gender-bending me. Then, there were the photos I let my sister take of me a couple years later: sexed-up, grungy glamour shots in which I’m wearing a Delia’s baby doll dress and black lipstick and attempting a desultory lean against the Trainspotting poster taped to her bedroom wall. She’d convinced me to pose for the photos, so that she could submit them to one of those teen magazine modeling contests, and, under the cover of indulging her, I’d agreed. Identity is never as straightforward, never as fixed, as we think.
I didn’t win that contest. By that time, the modeling scouts had retreated into the shadows from whence they came, to lay in wait for other even skinnier girls. I was finally going through puberty, and my body was thickening; waifdom soon would be firmly in the rearview mirror. I was starting to look like a woman, and, more surprising, I didn’t totally mind. Adolescent hormones were reshaping my desires, and, as unsettling as it was to admit, what I now wanted was not to disappear among the boys, but to be noticed by them. I didn’t know how to dress that part, and it was a halting, awkward transition that included many ill-fitting belly shirts and too much cleavage—one that I can see now took courage to undergo at the same school where I’d tried for so many years to convince people to regard me as a boy.
And, eventually, even as fashion lost interest in me, men did begin to look. So, I traded in, for better or worse, one gaze for another. It would be a long while before I remembered what I once knew so well: that real style has nothing to do with who wants to dress you, or who wants to undress you, and everything to do with what you want to tell the world about how you would like to be seen. In the East Village, just around the corner from Tompkins Square Park, is Cadence, a restaurant with an exposed brick interior, a blue bar, and only eleven pink velvet seats inside. Yet, as the saying goes, small is often mighty: since opening last spring, Cadence has received swift critical acclaim: The New York Times called it one of the top 10 new New York restaurants of 2021 as well as one their top 50 favorites in America, whereas Esquire named it to their top 40 in America. Why? Chef Shenarri Freeman’s delicious, innovative take on soul food, in which every dish is vegan.
At Cadence, Freeman makes crab cakes with chickpeas and hearts of palm, spicy buffalo oyster mushroom sliders with pretzel buns, fried lasagna with pine nut ricotta, and cornbread with bee-free honey. Meanwhile, all wines on their menu are from Black-owned wineries, including Napa’s Brown Estate and Isiah Thomas’s Cheurlin Champagne. Freeman, 28, grew up in Richmond, Virginia with a big family (22 first cousins and counting). Food was at the center of their familial relationship, from Thanksgiving dinner to their Fourth of July cookout and Christmas brunch at Freeman’s mother’s house. “There was always a lot of soul food—fried oysters, chitlins, certain staples,” she explains. It filled her with happy memories: “When it comes to soul food, there’s a little bit more love and thought and care put into it.”
It also piqued her interest in cooking.