the mini-bitch: "Parachutes" edition
TW: rape, sexual assault
It has been several months since I sent you all an email. While I thought the stay at home order would force me to stay-at-home-and-write-a-lot…it didn’t. But as I finished an audiobook with tears streaming down my face this morning, I knew I needed to package all of these emotions into a mini-bitch and shout this recommendation at the world ASAP.
I first heard about “Parachutes” when author Kelly Yang’s tweet went viral in May about her sexual assault at Harvard Law:
The thread gutted me. Not only did Harvard Law cross examine her about her rape in front of her attacker and erroneously decide he was innocent, they then proceeded to launch an investigation against her for “malicious prosecution.”
Though it would be on-brand for me to leave you with a thread of tweets, that’s not what I’m here to do. I put “Parachutes” on my Audible waiting list, and finally listened to it over the weekend. I’m sure in the archives of this newsletter you can find me saying that YA is not my thing. Even when I was 13, YA novels were often huge disappointments filled with weird tropes about teenagers that felt antiquated and entirely out of touch. But from the very first chapter, “Parachutes” gripped my attention. It tells the stories of two completely different high school juniors: Claire is a wealthy Chinese foreign exchange student (or a “parachute”), and Dani is a scholarship student whose mom becomes Claire’s host family.
Their individual journeys throughout the school year twist and turn around each other, intersecting in ways the other only sometimes knows about. The narrative is expertly crafted and beautifully written. It outlines class, racial, and sexual abuses that young women face in a way that doesn’t make you say “there’s no way this is actually happening”—but rather, “how the hell are we letting this happen?”
A New York Times review by Karen Valby from June is one step ahead of critics:
Know this, weary readers: “Parachutes” is not a book about sexual violence or broken girls or the polluting forces of shame and isolation. It is about the radical possibility of young women finding and detonating their voices.
The book begins with a trigger warning for rape, but I was not braced for another storyline that flew me back to my own high school experience. Dani is a star debater, and her talent and vulnerability catches the extra attention of her debate coach. She feels special when he gives her encouragement and nicknames. He offers her private coaching. He asks her questions about her personal life and she confides in him details that she’s never told anyone else. Then he goes a step too far.
If you went to high school with me, you know the tragic story that immediately came to mind. If you didn’t, here’s a briefing.
While my school’s leadership acted as if our coach and teacher, Ed Klemm’s, arrest was a surprise, those of us on the speech team quickly pieced together that this was undeniably on their radar. Our principal at the time knew that he had been acting inappropriately with his accuser—so inappropriately, in fact, that they had fired him from the speech team the year prior. But he was allowed to keep his job as a teacher, giving him an 8-hour daily outlet to spew lies to students about how his life and legacy had been ruined by a jealous “slut”, literally spitting out her name in disgust and calling her racist, derogatory slurs while she walked the hallways among us.
Klemm had many victims, but it was the one who was most hurt and most brave that finally put him in jail and put an end to years of predatory behavior. But not everyone hailed her as the hero she was. She was bullied, harassed, and targeted by his blind supporters until the day she died far, far too young.
I cannot stress how important books like “Parachutes” are for young girls to read. If I had read this book when I was 15, it might not have taken me until his arrest to see how I was his victim, too. I might have realized how freakishly abnormal our interactions were. The way he took a keen interest in knowing the details of my first relationship, the way he quoted Blazing Saddles to call me “Lili, Lili, Lili legs”, the way he begged me to babysit his daughter at his home, the way he gossiped to me about his wife, the way he told my mom that I, a 16-year-old girl, was “his rock”.
While the experiences of Kelly Yang and Klemm’s accuser are of much more traumatizing magnitude, these smaller experiences—the #MeToo moments of your own that you might not think “count”— boil up and create years of self-doubt and distrust. They matter. It all matters. And it needs to be written about, spoken about, and screamed about so that it can be litigated, prosecuted, and shut the fuck down.
Read “Parachutes”. Send it to everyone you know, especially the young people you know. Let the fictional stories of Dani De La Cruz and Claire Wang—and the very real story of Kelly Yang—be heard. And when you hear these stories from your friends, your classmates, your colleagues…believe them.
Until next time,
xo,
Lily
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