{"id":13187,"date":"2016-12-15T00:01:24","date_gmt":"2016-12-15T06:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=13187"},"modified":"2016-12-12T16:31:43","modified_gmt":"2016-12-12T22:31:43","slug":"elegy-1998","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/13187","title":{"rendered":"Elegy, 1998"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;padding-left: 30px\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt\">I first heard the American pronunciation of my name in kindergarten. We practiced handwriting with chunky Ticonderoga pencils and three- lined paper: two solid green lines with red dashes in between. I wrote Anu over and over: my <em>dhak nam <\/em>at home meant bright star in Bangla. My blonde-bobbed teacher wrote INC for incomplete, attached -radha in\u00a0red pen. <em>You need to practice writing your name, Ann-uh-rah-duh<\/em>.\u00a0Radha was the Hindu goddess of love and good luck. I told\u00a0the teacher my name was Oh-nu-rah-dha, Oh-nu for short.\u00a0<em>Don\u2019t talk back to me. <\/em>The first language I spoke had eleven\u00a0vowels. Ma and Baba spoke broken Bangla-English. They\u00a0mailed letters to Bangladesh in orange envelopes: the return\u00a0address in jumbled capital and lowercase, extra loops and curls\u00a0in the letters. I learned about abbreviation. When I got my first B\u00a0in handwriting, the report card comments noted U for\u00a0unsatisfactory. I practiced my penmanship till the letters\u00a0straightened, the pages clean of eraser residue. I crafted my\u00a0American name inside Lisa Frank folders, wore a Barbie clip in\u00a0my black hair for the Lifetouch portrait. I lost the aspirated last\u00a0syllable of my name when I was six. In the American\u00a0alphabet, it did not exist.<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><a href=\"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/13165\">Anuradha Bhowmik<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I first heard the American pronunciation of my name in kindergarten. We practiced handwriting with chunky Ticonderoga pencils and three- lined paper: two solid green lines with red dashes in between. I wrote Anu over and over: my dhak nam at home meant bright star in Bangla. My blonde-bobbed teacher wrote INC for incomplete, attached [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[50],"tags":[25],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-3qH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13187"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13385,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13187\/revisions\/13385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}