On Guilty Pleasures
By: Lucia Tang
Tags: Classics, History, Higher Education, Race, Asian American

I buy more makeup than I should. The Sephora shipping boxes pile up by my refrigerator, and my carbon footprint ticks upward with every sheet of bubble wrap, and I shouldn’t spend so much of my grad stipend buying up lipsticks in interchangeable shades of red. Makeup is a guilty pleasure.

It’s not my only guilty pleasure.

I’m not a classicist, but I am a fellow student of antiquity, a historian of premodern China. The semester after I learned Latin, I started a makeup blog. For a few months after I attended the Berkeley Latin workshop — the only Asianist among students of the white medieval and early modern ages — I spent a lot of time staring at my face. I’d fill in my eyebrows with powdery red, or outline my cupid’s bow in sticky blue. Then I’d put on my glasses to see how it all looked, swipe them back off again, and turn my face to the protruding eye of a DSLR camera. I bought it off Ebay, refurbished, with a coupon code. But I still shouldn’t have gotten it on my teaching salary.

That was my second year as a PhD student, but my first time teaching, for a comparative history course on the Han and Roman Empires. It was co-taught by my advisor, an eminent Han historian, and a Romanist colleague who awed us teaching assistants with the telegenic precision of his lectures. As far as teaching assignments go, this was a stroke of remarkable fortune. At Berkeley History, so many of my fellow premodern Chinaists end up trudging through sections on Industrial Britain or the Civil War US — teaching sources two millennia more recent than anything they’d ever read by choice. Getting to stay in antiquity was a win. Antiquity in China was even better.

But when my advisor came in to observe a section, she asked me why I spent so much less time on China than on Rome. That was the day I brought in printouts of Seneca the Younger’s Apocolocyntosis for my students to read in class — not my translation, but the Allan Perley Ball version you can find online. I handed them out and then sat waiting to see if they’d laugh, with the kind of the grinning hyper-alertness you wear when you show a funny YouTube clip to a friend.

When I named my makeup blog Through a Gloss, Darkly, I was thinking about looking glasses and lip glosses, not linguistic glossing and the obscurity of translation. But each time I posted, it ended up being as much about Suetonius and Ovid as about Maybelline. I took pictures of myself with rust-colored eyeshadow and lazy Vestal braids, holding up my Ovid reader to the camera. I mixed Lip Tars to make a fire-hued paste I called Agrippina the Younger. The whole thing was an exercise in turning my feelings about periodic sentences, Julio-Claudians, and the Arachne myth into colors and textures and prose.

They weren’t complicated feelings. This was 2014 — we were years away from the presidential election, when classics seem to tip over into something incandescent and dangerous, to be pried out of white-knuckled, white supremacist hands. I didn’t know that for other people, scholars of color in the discipline’s trenches, Greco-Roman antiquity was already something embattled.

I hadn’t yet met Dan-el Padilla Peralta at a conference on imperial ritual in Rome and Han China, where he gave the best paper and was kind to me at dinner, and so I followed him on Twitter and learned about the white scholar who responded to his talk at the SCS with racist attacks. And I hadn’t yet taken a class with Chris Waldo, the Korean-American Hellenist who would go on to co-found the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus.

I read the AAACC’s founding statement. I may even have shared it on Facebook. The emotional world it sketched out — of grappling with “guilt, frustration, self-questioning, and an absence of cultural capital” — wasn’t entirely strange to me. I connected it to the fidgeting hyper-awareness of self I remembered wearing as a teen. Born in Heilongjiang and raised in suburban Texas, I went to a high school that was 87% white and inhabited the only body of color in a European history classroom. That was why I rushed headlong into Sinology as an undergrad, a way to make up for lost time. Why I got myself literate in modern Chinese as quickly as possible, pushing against the limitations of my own memory like forcing my way upstream through a crowd. Why I spent my freshman summer studying in my birth province.

These feelings — the elbows-out, jostling haste and guilt — had nothing to do with how I felt learning Latin. The Suetonian images lodged in my head like memes or pop songs, to burst out in makeup blogging. I was all naive joy, as I absorbed a grammar that seemed to seep in magical ease — not like the classical Chinese I choked down, straining at the temples and throat. Sinology was work, albeit of a self-imposed kind: I had to shake off the diasporic unease of not knowing something that should have belonged to me. But Latin had nothing to do with me, so it could be fun.

The AAACC founders’ words — the guilt, the defensiveness, the sensitivity to all the gaps in your own experience — felt familiar enough, from the time I spent making sense of my own place in diaspora. But until I read them, it didn’t occur to me that classics itself could feel diasporic.

The times have changed, or I’ve changed. I can’t stem the rush of words and images that come to mind at the thought of classics: the West, O tempora O mores, and barbarians at the gate, and the young white men with their torches in hand, mouths agape with noise and fear and hate. I can’t read Mary Beard without a twinge of shallow guilt — not the diasporic guilt of the AAACC, but the moral queasiness of the privileged. Because your battlefield is my vacation spot.

But despite all this, I don’t want to let go of the childish simplicity, the cotton-candy sweetness of my glancing engagement with the classics. What I want is to selfishly enjoy my Latin, to turn it into playlists and memes and makeup blogs. To show my students Claudius’ Pumpkinification just because I liked it, and to paint my lips sticky copper orange in honor of Agrippina the Younger. What I want is to see the cultural pillars of Western civilization and not have to take them seriously, aggressively approaching them as nothing but fun.

I could pretend that it’s an act of radicalism, to approach classics with this low-stakes sense of play. I could talk myself into claiming that I’m turning the symbolic weapons of white supremacy into jokey fodder for my own self-care — the logic of J.K. Rowling’s boggart, converting horror into laughter. But the truth is, my irreverent fondness for Latin isn’t political, it’s lazy.

As an outsider, I have the luxury of dipping in and out of classics, skimming its bright surface to harvest easy pleasures. I can translate an inscription to make a comparative point about Qin dynastic ritual, or ironically cross-stitch the one line of Catullus I have by heart. I read Lucretius with my advisor, the sensation of thumbing through my dictionary like a balm against the stress of quals, because I can never learn everything I’m supposed to know about China. And I preen when a tough medievalist professor, whose approval I craved, introduces me to her colleague with an offhand “her Latin is very good” (the “for a China scholar” part left unspoken).

No one will ever tell me I don’t belong, or accuse me of making space for white supremacist voices in the beats of my silence, because I have no obligation to say anything. No one will ever mistake me for an Asian historian purely on the basis of my name and my face — I am an Asian historian.

I can see now that other Asian Americans don’t often have that luxury when they work in the classics — nor do other marginalized classicists. They have to make a home in a field that must feel like quicksand or the rumble of tectonic plates between their feet, tugging with demands on their energy and activism or trembling to cast them out. But that’s something I can only imagine.

For me, Latin exists in the spaces left by Chinese, the unidimensional smoothness of shadow against the jagged peaks and roughness of the thing that casts the shadow — a restful negative. It’s the charm of distraction, the gloss of adornment: her Latin is good for a China scholar, she doesn’t actually need it at all.

I don’t need it. But I don’t want to give it up.

When I wrote this, I was reading The Secret History. In Donna Tartt’s dark academic thriller, a group of culty undergrad classicists try to reenact the bacchanals they read about in Greek class. Naturally they lapse into murder, the way I imagine you might lapse into Latin when you’re first learning Greek. Of course, this is all conjecture: I don’t know Greek.

I live-blogged my way through the book, subjecting my best friend from undergrad — a Princeton Classics PhD grad — to a barrage of AutoCorrect-ravaged reactions, even though she’d read it years before.

I said: Also these secret history children are truly judge worthy [sic], even I know Greek doesn’t do ablative

And she said: Wow I don’t remember whether I knew Greek when I read this but they sound truly stupid

Our mockery of these made-up baby classicists was also self-mockery. In college we ate dinner in a group where I was the only person who didn’t read Greek. We traded racy anecdotes from the ancient world like they were TMZ gossip — me, weighing in from Han China with a kind of default authority, like a representative of state.

Like Tartt’s cliquey classicists, we liked antiquity, wore it like an ornament, a distinguishing badge. But these days, it feels like there’s something unseemly about my fondness for Latin. I imagine that it’s try-hard and it looks bad, like showing up to seminar with a matte red lip and a pouffy, mid-century style dress — something I’ve also done, time and again. As if you’re cosigning a politics just by liking a certain look.

To me, Latin feels like style, as luxurious and diverting as it is suspect. I don’t want to draw attention to how much I like it, but I want you to think I’m good at it. Don’t look at me. No, look at me.

This embarrasses me, don’t take it too seriously.

Appreciate how well I do this.

I’m tempted to say that, if Latin is my makeup, then Chinese is the face I put it on. Of course that’s too easy, as reductive as a fortune cookie slip. Still, I’ve never liked my face the way I’ve liked the liquids and unguents I could put on it, the shimmer gliding smoothly over features I can’t view with anything but ambivalence. It sits on the surface: easy.

Lucia Tang is a PhD candidate, lipstick hoarder, and lapsed beauty blogger who studies premodern Chinese history at UC Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Gnome Stew, Lit Hub, and Strange Horizons.