Alysa Liu is What I'm F-ing Talking About

 

In my high school days, I hung out with a variety of social groups. For a closeted t girl with no fixed identity, the validation of my peers was of utmost importance. If I may paraphrase the apostle Paul: to the athletes, I became a linebacker. To the band geeks, a trombonist. I socialized with any one who would have me, save the cheerleaders, who were not stereotypically snobby but whose high femme-ness I was both intimidated by and secretly coveted. The best group to chill with by far was the alt-girls. 

As someone who used conformity as a dysphoria coping mechanism, alt-girls fascinated me with their non-conformity. They shopped at Hot Topic, did their hair in weird styles, and gave zero fucks, especially towards the people who sneered at them. They listened to punk and pop rock, wore bright clothes and always seemed to be smiling. Alt-girls were sartorially daring, culturally-adjacent to goths but without the black warpaint and performative sadness. And their persona, while not unique to my corner of the world, cannot be separated from its existence within its environment. 

My school was in a first-tier suburb of Baltimore city, with its wealthier enclaves to south of us. In other words, you could tell whose grandparents left the docks of Baltimore to become CEOs (Severna Park) and whose grandparents got jobs as carpenters (mine, Glen Burnie). We had a county-wide reputation of being the white trash high school — in part due to economics and in part because my school had close to a 50-50 racial mix of Black/white in our lily white (70%) county. Naturally, the toxic brew of class, race, and gender bigotry caused an outsider perception that the women at our school were oversexed monsters. Even now, with my knowledge of how rape culture works, I remain surprised and disgusted at the way my female classmates were talked about by those from other schools. 

Which brings me, at last, to Alysa Liu.

When Alysa Liu screamed "That's what I'm fucking talking about!" and left the ice slapping the rink-side padding after her gold medal performance, she echoed a kind of feminine sentiment that I experienced back in those days. Her words called to my mind a litany of similar cries with hard waterfront accents that mangled long-ū verbal agreements. Her attitude reminded me of the female friendships I once had. Her aesthetic, like all of theirs, is unapologetically alt. Demeaned for their location and class status, they'd turn both up to ten.With wariness, I know that what Alysa was fucking talking about will be cannibalized by upper classes and repackaged as some sort of celebratory feminist primal scream for consumerist purposes. But as always, that will miss the point. It was indeed a feminist primal scream, but the sound is different coming from a biracial woman with an immigrant father, an out-of-place hair cut, and a frenulum piercing. 

In other words, you can downplay it with white- and class-washing but those who know know. 

People saw Alysa's actions both leading up to and after her performance as defiance against the painfully matriarchal (racist, classist, ableist, etc) standards of the figure skating world. I saw it for what it was: Pure My High School. Like my classmates from Baltimore, Alysa's Oakland upbringing is impossible to separate from her persona or performance. I don't know the first thing about how she grew up but I know what it means to represent a city seen as less than by its neighbors. This is my place. It made me who I am. And I'm gonna show these clowns how to do it. You write my home off as a hole in the ground, well look at what the ground spit up, motherfucker. Now you have to deal with me. 

Alysa Liu is who I grew up with. And as I once did before, I stand in awe of Alysa and the alt-girls of the world. Hers was a two-fingered salute directed at the power of gender, race and class conformity. Someone is looking at her and seeing the triumph of self. It was once me. Time has marched on but I still celebrate Alysa and her ilk. They are what I'm fucking talking about.