Pin Ups

By Yi Shun Lai

When Yi Shun Lai was old enough, her mother bought her a subscription to 'Teen magazine, in the hopes that she'd shed her tomboy skin to reveal a polished young lady. But Lai cut out all the wrong articles—girls on BMX bikes, girls on the gridiron, girls on the ski slopes and in the ocean—and these women became her role models. Pin Ups is the story of Lai's quest to join these women in their ranks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Little Bound Books
• Release date: Sep 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953340306

Yi Shun Lai

Yi Shun Lai lives in Southern California, and she can talk to you forever about plants and animals and deserts both hot and cold. She volunteers for ShelterBox, an international disaster relief organization, and was once invited to be a crew member aboard an Antarctic cruise line. She’s the author of novels Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu and A Suffragist’s Guide to the Antarctic and memoir Pin Ups. You can read her essays in Shondaland and Brevity. Find her on the web at TheGoodDirt.org.

Book preview

My friend Erik took a solo canoe trip down the entirety of the Mississippi River the summer of 2018. He camped at random islands and beaches and parks over three months, and he relied on the kindness of strangers the whole way. This last is one of those plot points that would ordinarily scream cliché if it didn’t truly happen, with photos and news coverage to prove it.

This is the kind of trip I’d have fancied myself undertaking at some point; the kind of thing I always knew I could do if I set my mind to it. Such endeavors were the bulk of my aspirations when I was in my teens and early twenties.

Witness the mock cover letter I wrote just after graduating. Aside from listing my accomplishments to date and the reason I wanted to work for so-and-so publication, I also wrote that my biggest goal was to hike the entirety of the Appalachian Trail. My advisers quickly cautioned against including anything of that sort: they said it would look like I was too eager for vacation time.

I’d never thought of it that way. For me, wanting to tackle something like the Appalachian Trail was an indication of dedication, passion, gumption, other things I didn’t understand at age 20. Further, it indicated a capability to be At One with the great outdoors and survive on sheer wits and loneliness and sticks of butter, like one hiker I’d read about had done. For a reason I can’t pin down, a big outdoors endeavor like this was sexy to me, maybe because of its sheer distance from anything I had ever done before.

It’s probably safer to say that thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail was only a symptom of the person I thought I wanted to be: One of those who was at home no matter what the condition. I wanted to be the type to survive out of a little backpack and call it luxurious, say laconically, when people asked me, What I have is enough, as if enough were the most I could ever want.

I’m not sure where I got this idea, because it had certainly never been posited to me in my cushy, advantaged upbringing. And I was never encouraged to get lost in the woods as a child: good girls don’t do such things in my culture.

And yet, when Mrs. Salo, my third-grade teacher, read to us from Wind in the Willows, I felt a kinship with Mole, lost in the woods and hunting for home with his best friend Ratty. He was immediately a kind of beacon character for me as I, too, looked for something I couldn’t find or even define.

Later, in my pre-teens, my mother bought me a subscription to ‘Teen magazine. She said it was so I could be more of a