man who sternly said the pool was for residents only. This was at my aunt’s

THE INDEBTED
NURSING MY DAUGHTER AT THE late blue hour when streetlights begin to pale, I
saw a plane blinking across the sky. I wanted to be inside that plane, inside the
white hush of a dimly lit cabin, white buds sunk into my ears, New York’s skyline
fading from view until it was a baby’s breath of lights.
When I first became a mother, I resented how locked in I was to my local
environs. No more traveling alone. No more taking off when I felt like it.
Landlocked, I stole away to the Red Hook municipal pool as much as I could to
swim a few laps by myself, because being underwater was freedom. I tried to
write an essay about the pool, beginning with the Red Hook public pool as a
genuine commons, massive as a football field, with space for every kind of kid,
and gloriously free, with free sunblock that comes out of a dispenser.
And yet historically, the public pool was one of the most hotly contested
spaces for desegregation. On the East Coast, urban planner Robert Moses built
the WPA pools mostly on the white side of New York so they would be out of
reach for black people. Southern towns filled their town pools in with concrete
because they’d rather deprive everyone of the pool than share it with black
people. I saw a photograph of one such concrete-filled pool, now part of a
parking lot for a bus depot. The only evidence of it is a forlorn 4½ʹ depth marker
delineating the perimeters of where swimmers once splashed; it now looks like a
grave marker. In Pittsburgh, when black swimmers entered a newly integrated
pool, a mob of white swimmers threw rocks and tried to drown them. When
desegregation was unavoidable, white Americans fled to the suburbs to build their
own private pools.
The public pool is such a stark example of how much this country has been
hell-bent on keeping black and white bodies apart that I became unsure if it was
my history to retell. My interest was sparked by a childhood incident but it
discomfited me to attach my experience to a history that, next to the black and
white apartheid that has carved itself into the American infrastructure, felt
anecdotal. I was thirteen. Deep in the pool I swam like a bottom feeder until I
could no longer hold my breath. As I surfaced, I heard a grown-up voice boom
“Get out!” Treading water, I squinted toward the source of that voice to a backlit
man who sternly said the pool was for residents only. This was at my aunt’s
apartment complex in Orange County. I told the man that my aunt and my little
cousin, who was at the shallow end with my sister, lived here and I was
babysitting. He didn’t let me finish and ordered us to leave. As I clicked the gate
behind us, I heard him say, “They’re everywhere now.”
—
We’re everywhere now. We have taken over Orange County. Some of us are even
rich housewives in Orange County. The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing
opening scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: if you
discriminate against us, we’ll make more money than you and buy your fancy
hotel that wouldn’t let us in. Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn’t that
how whiteness recruits us? Whether it’s through retribution or indebtedness, who
are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?
—
I began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about
my racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to
see what throbbed beneath it. This was harder than I thought, like butterflying my
brain out onto a dissection table to tweeze out the nerves that are my inhibitions.
Moreover, I had to contend with this we. I wished I had the confidence to
bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them. But I feared
the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female,
atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so
nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so,
like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.
—
I never finished my father’s story about the war. After the interpreter recognized
my uncle as an old friend from school, the interpreter turned to the American
soldiers and spoke to them in their strange language. Like magic, the GIs eased
their guns. My father was astonished by the power of the English language. After
they tried to shoot my grandfather in his own home, these giants dug into their
rucksack to give my father a round blue tin of Charms Sour Balls. My father
popped a sugar-crusted molecule of cherry, lemon, and lime balls into his mouth
and was stunned by the firework of flavors.
The wretched of the earth know this candy. Hershey’s doled out after a
firefight, M&Ms handed out before a raid. Americans sprayed Dum Dums lollies
from a fighter helicopter and the children of Afghanistan ran after the chopper
with their arms raised. Sometimes candy was used as a trick. In Vietnam, bored
guards planted candy under barbed wire so they could watch street kids lacerate
themselves trying to grab it. More recently, two U.S. marines were handing out
sweets to four Iraqi kids when they were all killed, ambushed by a suicide
bomber. In 2003, during the Iraq invasion, the U.S. marines threw out the Charms
that came with their MREs because they believed they were a curse. A lemon
Charm meant a vehicle breakdown; a raspberry Charm meant death. Abandoned
packets of Charms scattered the roads of southern Iraq. No one would touch
them.
But the hearts of South Koreans were won.
Sow the cratered lands with candy and from its wrappers will rise Capitalism
and Christianity. About her homeland, the poet Emily Jungmin Yoon writes, “Our
cities today glow with crosses like graveyards.”
—
Throughout my life, I had felt the weight of indebtedness. I was born into a
deficit because I was a daughter rather than the son to replace my parents’ dead
son. I continued to depreciate in value with each life decision I made that did not
follow my parents’ expectations. Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and
to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never
your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner
party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that
no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be
invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in
before I’m interrupted.
If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the
child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The
indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that
the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back
reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without
complaint, prove myself in the workforce.
—
Indebtedness is not the same thing as gratitude. In his poetry, Ross Gay gives
thanks to small moments in his life: tasting the “velvety heart” of a fig, drinking
cold water cranked from a rusty red pump; he even gives thanks to his ugly feet,
though when they’re bare, his feet make him so self-conscious he digs “his toes
like twenty tiny ostriches into the sand.” To truly feel gratitude is to sprawl out
into the light of the present. It is happiness, I think.
To be indebted is to fixate on the future. I tense up after good fortune has
landed on my lap like a bag of tiny excitable lapdogs. But whose are these? Not
mine, surely! I treat good fortune not as a gift but a loan that I will have to pay
back in weekly installments of bad luck. I bet I’m like this because I was raised
wrong—browbeaten to perform compulsory gratitude. Thank you for sacrificing
your life for me! In return, I will sacrifice my life for you!
I have rebelled against all that. As a result, I have developed the worst human
trait: I am ungrateful. This book too is ungrateful. In my defense, a writer who
feels indebted often writes ingratiating stories. Indebted, that is, to this country—
to whom I, on the other hand, will always be ungrateful.
—
The first time I saw the famous photograph of Yuri Kochiyama was only a few
years ago. The black-and-white photograph was snapped right after Malcolm X
was shot at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965. He is splayed
out on the floor, surrounded by a crowd trying to revive him. She is the only
person tending to him whose face isn’t cropped out. She is kneeling in her black
coat, cradling Malcolm X’s head on her lap. Upon closer inspection, I notice that
she is propping his head up with her two hands while another woman is undoing
his tie to better see to his bullet wounds. She looks like she is in her forties,
wearing cat-eye glasses that frame her thin angular features. Who is this Asian
woman? And why am I surprised to see an Asian woman in this photograph?
—
Kochiyama was born in San Pedro, California, in 1921 to a middle-class Japanese
American family. She was a happy and devoutly Christian teenager who grew up
on the white side of town, and her life there was uneventful—until Japan bombed
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Soon afterwards, her father, whose health
was already frail, was falsely accused of espionage and taken to prison, where he
was detained and questioned for five weeks. He died in a hospital right after his
release, hallucinating that Kochiyama’s brother was his interrogator because her
brother, who had enlisted in the war, was wearing a U.S. army uniform at his
bedside. When her ailing father turned his attention to Kochiyama, he asked in a
panic, “Who beat you up?” But no one had touched her.
The rest of the family was evacuated to Jerome, a concentration camp that
imprisoned 8,500 Japanese internees in the swamplands of Arkansas. Forced to
give up all their property and life savings, which is now estimated at $6 billion,
Japanese families were crowded into drafty barracks that were built like the
living quarters of prisoner-of-war camps. Each person was issued a straw mattress
and an army blanket. There was no heat during the harsh winters and no indoor
plumbing, so that if someone had to go at night, they had to trudge out in the mud
to the latrines while a guard tower’s search light was trained on them the whole
way. And yet, even while interned, Kochiyama was almost delusionally upbeat,
organizing letter-writing campaigns to fellow Nisei soldiers who had enlisted to
prove they were American patriots, until letters began pouring back with the word
“deceased.” According to her biographer Diane Fujino, Japanese American
soldiers helped liberate thirty thousand survivors in Dachau, which was fairly
ironic considering that their own families were still behind barbed wire in
America.
—
Upon release, Kochiyama returned to San Pedro. She couldn’t find a waitressing
job anywhere because no one wanted to hire a Jap. It wasn’t until she and her
husband moved to Harlem that she began to understand what had happened to
her. Until then, nothing deterred her patriotism, not the FBI whisking her father
away to prison without reason, not his death, nor even her family’s internment.
She still clung to the myth she learned in her white church and school: that the
United States was a land of liberty. What lay beyond the fault lines of her belief
system was only fear. When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York,
her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America’s racist history.
Finally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to
her wasn’t a nightmarish aberration but the norm.
Kochiyama’s optimism was also what made her an extraordinary activist.
Since she was young, she’d had a preternatural gift for bringing people together.
After befriending her black neighbors and coworkers, she became an ardent civil
rights activist. She later met Malcolm X at a demonstration protesting the
discriminatory hiring practices of a construction company. He was mobbed by
fans but when he saw the lone Asian woman standing back, he reached out his
arm to shake her hand. To his surprise, Kochiyama challenged him, asking him
why he wasn’t an integrationist. Struck by her gumption, X invited her to the
weekly Organization of Afro-American Unity meeting, where she became further
radicalized, turning not only anti-racist but also anti-capitalist.
—
Kochiyama had a compulsion to help others, and was adamant that she not be the
center of attention, which was admirable but also gave me pause; made me
question if there was something inherently Asian and female about her
selflessness, which probably betrays my own internalized chauvinism and my own
rather predictable preference for the melancholic poet or the messianic hero
rather than organizers, like Kochiyama, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes.
In fact, at a time when identities can be walled off, it’s essential to lift up the life
of Kochiyama, whose sense of we was porous and large, whose mission was to
amplify the voices of others while amplifying hers. She fought tirelessly for
prison rights reform; her home was known as “Grand Central” for black civil
rights activists; and she was one of seven activists who occupied the Statue of
Liberty in support of Puerto Rican independence in 1977. Later, in 1988, she
helped lead the Japanese American activist movement that demanded and
received a formal apology and reparations for the internment camps.
—
In 1968, students at UC Berkeley invented the term Asian American to inaugurate
a new political identity. Radicalized by the black power movement and anticolonial movement, the students invented that name as a refusal to apologize for
being who they were. It’s hard to imagine that the origin of Asian America came
from a radical place, because the moniker is now flattened and emptied of any
blazing political rhetoric. But there was nothing before it. Asians either identified
by their nationality or were called Oriental. The activist Chris Iijima said, “It was
less a marker for what one was and more for what one believed.” Some activists
were so inspired by the Black Panthers that groups such as I Wor Kuen in New
York City and the Red Guard Party in San Francisco downright copied the Black
Panther signature style—their armbands, their berets—while initiating their own
ten-point program where they gave out free breakfast to poor Chinese American
children.
They were from Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese working-class backgrounds,
from migrant farmers to restaurant waiters, fighting not just domestic racism but
U.S. imperialism abroad. Many were disenchanted with the mainstream white
anti-war movement because they cared not just about “bringing the troops home”
but about the tens of thousands of Southeast Asians abroad who were being killed
daily. That period of time, writes the historian Karen Ishizuka, was “an unholy
alliance of racism and imperialism, like nothing before or since—the war united
Asians in America who, regardless of our various ethnicities, looked more enemy
than American.” According to the scholar Daryl J. Maeda, Asian American
veterans reported being humiliated and dehumanized by their fellow GIs as
“gooks” while their supposed enemies, the Vietnamese, often identified them as
their own. In the 1977 play Honey Bucket by Melvyn Escueta, an old Vietnamese
woman touches the black hair of an American soldier named Andy. She asks,
“Same-same Viet-me?”
“Filipino. Uh, Philippines,” Andy says.
“Same-same, Viet-me,” the peasant repeats confidently.
—
In college, I was more interested in art than activism, so I discovered our radical
history rather late. My only exposure to it in school was scanning the row of
faded books on Asian American social movements in the library, its death
entombed in those dull dry textbooks that were never checked out. But I also
recall how the anti-racist movements in the sixties and seventies were dismissed
as failures. Marxists wrote off the fight for Chicano, Asian American, and Native
American rights as extravagantly specialized, atomizing the Left from thinking
about the core issue of class, whereas the mainstream center dismissed it as
overtly militant, an opinion shared not only by whites but by minorities as well.
In a 1996 New York Times interview, Yuri Kochiyama declared, “People
have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back. And given what the United States
and Western powers have done to the third world…these countries should fight
back.” Right afterwards, the interviewer, Norimitsu Onishi, deflated her quote by
saying that Kochiyama “clings to views now consigned to the political fringe.”
I embraced all these half-baked opinions without doing my homework.
Whatever their politics were, I thought, they were now outdated. It concerns me
how fast I dismissed the hard work of my activist predecessors after hearing
enough “experts” spout off on the frivolity of identity politics when the
international and interracial politics of Kochiyama was anything but frivolous. It
makes me worried about the future, about this nation’s inborn capacity to forget,
about the powers that be who always win and take over the narrative. Already,
“woke” is a hashtag that’s now mocked, when being awake is not a singular
revelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation. Ending
this book, I think about what prognosis I can offer among the crowded field of
experts who warn of our end times. What I can say is look back to that lost blade
of history when activists like Kochiyama offered an alternate model of mutual
aid and alliance. They offered an alternate model of us.
—
A thought experiment: what if every time white people yell at nonwhites to go
back to [insert nation or continent], they are immediately granted their wish?
Confusion will abound. Ecuadorians will find themselves in Mexico, or I could
find myself in China. But what if they get it right and I find myself zapped to
Seoul?
I haven’t returned since 2008 – Affordable Custom Essay Writing Service | Write My Essay from Pro Writers, when I went to visit my grandmother who, at
the age of one hundred, was slowly dying in an appalling nursing home that I still
can’t think about without being upset at my family. That home was like some
daycare from hell, with pink walls and a creepy recording of church songs sung
by children playing all hours of the day. Elderly people, packed ten to a room,
whimpered for their kids to come visit them. My sister was there for a year,
caring for our grandmother, because the rest of my relatives were too old to
manage her severe dementia. “I want to die before my family abandons me in old
age,” my grandmother used to say.
I can’t live in Seoul. It is not a good place for women. Through cosmetic
surgery, many women shrink down their naturally wide Mongolian faces to
whitened inverted teardrops. The education system is merciless. In 1997, the
International Monetary Fund bailed out South Korea’s crippling financial crisis
with a $58 billion loan upon the agreement that the nation open up its markets to
foreign investors and relax labor market reforms, making it easier to hire and fire
workers and loosen carbon emission standards so that American cars can be
imported. Now real wages have stagnated. Unemployment is dire. College
graduates call their country “Hell Chosun” after an oppressive dynasty with a
feudal class system. A murky haze of micro-dust has settled over Seoul, dust
which can’t be seen but is felt at the back of your throat, and which will cause
long-term health problems, like cancer. During certain months, if Koreans have
to go outside at all, they wear surgical masks, but even that isn’t enough to protect
them.
—
Then be grateful that you live here.
—
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, “Arrest the machine that purports to employ
democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her.” The most
damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are,
turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but
turning me against myself.
—
I had my twenty-eighth birthday party in Seoul, and celebrated it at my sister’s
little apartment with four of our new Korean friends, who were noise musicians.
My sister and I went to their shows in tiny back-alley clubs where onstage one of
them would sit on a folding chair and click on their laptop while an ongoing
buzzing sound, with occasional blips and screeches and snares, would emit from
the stereo system. At my sister’s, when we were already drunk, they proposed a
drinking game and I suggested we play “Never Have I Ever.” This is a game
where people take turns declaring an act they’ve never done before, and anyone
who has done it has to drink. It’s a game that often starts with the mildly
embarrassing (“Never have I ever peed in the shower,” for instance) before it
drops off the precipice into the frank and sexual. I thought I would begin with a
silly question so they would get the hang of it, before one of the musicians, the
one who called himself Fish, with a hipster mid-aughts mullet and black plugs in
his earlobes, announced that he’d start. He raised his shot glass of soju.
“I have never tried to kill myself,” he declared, and downed his glass.
The other musicians clinked their glasses and also downed their drinks.
There was nowhere to go after that, so we stopped playing.
—
I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists
used to say, “I am here because you were there.”
I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two
fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country
used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make
North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families,
including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of
liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country
than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A
fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon,
David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a doubleeyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up
testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s
the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral
country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have
sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars
and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States.
Don’t talk to me about gratitude.
—
I was never satisfied with those immigrant talking points about “not belonging”
and “the sense of in-betweenness.” It seemed rigid and rudimentary, like I just
need the right GPS coordinates to find myself. But I also understand the impulse
to search for some origin myth of the self, even if it’s shaped by the stories told to
us, which is why I keep returning to Seoul in my memories, to historical facts that
are obscure to most and obvious to few, to try to find better vantage points to
justify my feelings here. In Seoul, I still found myself cleaved, but at least it
wasn’t reduced to broad American talking points. At least the “arsenal of
complexes” that Frantz Fanon talks about was laid bare.
—
Upon my return to the United States, the air thinned; my breath shallowed. As the
scholar Seo-Young Chu puts it, I was exiled back to the uncanny valley, where I
was returned to my silicon mold and looked out of monolid eyes. To be a writer,
then, is to fill myself in with content. To make myself, and by proxy other Asian
Americans, more human and a little more relevant to American culture. But that’s
not enough for me.
Poetry is a forgiving medium for anyone who’s had a strained relationship
with English. Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through
song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry. The poet
Louise Glück called the lyric a ruin. The lyric as ruin is an optimal form to
explore the racial condition, because our unspeakable losses can be captured
through the silences built into the lyric fragment. I have relied on those silences,
maybe too much, leaving a blank space for the sorrows that would otherwise be
reduced by words. “It is horrible to be tangible inside capital,” said the poet Jos
Charles. I used to think I’d rather leave a blank space for my pain than have it be
easily summed up for consumption. But by turning to prose, I am cluttering that
silence to try to anatomize my feelings about a racial identity that I still can’t
examine as a writer without fretting that I have caved to my containment.
—
Our respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our
thoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except
others in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asian
Americans, more human is not enough for me. I want to destroy the universal. I
want to rip it down. It is not whiteness but our contained condition that is
universal, because we are the global majority. By we I mean nonwhites, the
formerly colonized; survivors, such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have
already lived through end times; migrants and refugees living through end times
currently, fleeing the droughts and floods and gang violence reaped by climate
change that’s been brought on by Western empire.
In Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining
themselves as slaves and refugees in the future. In Blade Runner 2049, the sequel,
neon billboards flicker interchangeably in Japanese and Korean, villains wear
deconstructed kimonos, but with the exception of a manicurist, there is no Asian
soul in sight. We have finally vanished. The slaves, like Ryan Gosling, are all
beautiful white replicants. The orphanage is full of young white boys who
dismantle junked circuit boards, a scene taken straight out of present-day Delhi,
where Indian child laborers break down mountains of electronic waste while
being poisoned by mercury toxins. Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science
fiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against
black and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their
own fall as a preventative measure to ensure that the white race will never fall.
—
In Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s eighteen-hour documentary The Vietnam War,
they interviewed a Japanese American veteran, Vincent H. Okamoto, who served
as a platoon leader. Like Kochiyama, Okamoto was imprisoned at a Japanese
internment camp, in his case in his early youth. Since all six of his brothers
served in the military, two during World War II and one during the Korean War,
he followed his family’s footsteps by enlisting to go to Vietnam.
Okamoto’s first assignment was searching for Viet Cong soldiers supposedly
hiding out in the countryside fourteen miles outside of Saigon. After hours of
fruitless searching, he gave orders for his men to take a break for lunch at a
nearby village. He found a hut where he smelled the familiar scent of steaming
rice. He suddenly felt homesick for his mother’s cooking. He hadn’t had rice for
months. Okamoto told his interpreter to ask the elderly woman who was cooking
if he could have a bowl of rice in exchange for cigarettes and C-rations of canned
turkey. She made a meal for him of rice and fish and vegetables. He wolfed it
down. He asked for seconds.
“Ain’t they poor enough without you eating all their food?” a soldier chided
him.
“They’ve got enough rice to feed a dozen men,” Okamoto responded.
Then he stopped himself. Why was there all this rice for one elderly woman
and her grandchildren? He asked the woman, “Who’s all this rice for?” “I don’t
know,” she kept repeating through the interpreter. He ordered his group to
conduct a search around her home. Under a thatch of straw, they found a secret
tunnel. Okamoto threw a phosphorescent grenade into the tunnel. After the
explosion, they dragged out seven or eight dead bodies that were so charred they
couldn’t be identified. “Atta boy,” the company commander said to him. The
woman who fed him the rice crumpled to the ground and started wailing.
—
Traitor, I thought.
That word kept ringing in my mind. I was disgusted with him, especially by
his flat neutral affectlessness as he told the story. But I was wrong. He wasn’t a
traitor. He was fighting for the United States. He was doing his job. In fact, he
was probably showing his remorse by telling that story for a documentary series
that he knew would be seen by millions of viewers.
Ultimately, I was left dissatisfied with the documentary. The directors
claimed that their series was going to show both sides of the war, but it still
centralized the trauma of American veterans. No stories of loss by Vietnamese
civilians. None by the Viet Cong female soldiers whom I was dying to know
about. I had read that feminist Asian American activists in the sixties and
seventies looked up to these female soldiers as models of resistance. The series
also didn’t have much of anything on the foreign allies who helped the United
States, not that I expected it would. I’m thinking specifically of South Korea, who
deployed more than three hundred thousand soldiers to Vietnam during the nine
years of the war. At the time, South Korea was one of the poorest nations in the
world and they wanted aid money to boost their economy. They were also
indebted to America for rescuing them from their Communist enemy during the
Korean War. At the time, the dictator Park Chung-Hee said, “We are making a
moral repayment of our historical debt to the Free World.”
—
I could begin writing about buying flowers from the corner deli, but give me
enough pages—two, twenty, or one hundred—and no matter what, violence will
saturate my imagination. I have tried to write poems and prose that remain in the
quotidian, turning an uneventful day over and over, like a polished pebble that
glints in the light into a silvery metaphysical inquiry about time. It is late spring. I
pick up my daughter from preschool and on our walk home, we admire the
perfect purple orbs of onion flowers in bloom. My husband makes dinner that we
sometimes take upstairs to our roof with the view of the train and the sun that
melts its blood orange into the clouds.
I write down my daily routine that is so routine it allows me the freedom to
ruminate. At what cost do I have this life? At what toll have I been granted this
safety? The Japanese occupation; the Korean War; the dictators who tortured
dissidents with tactics learned from the Japanese and the war. I didn’t live through
any of it, but I’m still a descendant of those who had no time to recover; who had
no time, nor permission, to reflect. Barely recovered from the Korean War,
young South Korean soldiers arrived in Vietnam to pay back their debt to
America. They were ground troops assigned “to pacify the countryside” and they
raped and murdered civilians indiscriminately. Their zeal for retribution was
monomaniacal, where if one of the soldiers died from an unknown sniper’s fire
from a village, they went back and burned that village down. In Hà My village,
South Korean troops killed 135 civilians, including babies and the elderly. In Bình
Hòa, there were 430 deaths. In Binh An, more than 1,000 civilian deaths. There
were 8,000 civilian deaths at the hands of South Koreans but that number, like all
civilian casualties during war, is inexact.
—
I can’t entirely renounce the condition of indebtedness. I am indebted to the
activists who struggled before me. I am indebted to Cha. I’d rather be indebted
than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an
ethical life is to be held accountable to history. I’m also indebted to my parents.
But I cannot repay them by keeping my life private, or by following that
privatized dream of taking what’s mine. Almost daily, my mother demanded
gratitude from me. Almost weekly, my mother said we moved here so I wouldn’t
have to suffer. Then she asked, “Why do you make yourself suffer?”
—
“In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist
Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018: 2024 – Write My Essay For Me | Essay Writing Service For Your Papers Online, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to
counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s
sun has set.” Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American,
I felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O’Grady. I heard the
ring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book.
Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal
wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head,
corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is
every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who
live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise.
Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to
live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that
it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional
existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains
conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave,
whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a
peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian
American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our
conditional existence.
But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep
the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only
answer that through the actions of others. As of now, I’m writing when history is
being devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The
administration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to
fill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp
survivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever
happened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why
didn’t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, “We
need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans
didn’t have in 1942.”
We were always here.

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