REFLECTIONS ON LARB

development of gardening as an art form. It’s certainly not surprising that Harold would be drawn to Noguchi, since the artist offers Harold a way of reimagining what the opening panels depict as a physically laborious and not very respected job into something more refined. At the same time, Tomine must certainly have been aware that Noguchi’s father is the famous poet Yone Noguchi, who lived for many years in the United States and was celebrated in his time for the contributions he made to both American and Japanese literature. Because Yone’s work does not deal as directly with the experiences of Asian immigrants to the United States as that of other writers of his time, his status as an Asian American writer has seemed to many critics to be a slippery one. How fitting, then, that Tomine begins Killing and Dying with Harold reading a quotation by Isamu. The quotation not only speaks to Harold’s yearning to be an artist; it also aligns this yearning with an important if not easily categorizable family of Asian American creative artists. Despite the physical absence of Asian Americans, that is, the question of what role they play in the making of American culture remains decidedly on the table.

Then, too, we might note that Harold’s wife is black. This story registers this detail, again, visually rather than verbally, and the wife’s race doesn’t play any direct role in what follows. But the inclusion of this detail suggests that race plays a larger role in the many layers of Tomine’s storytelling than might at first appear to be the case. Throughout the book, if we look closely enough, we find that many of the background characters are recognizably black and Asian. Other characters are racially ambiguous enough that they could be white or some other ethnicity, which points not only to the diversity of the world these stories create but also how resolutely they refuse simplistic categorization.

There is, finally, one last turn of the plot in the story “Killing and Dying” that I feel the need to return to, because it very intentionally returns us to the topic of race in a way that has not been so explicit before. Before the daughter appears on stage at the improv theater, a black comedian tells a provocative joke that involves the n-word. As the daughter flounders on stage, trying desperately to connect with the audience, she responds to a black heckler by saying, “But I g-g-guess it’s OK to t-t-tell a bunch of ‘n-word’ jokes, right?” Unfortunately for her, the audience member is a different black man than the comedian who had just been on the stage. Not much more is made of this exchange, but it lingers as part of what makes her performance so mortifying to witness. As she tries to explain away her faux pas, Tomine shows her father tucked behind a doorway, hunched down, his eyes closed. In the midst of his grief for his wife, he also finds himself grieving for his daughter and, through this moment, for a present so full of inequality and loss and racial tension it becomes difficult to tell whom we should be angry at and whom we should simply pity.

ART TK

Roula Nassar, holy fools, 2019, pencil on paper, 13 x 10 inches.

REFLECTIONS ON LARB

SUMMER KIM LEE

Since writing this essay, quarantine and living in a remote area of the Northeast got the better of me: I gave in and caught up on the rest of Grey’s Anatomy following Sandra Oh’s departure from the show. Grey’s recent 17th season (I’m looking at this number in disbelief) took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the season drew to a close, it seemed like the end was near, that this might finally be the show’s last season. The big question, then, was whether or not Cristina Yang would return to say goodbye.

But in an interview with the Los Angeles Times’s Asian Enough podcast, Oh stated that she would not be returning to reprise her role. “In some ways, you do your work as a bubble and you let it go,” she stated. “I left that show, my God, seven years ago almost. So, in my mind, it’s gone. But for a lot of people, it’s still very much alive. And while I understand and I love it, I have moved on.” Oh has moved on from Killing Eve as well. While the show’s upcoming fourth season will be its last, recently she starred in the Netflix series The Chair.My own disappointment aside, it’s understandable why Oh wants Cristina to have a life separate from her own. I understand the readiness to let go of something or someone, whether it is a character one played seven years ago, or an essay one has written only a few years ago. Clearly, since I am writing this, I do not mean I am not interested in revisiting and reflecting upon the essay. Usually, I am repelled by the thought of having to reread my work. Inevitably, I feel embarrassed by what it reveals about me and what I was going through while writing it. The embarrassment is particularly heightened in this case since I had written about myself so directly, for the first time. Yet this is personally and precisely why I value this essay — the way it requires exposure and reveal at the same time that it insists on a private relation to representation