2017-2018 AACC 295 Magazine Issue I

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Acknowledgements Janis Jin and Noorisingh Saini AACC Director Joliana Yee and AACC Assistant Director Sheraz Iqbal The Asian American Cultural Center The Creative and Performing Arts Awards Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale

Notes Asian American Cultural Center Dear readers, The two of us became friends as first-years, bonding over late nights spent laying out pages for a campus publication. The essays and reviews we helped publish introduced us to this school's rich ecosystem of publications, exhibitions, and plays. As Yalies, we’re lucky to be surrounded by so much student work. As Asian Americans, though, we’ve felt a need to hold onto the pieces that reflect our particular experiences. Our message chains are filled with them - the art exhibits we cried at, our friends’ senior theses, the magazine essays we read and reread. But it’s so easy to lose these pieces after a month, a week, even a day. Life here moves so quickly.

As we entered our senior year, we were afraid there would be no way to locate all these works exploring Asian American-ness that had been so meaningful to us during our time here. We wanted to preserve them for the first-years to come who might inspired by these pieces, just as we were. Throughout the publication process, we have been moved by the interest and support we’ve received from the Asian American community. We believe the excitement surrounding this project speaks to the need for a publication like this at Yale.

As you flip through our inaugural issue, we hope you find the comfort that we’ve found in pieces like these over the past four years - the knowledge that you are not alone, that others have stood where you stand, have felt what you feel. We hope also that you learn something new: that through the experiences of others, you find new ways of thinking about your own story.

Warmly, Emily and Samuel

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Yale Asian Womyn's Alliance Hello readers, A few months ago, Agnes and I were digging (gently probing) through the AACC archives when we came across a stack of magazines from universities across the country on the bottom shelf of a small bookcase inside of a closet. The publications were primarily Asian American literary magazines produced from the 1970s to the mid 2000s and contained pieces that interrogated Asian American identity through personal and historical lenses. We read about the Women’s Liberation Movement and the 1992 LA Riots in the words of the students who lived these events. Though their experiences were unique to their social and temporal contexts, their hopes, fears, and realities still resonated with us.

Upon these discoveries, we were chatting with our friends Emily and Sam at the AACC who were already planning on publishing a magazine during the spring semester. One email chain later, the YAWA and the AACC teamed up and 295 was born.

Our magazine is named 295 to reference the AACC’s physical location and as a symbolic reminder of the Asian American community’s locus at Yale. We hope that future generations of students will stumble across copies of this magazine and be reminded of the Yalies who once frequented the meandering staircases of 295 Crown Street.

Happy reading, Haewon and Agnes

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295 Magazine Asian American Cultural Center Christian Detisch Emily Hsee Samuel Wang Yale Asian Womyn's Alliance—an undergraduate organization Agnes Enkhtamir Haewon Ma

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Table of Contents I Prose 10

A Hill with a View Rebecca Yan

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Three Years at the AACC LiLi Johnson and Courtney Sato

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Beautiful Pain Oriana Tang

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Doing Laundry in Beijing Annie Cheng

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Her World and Mine Emma Dinh

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Don't Worry Just About Yourself Tran Dang

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Foreign Reflections Heidi Dong

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Gunmetal Immigrants Vanessa Zhang

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What I ask of you Vy Tran

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Tongues Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

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Form, Order, Distance, Citrus Catalina Ouyang

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II Poetry 78

While in a Shanghai long-tang, I wonder if I am an imposter Emily Hsee

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Pursuit of Happiness Holly Zhou

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The Mountains Know of Rebirth Cindy Ren

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Country Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

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Motherland Tastes Kathy Min

III Academic 88

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Manhattan's Chinatown Monica Wang

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It Takes a Village: Dong Architecture and Culture in Guangnan Zishi Li

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Course Review: Asian American History by Mary Lui Jun Yan Chua

IV Visual Art 120

Terrarium Catalina Ouyang

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When the moon kissed the earth Rosa Chung

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Untitled Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

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Chinese Grocery, a MingLiU Type Specimen Poster Julia Ma

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Grandfather and Car John Lee

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Dad Standing Above LA Traffic John Lee

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Negative Space illustrations Haewon Ma

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Corrosion Ivory Fu

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Us Edi Dai

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Untitled (2018) Josh Feng

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Lunchbox for Janchi Guksu (Korean Banquet Noodles) Kristine Sungyeon Chung

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Roti Canai Lunchbox Sheau Yun Lim

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Monument to Lost Voices of Japanese Internment Emily Golding

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Bad Korean Lauren Chun

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Rabbit Canal Lauren Chun 7

I

Prose

Rebecca Yan

A Hill with a View If you stood on a hill by the East China sea and looked several miles inland, you would immediately notice the thick, dark smog. You would try to find the source and scan the skyline until you saw the tall, white smokestack that spewed toxins and industrial ambitions into the air. You would notice endless metal tubes around the smokestack and realize that they formed a petrochemical plant. If you really squinted, you would see past the plant and observe four identical apartment buildings, all concrete and very square, standing resolutely within the fence that circled the petrochemical plant. If you had superhuman vision and zoomed into the sixth floor of the first building on the left, through the third window, you would see a standard issue room with a rickety dresser, a wooden bed (no mattress), and the back of the head of a five-year-old girl.

I woke up in a square room surrounded by slabs of concrete on all sides. The fan was whirring, and I felt my sister’s body next to me, lifting and sinking to a steady rhythm. My back ached as I climbed out of the rock hard bed and tiptoed into the living room. I heard metal clanging in the kitchen. Was this jail? The smell of warm, fresh dough suggested otherwise. As my grandmother placed soy milk on the kitchen table, my memory returned to me. My father had started a new job and my mother had enrolled in graduate school, so they shipped my sister and me to live with my grandparents in Ningbo, a port city and industrial hub. Using five-year-old logic, I decided that the best way to protest this new life was to remain silent for as long as I could.

On my third day of priestly silence, my grandfather grabbed my hand and instructed me to wait for him outside the entrance of the apartment building. As I waited, I noticed across the street a small patch of green space filled with 10

pomegranate trees and climbing children. A young boy with a shaved head waved for me to join, but I quickly lowered my gaze and turned my head.

My grandfather pedaled toward me in his rusty rickshaw, and I jumped into the back. As we rode through the compound, the outline of a preschool formed in my view. I clenched the metal sides of the rickshaw harder.

My stern-faced teacher, Wang Laoshi, introduced me as the “new student from America.” Thirty pairs of eyes blinked at me. Breaking my silence, I hesitantly told the class my name and age. My teacher had reserved a coveted seat near the chalkboard, and I felt resentment radiate across the room as I claimed my spot. Classroom politics began early in China, and so did mathematics. To my dismay, Wang Laoshi asked me the first arithmetic question.

I shook my head. I knew nothing of summation. The second I revealed my inadequacy, every other hand in the class rose neatly in the air, elbows on tables and arms perpendicular to the the ground. Terrified by the robotic motions of my classmates, I sank in my chair, preferring to disappear rather than to conform.

Unlike my harsh, cold teachers at school, my grandmother, who retired from teaching ten years earlier, carefully observed and diagnosed my shyness as a lack of confidence in the Chinese language. She figured that arithmetic would come easily if I felt comfortable expressing myself first. I rejected her ideas initially. My mother knew me best, and she was coming to China to pick me up any time now. One, two, three months passed. My grandmother persisted. After half a year, the misery I felt in school outweighed the fading hope that I would return home soon. The moment I seemed open to the remedial lessons, she began to pore over workbooks with me every day after class, gradually training me to

master every consonant and tone. Under the evening glow of two light bulbs, the gentle grandmother who prepared my favorite tofu dish transformed to a fearless coach who drilled pinyin phrases relentlessly until I felt confident using them myself. On nights when I felt tired or lazy, her disappointed face signaled that alternatives did not exist. I never dared fight her authoritative presence.

Besides, I could not deny the results of these rigorous private lessons. New words meant new friends down the hall, sweets from the market, and, most importantly, owning my seat in class. I started to appreciate the rhythms of a new language.

My level of comfort in my new environment directly correlated with how competitive I became in and out of the classroom. At school, I often rushed to raise my hand, sometimes unable to keep my elbow on my desk as instructed.

When summer came, my grandmother decided that I should round out my academic life with “just a hobby or two.” Besides violin, painting, and chess, I learned to swim with my neighbor, Yunyun, who was five years older. By the end of our first lesson in the state-owned community pool, Yunyun could propel herself across the pool with her legs, but no matter how hard I kicked, my body would sink into the water. Frustrated by how much more quickly she could swim and immediately identifying her as my competition, I vowed to practice more than she did. I resented that she had a father who would stand in the pool with her every afternoon, giving her instructions, while my grandfather had no plans to step into a pool any time soon. All he could do was chaperone while I practiced kicking and floating under the setting sun.

Every night when I walked home from the pool, I would pass by the garden and see the young boy with the shaved head clamber over the pomegranate 11

Sometimes, I imagined I had fallen into the lake again, except this lake was made of words, splashing aimlessly around me, fighting for a seat on the page.

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trees. One rare sunny day, I decided I should try climbing my own tree. I felt too self conscious to climb in the garden with the boy, but the local town had plenty of eligible trees.

The southern region of China was known for gardens with romantic lakes, willow trees, and rock formations. My neighbor and I spotted a beautiful tree that leaned over the lake, and, in the spirit of my newfound bravery, I went first. One hand in front of the other, I crawled onto a tree limb that hung over the water. Just as I turned around to wave to Yunyun in victory, my foot slipped, and I plummeted into the lake. Although I became a fairly steady swimmer over the summer, the shock of falling into freezing water outside the pool for the first time made me panic, and I started flailing my arms rather than making smooth, careful strokes. My neighbor, seeing no cell phone or human nearby, immediately jumped into the lake and swam to me. She carried me to shore and checked that I was not hurt.

After we rested on the shore to dry off, Yunyun helped me up, and we began the walk home in silence. When we exited the elevator and arrived at our respective front doors, I thanked her. She returned my thanks with a reassuring gaze that meant my grandparents would never know. As I followed the sweet and sour scent of braised pork belly into my apartment, our first swim lesson replayed in my mind.

Swimming in pools, speaking in class, and climbing trees were manageable fears that I could overcome. What I truly struggled to adjust to were the menaces that would live every few weeks in the bathroom of my apartment: chickens.

In China, my grandmother would buy a live chicken, fatten it up in our bathroom (the only tolerable place for a chicken), and cook it. When my grandmother first brought home a chicken, I refused to use the bathroom in our apartment for four days. After several chickens had cycled through the bathroom, I decided for practicality’s sake that I would be willing to coexist, but only for three seconds. One week, my grandmother bought a hen. It had soft brown feathers and a dashing red comb. I begged my grandmother to keep the hen until I could see it lay at least one egg. I was so dedicated to this task that I would squeeze my eyes shut and extend my hand towards the hen’s beak to feed it, so at least I did not 13

have to watch it bite my hand if it did.

One morning during a routine check, we found a light brown egg waiting for us in the cardboard box. I cradled the fragile egg in my hand, feeling the weight of life in my palm. After briskly explaining the concept of fertilization, my grandmother whisked the egg out of my hand to use it in that morning’s breakfast. I looked at the broody hen to see how it reacted to the robbery. It sat there nonchalantly.

Two days later, my grandfather wanted chicken for dinner. He invited me to witness the slaughter, and to everyone’s surprise, I accepted. The slaughter went exactly how I imagined. Afterward, my grandmother prepared the chicken the way my grandfather liked, with lots of pepper and peanuts, and I sat at the table in silence, leaving my meal untouched.

After dinner, I went to the pomegranate tree garden across the street. The garden was eerily empty since the sun was setting. Not even the boy with the shaved head was nearby. I climbed a tree methodically and found a knot in the branches that looked sturdy for sitting. I remained there until I no longer trusted myself to climb down safely in the dark.

Miraculously, the air was clear.

At the end of my second year of preschool, my teacher assigned a final project with the theme of birth and life.

The projects would be read in front of the class for enjoyment rather than for competition, and students buzzed with excitement over this reprieve from our usual course load. I prepared for the assignment weeks in advance. Students my age did not learn how to write Chinese characters yet, so I dictated my story to my grandmother, who transcribed my speech under the glow of two light bulbs. I reviewed what she wrote and adjusted accordingly, learning to build a narrative by mentioning details whenever I could remember: the plump, red pomegranates; the smooth surface of the young boy’s bald head; 14

the icy lake water; the black, beady eyes of the hen. Sometimes, I imagined I had fallen into the lake again, except this lake was made of words, splashing aimlessly around me, fighting for a seat on the page. I wanted to include them all just as I had experienced them. I felt every consonant on my tongue and the weight of the words as I recited them aloud.

When I finally grabbed the right words and filed them neatly, I narrated to the class a story almost identical to what I told here.

If you returned ten years later from America to the hill by the East China Sea, you would notice that the petrochemical plant no longer stood alone. The plant would be surrounded by acres of glass skyscrapers and elevated highways. The smog would be even more oppressive than you remembered.

If you looked for those four apartment buildings, you would be disappointed, for the grey concrete facades had been replaced by fashionable buildings designed by architects. But if you zoomed into where those apartments once stood, some red blurs would appear in your vision. Those blurs would be plump, red pomegranates on trees with branches so wide and welcoming that you would know someone once climbed them.

Three Years at the AACC LiLi Johnson and Courtney Sato Our advisor, Asian American Studies historian and Head of College of TD, Mary Lui often emphasizes to us to think about “change over time.” The phrase has become the basic tenant of our attempts to do historical work while not actually being History graduate students and, like any graduate student turned AACC Interim Co-Director turned back to graduate student, we thought we’d start our reflection of our three (plus a little) years at the AACC with this deeper question of “What has been the ‘change over time’ that we’ve seen, felt, and participated in during our time at the AACC?” And as (pretend) historians, what does it mean to reflect on that time now that we’ve spent several months away from the Center?

In many ways our personal relationships to the AACC have been reflections of the growth and changes of the community more broadly. Walking in to the AACC as friends already, the more work we put in to the Center and the community, the more we came to appreciate the love, ambition, and growth of each other and everyone around us.

As our personal triumphs and joys were shared over late nights after work at Barcelona or Froyoworld, the AACC continued to become a thriving community where people could share their struggles, laughs, and (always) food.

We were both second year Ph.D. students in American Studies when we began as Graduate Assistants at the AACC under the direction of Dean Saveena Dhall. We had spent our first year of graduate school already camped out at Panera becoming best friends and, after conferring about whether the other one was going to do it (LiLi wasn’t sure), we submitted 15

our applications in the summer of 2014. When we scheduled our Skype interviews with Dean Dhall, Courtney was in Japan and LiLi in Massachusetts.

As we later found out, LiLi was the first person Dean Dhall interviewed and Courtney the last.

Luckily there were three Graduate Assistant positions to fill and the best news was hearing that both of us received offers to join the AACC. During August of 2014, Dean Dhall was the only professional staff member at the AACC, and she spent half her time with her decanal duties as Assistant Dean of Yale College. That year, by her side were Head Coordinators (now alumni) Hiral Doshi and Jessica Liang, the only returning staff members to the AACC. Both were so well-versed in the AACC, competent, and strong leaders that we thought they were graduate students at first. Together, Dean Dhall, Hiral, and Jessica led the AACC staff of 12 undergraduate staffers and three graduate staffers, Courtney, LiLi, and (now alum) Sameera Savarala.

Things were very different then at the AACC. The house had brown carpets, molding couches, and metal bars on the windows. The staff was smaller, and our budget was less than half of what it is now in 2018.

Our first staff activity was bonding on a Saturday before classes started. The day began with a long walk to lunch at East Rock Park (as usual the shuttle that we had planned to catch wasn’t running prior to the start of classes), a two hour rock climbing session at City Climb, ice cream at Ashley’s, and then a program planning session in the Trumbull courtyard. It was a long day, and we weren’t paid for the time. But over the course of the day we learned each others’ names, cheered each other on while scaling a climbing wall, and began to feel like a team.

That Fall, Courtney worked with a team of students (Andrew Ma, 16

Richard Chung, Shelly Kim, and Pratyusa Mukherjee) to curate an exhibit on the history of Asian Americans at Yale. The impressive exhibit was put together largely by the students. It was sprawled throughout the entire top two levels of the Center. Drawing together records, photographs, Yale Daily News articles, and other memorabilia from the large collection of AACC archival files housed in the AACC library was one of the initial challenges these student curators tackled.

In October 2014, when the exhibit officially opened, Yale alumni Rocky Chin and Grant Din led a discussion reflecting on materials included in the exhibit. In reminiscing on their own experiences with the Association of Asian American Yale Alumni (AAAYA) and the Asian American community, the two alums reflected on much longer histories of Asian American activism at Yale.

In the Spring, LiLi collaborated with the newly-reestablished Asian American Studies Task Force, a group of undergraduate students fighting for the growth of Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies on campus, in the Yale Asian American Studies Conference. At that time, Mary Lui was the only tenured or tenure-track Asian American Studies professor at Yale University. That year no undergraduate Asian American Studies courses were offered because Professor Lui was on leave. The Conference hosted scholars from across the country in Asian American Studies fields not represented at Yale including Literature, Political Science, and Visual Culture.

We were honored to feature founding scholar in Asian American Studies and Political Science Don Nakanishi as our keynote speaker and attendance at the conference was overwhelming.

Students, scholars, activists, and community members from across the Northeast attended and the conference helped strengthen the support for Asian American Studies at Yale University.

As our first year at the AACC went on, it became ever clearer that Dean Dhall and the loyal staffers of the AACC were the core foundation for the energy, collaboration, implementation, reflection, and excitement at the heart of the community. We were the program planners, advertisers, administrators, secretaries, chefs, decorators, craftspeople, chauffeurs, and everything in between for the Center. And we loved doing it because we were a team and we felt so invested and passionate in our community.

Going in to the second year at the AACC, Dean Dhall, Courtney, and LiLi all looked forward to the growing sense that it was going to be a peaceful year. Jonathan Holloway had just been appointed as the Dean of Yale College and the staff was a mix of returning staffers and new folks. We also had the funds for a new GA which rounded out the graduate students with Courtney, LiLi, (now alumni) Jason Duong and Bethany Carlson. We had the dream team and the year ahead looked bright!

The year started off with an exciting and generous donation from renowned Asian American historian and Columbia University Professor Gary Okihiro of over 2,000 books towards our Library. Thanks to Yuni Chang and Susie An, the library was cataloged and we held a reception for the opening of the Gary Y. Okihiro Library at the Yale Asian American Cultural Center. While on campus, Professor Okihiro also delivered an address for the opening of “Out of the Desert: Resilience and Memory in Japanese American Internment.”

The exhibit, curated by Courtney, was featured in the Sterling Library Memorabilia Room from November 2015-February 2016.

During the course of Professor Okihiro’s visit at Yale, that Halloween brought the infamous Christakis email and the snowball of activism that came

to shape all the Cultural Centers and experiences of students of color at Yale. One night following the March of Solidarity, the AACC hosted an open discussion for students to reflect, discuss, and consider all of the events that had been happening. Over 200 Asian American students attended and the House was completely packed. Courtney, LiLi, and 8 other staffers each led a discussion group in various rooms of the House and the reflections ranged from Asian American students who had never thought about race before to students who had been at the forefront of activism on campus. What became glaringly clear, more so than ever before, was that the community of Asian and Asian American students was incredibly diverse with individuals at various points in their journeys of negotiating what it means to be Asian and/or Asian American at Yale and in the United States more broadly.

This continues to be an important and generative tension in the Asian American community (at Yale and beyond). While every person has the right and agency to define and avow their own identities, many Asian Americans are not aware of the history of Asian American racial formation in United States society. Many students do not know why or how Asian Americans became a racial group in the United States, how or why Asian Americans are considered “people of color,” or do not know the history of activism across racial and ethnic groups in US (and Yale) history. At the same time, many Asian American students know this history intimately and are learning and building on the history, theory, and activism of years past. The question of how we build solidarity both within and across communities continues to be a challenge that the we must continue to courageously tackle today.

Largely due to the student activism of Fall of 2015, promises and 17

Our desire to support the operation of the Center, the staff, and the community at times conflicted with our own graduate work, personal health, and happiness.

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developments were made across the University with a renewed interest in Ethnic Studies and the Cultural Centers. The Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) was established, ethnic studies courses surged in popularity, and each of the Cultural Centers were granted increased budgets and a new professional staff position of Assistant Director.

Personally, that Spring was also eventful (and stressful!) for us academically as we both became Ph.D. candidates, passing our qualifying exams and successfully proposing our dissertation projects.

In August of 2016, it was announced that Assistant Director Raymond Firmalino would be joining the staff of the AACC. Everyone was excited by the new energy and additional professional support for our community. Unfortunately, later that month, Dean Dhall officially announced that she would be leaving the AACC to accept the role of Associate Dean of Student Affairs at the Yale School of Nursing. After a decade of service to the community, her departure felt like an irrecoverable loss. Her going away party was supposed to be a surprise but (probably for the best) she found out. Together with her family, colleagues, staffers, and friends, in September 2015 we celebrated all that she had given to our community.

Courtney and LiLi came up with the idea of dedicating the AACC Conference Room in her name and with literally no knowledge of how that is done (and complete disregard for whatever administrative and legal requirements there are for such a process), we ordered a plaque and (clumsily) nailed it to the Conference Room wall. Even today, Dean Dhall continues to reach out and serve as a role model and mentor to us.

The 2016-2017 academic year brought new challenges with only one professional staff member at the Center who was still new to the university. With a significantly increased budget, the Center was growing in new, exciting, and sometimes unruly ways. As the only returning Graduate Assistants in the Fall semester, we began to take on more and more responsibilities. Our passion for the work as well as our friendships with so many community members kept us going through late nights of juggling our Ph.D. alongside our AACC work. We were beginning our fourth year of our graduate program and beginning to write the first chapters of our dissertations. There’s no denying the fact that this was one of the most difficult years of our graduate school careers. Our desire to support the operation of the Center, the staff, and the community at times conflicted with our own graduate work, personal health, and happiness.

The search for the new AACC Director/Assistant Dean of Yale College continued throughout the duration of the academic year with no success. Members of the staff and community were uncertain of the future of the Center and 19

when April 2017 came along, our Assistant Director resigned.

The AACC staff found ourselves facing the end of the year with neither a Director or Assistant Director. The decision to accept the role of Interim Co-Director positions was incredibly difficult for both us. We already felt exhausted from the school year and the effects it had had on our academic and personal lives. Yet, we could also see the promise that such a position held in helping care for a community that felt truly in transition and building something that we had always loved being a part of.

The start of our term as Interim Co-Directors began in a flurry of resupplying the House before the end of the fiscal year. Concurrently, with our supervisor Dean Burgwell Howard and the other Cultural Center deans, we began concurrent searches for AACC Assistant Director and AACC Director/Assistant Dean of Yale College. The summer became a regular stream of campus visits for promising candidates, which was difficult at times to negotiate as the AACC kitchen was under renovation and the House had become an official construction zone. One of the great joys was working with the undergraduate students that were in New Haven for the summer who attended the various candidate dinners, provided feedback, and shared their visions for the Center’s future.

In July 2017, we welcomed our new Assistant Director Sheraz Iqbal. Everyone was excited for Sheraz to join the AACC. The first few weeks were busy for all of us with meetings, trainings, and trying hard to avoid overloading Sheraz with too much Center and broader University institutional history.

Alongside current AACC Head Coordinators Janis Jin and Dean Li, we also began to plan for the year ahead including hiring new staffers, planning trainings and annual programs, and continuing the AACC Director/Assistant Dean of Yale College search. August went by in a blur as we pushed to expedite the delayed construction for the kitchen before the start of the school year, and purchased supplies (including many snacks) for the House in anticipation of our Annual AACC Staff and PL Retreat.

September brought the exciting news that Jolianna Yee would be joining the AACC Community as Director and Assistant Dean of Yale College in January of 2018. We were relieved to know that the professional leadership for the Center was now in place. To commemorate the 75th Anniversary of Executive Order 9066 and spearheaded by Courtney, the AACC (in cosponsorship with the RITM Center and the Yale Out of the Desert Project) organized a symposium on Japanese American World War II incarceration. The symposium, “Legacies of Incarceration,” was held from October 5-7, 2017, and drew roughly 150 attendees from across the university and the broader community. At the symposium’s reception, the AACC 20

also announced the inaugural Satoda Scholars cohort. In thanks to the generous donation from Yonekazu Satoda (whose diary was featured in the 2015 “Out of the Desert” exhibit), Yale undergraduate and graduate students received funding to pursue research on incarceration studies. As Mr. Satoda put it, he wished for others to learn about “the history of what happened to my family and I.” The AACC staffers and Assistant Director Sheraz ensured that even when we hosted a large sushi lunch at the center for all the conference attendees, the entire meal was organized seamlessly.

The conclusion of the Symposium coincided with the end of our term as AACC Interim Co-Directors. The day after the Symposium, Courtney was moving from New Haven to San Francisco and both of us would begin our dissertationwriting year, in which our primary responsibility would be to write our dissertations. On the final night of our Interim CoDirector term, we stayed up all night with Head Co-Coordinator Janis folding and stapling the hundreds of programs from scratch for the Symposium. In preparation for the Symposium we also looked at the center’s archives. Sifting through the piles of binders, scrapbooks, photographs, and posters was a reminder of the much longer legacies of student activism and collaboration that still resonated in the work we sought to carry out over the past three years at the Center, but also pointed to the important work by students still to come.

Now that it’s been several months since we worked at the AACC, it’s easier to say more about this idea of “change over time.” The people and voices and conflicts at the AACC will always be changing and there will always be disagreement about how things should or shouldn’t be run, what our vision should be, and how to prioritize the needs of the community.

However, what won’t change is the love, care, and passion that holds this community together. In the years that we’ve worked at the Center, community action has had a direct impact on resources allotted: the more people have pushed for resources, courses, faculty, etc., the more the University has responded.

And as such, we encourage all present and future staffers, community members, and allies to listen to one another, support each other, and fight for what you need.

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Oriana Tang

Beautiful Pain Previously published in Plan A Magazine.

This version has been cut to meet length restrictions.

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The first Lana Del Rey song I loved was the cover of “Video Games” by The Young Professionals. A friend sent me the link one night in July four years ago.

“It’s better than the original,” she said.

I had never heard the original, but I pressed play anyway, the volume turned low so as not to wake my parents. A clunk: the sound of a coin dropping into a slot. Then the music began, poppy, fast, the minor key full of flavor. The song was the color of a cool summer night.

I was seventeen, about to enter my senior year of high school. During the day I interned at a cancer research lab in New York; at night I sat beneath the blue fluorescence of my desk lamp, trawling mindlessly through the Internet. The summer moved as slow as honey twisting from the back of a spoon. Though my friend sent me many songs, “Video Games” by The Young Professionals became my soundtrack. Even listening to it now recalls those evenings: the occasional sweep of headlights down the road before my house; streetlamp shadows on the neighbors’ siding; ellipsis pauses on Facebook as I waited for people to respond to my messages.

It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college that I finally listened to the original “Video Games.” My first impression was shock: it was so slow.

Lana Del Rey’s voice was lower than I expected. Like a vapor, the song expanded to fill the room and the spaces inside my head, and when it ended I felt empty, bereft. And the video, which was a marvel—the overlapping images of joy, danger, beauty, all of it pregnant with a kind of voyeuristic memory: the precious, amateurish quality of a stranger’s photographs. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

I listened to other songs: “Carmen,” “Ride,” “Young and Beautiful” from Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby, snippets of which had entranced me from the movie trailers. The music, yes,

it was addicting. It demanded attention.

It was so rich it pushed everything else out of my mind until all that was left was the sound, slow as a sleeper’s breath. But what really drew me to Lana Del Rey was her persona. It was a drama of girlhood, beauty, sex, death. It was red ribbons tied around long white necks; loose dresses made of lace and silk; suicides more about poetry than about grief.

Lana Del Rey was both archetype and amalgam, inimitable and familiar. She was everything I’d spent my short life chasing: in the stories I wrote, the essays I read, the history I obsessed over.

But why? My attraction to the singer made no sense. It was obvious, even before I began to consider what it meant to be Asian American, that the history of Lana Del Rey was also a history of white women, of Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott and Annabel Lee and Evelyn McHale and Marilyn Monroe. I didn’t want to become Lana Del Rey—far from it. And yet something was common in how I wanted to see myself and how I saw the singer. I struggled through an interpretation of femininity that wavered between white modesty (Ruth Yeazell) and Asian ornamentalism (Anne Anlin Cheng); considered Freud’s concept of the death drive; wondered whether it was as simple as admitting that Lana Del Rey’s appeal transcended racial boundaries.

None of it seemed right.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I attended a language program in the south of France. Some weeks after I returned, my family took a road trip to Boston for a weekend. We arrived in the city around noon, parked the car, and walked to a square filled with flowers and ducks and teenagers playing Pokémon Go. We wandered around, looking at the willow trees bordering a pond, the bronze statues of 23

American heroes perched proudly on horses. I felt oddly anxious, like we were being watched. Other Asian families— clearly tourists from out of the country— walked around carrying cameras and speaking to each other in Mandarin or Korean. I wondered if we looked like them. Did other people in the park see us and group us with the foreigners? Did they know we were American, too? I spoke too loudly to my sister, in English; I looped my arms affectionately around my parents’ necks. We’re different, I wanted to shout. We’ve belonged here for more than twenty years.

I’d never felt the need to prove my membership in America before. But France had changed something, had made me cautious. People shouted at me on the street: “ni hao,” “chinoise.” I felt on display. My host family was white; in their pristine house I found excuses to stay in my room, though they were kind to me, hospitable. I was relieved to return to America, where I could open the door of the refrigerator without feeling like a thief.

Of course this story is nothing new.

You could say, maybe, that it’s one of a series of moments in which I became racialized, in which my identity as an Asian American came to mean something beyond the cultural habits it instilled.

Perhaps the real surprise is how long it took. Growing up, I was as unconscious of my race as it was perhaps possible to be for an Asian girl born to immigrants and raised in America. My hometown, we children said, was “half Asian and half Jewish.” All of the Asian kids were lumped into a cohort without ethnic tags. Some of the Jewish kids were called “jappy,” an offensive term that originally stood for “Jewish American princess” but eventually lost its usefulness as an acronym and was instead applied to any white person with brand-name clothing, chemically straightened hair, bleached teeth, spray-tanned skin. People stuck 24

What I saw of th American exper the easy, unques coexistence of m and other bodie the way my slipp between langua was considered normal, commo wasn’t somethin represented in p media.

he Asian rience— stioned my es; page ages

on— ng I saw popular

to their groups, though border-jumpers existed—Asian girls who wore liberal amounts of makeup and drank and postured in photos like the white girls did; white boys in polo shirts and khakis who played cards at lunch and did well in their classes and earned the title “honorary Asian.”

It was the way things were, and I didn’t question it.

Nobody I knew cared about the fact that I was Asian. If people pulled at the corners of their eyes in elementary school or sang insulting rhymes, I’ve long since forgotten. Near the start of my freshman year of high school, one teacher mixed up the names of two white boys. When they corrected her, she apologized, “I’m sorry, but you white boys just all look the same!” She never confused the Asian students.

After graduating, I read an opinion piece by a friend in the class below in which she claimed to have wished she was white. I congratulated her on its publication, but privately I was shocked. Wishing to be white, like the desire to develop a culture-bridging identity, or the struggle with racist namecalling, were themes that appeared in young adult novels, not realities from our sleepy liberal town. It wasn’t that they weren’t real, of course, just that they weren’t a part of our lives. What I saw of the Asian American experience—the easy, unquestioned coexistence of my and other bodies; the way my slippage between languages was considered normal, common—wasn’t something I saw represented in popular media. But it didn’t matter to me. I considered it banal. Much more interesting was my teenage angst: drifting apart from friends, crushing on boys, getting into college. I thought I was intellectual; I was interested in death. I knew nothing about death. The people in my life who had died were grandparents I hadn’t seen since I was very young. Almost any problem in my town was solved with money; I never heard about girls getting pregnant or getting abortions, though looking back I’m sure both happened; I never heard about people getting busted with drugs.

On the album cover of Lust for Life, released in July 2017, Lana Del Rey smiles with all of her teeth. The picture is startlingly clear, capturing the shine of her locks with an almost artificial gleam: evidence of the digital age. It’s the first time the singer has posed for an album cover with a smile.

Lust for Life, as has been hashed and rehashed in the hundreds of reviews that have been posted since the album came out, both affirms and departs from Lana Del Rey’s usual message and iconography. In an interview with Pitchfork published a few days before the album’s release, the singer repudiated her 2014 remarks against feminism. “Women 25

started to feel less safe under this [Trump] administration instantly,” she said. “Now, when people ask me those questions [about feminism], I feel a little differently.” She said she would no longer use the American flag as her background at concerts (she’d prefer static). In her lyrics, she references North Korea’s missiles, blesses America’s women, suggests hope in the midst of war.

But the past is still there, overlapping the present like a double exposure—Woodstock and Coachella, John Lennon and Sean Lennon. In a series of photographs shot by David LaChapelle for Flaunt magazine, Lana Del Rey appears like a specter of the 1970s: gripping a red hymn book before a white-clad church choir; waving at crowds from a tasseled parade float; standing over a lace-edged table runner in a wedding dress splattered with wine. Though visually she belongs to the world of the photos, she doesn’t quite seem to fit in. It's easy to pick her out from the other people in each picture, who look faded and distant, like part of the background, while she stares coolly, almost menacingly, at the camera.

The past, like death, is a site for intrusion. It has already happened, so it is easy to overwrite, to make over into a kind of ideal present: cherrypicked for convenient memories, filtered through the lens of nostalgia. The past has pathos. Existing there makes you authentic; it means you have history; you can’t be a stranger if you’ve been here for so long.

Sitting with a friend in her kitchen one night, we discussed what it meant to see the world from an Asian American perspective. “I think Asian Americans aren’t sentimental,” she said. “But white people, for instance, are sentimental about everything.” I’d agreed. But then, to be sentimental requires having history to be sentimental about—looking to the 26

past as though it could have been as good as what you might hope for from the future. And to be Asian American, to be the child of immigrants, is to have no past—neither your parents’ past, nor even the past, really, of other Asians in America. All of that historical pain traces no direct line from the past to the present. It belongs to different waves of immigration, to different ethnicities within the cohort of Asian America; for it to have political value means to consciously absorb it, to accept it as pain we still have a duty to shoulder.

Lana Del Rey shoulders a kind of pain, too. Her brilliance lies in her ability to reimagine history, to siphon past darknesses that rewrite popular memory: she recalls the cults of the 1970s rather than the bell-bottom jeans, JFK’s assassination of the 1960s rather than free love. She sings “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in black and white at the start of “National Anthem”; knots grainy, low-resolution footage into “Summer Wine”; allows herself to be fucked over a pinball machine in “Ride.”

She mutates even sweet memory into the sour wresting of loss. Then again, Lana Del Rey is a pretty white woman. We believe in the stability of her innocence.

On her, pain can do nothing but make her more beautiful.

Two years ago, a man in my town, the neighbor of a friend, was murdered. The neighbor, my friend had told me some years earlier, was a pervert: he spent all day on a lawn chair on his screened-in porch, wearing only a bathrobe. I’d been incredulous; my friend was casual, even amused.

Perhaps he’d gotten used to the sight, the disruption of surveillance every time he wanted to play basketball with his brother in the driveway. Perhaps it didn’t matter to him because what

was there to see in his body, skinny, angular, moving with the bony grace of adolescence? We met one evening in the local diner, the dark windows capturing our broad, pale faces, the pink walls, the neon tubing. Oh yeah, he said, spearing a piece of waffle. Remember my creepy neighbor? He was murdered a couple weeks ago. I stared at him and demanded details, but my friend didn’t know why it happened, or how, and even afterward, when I looked up the incident, I found only a few sparse sentences in the local newspaper.

It wasn’t the first time the illusion of safety I found in my hometown was disrupted. Last spring, a junior at the high school committed suicide—the first time I can remember something like this happening in my town, though the event, considering my high school’s history of competition, couldn’t have been unexpected. Other incidents must have happened throughout my childhood, too, instances I’ve long since forgotten. But by all appearances these tragedies soon scabbed over. Livingston sank easily beneath the monotony of the everyday.

Perhaps this is the meaning of privilege: the completeness with which I can exist under the illusion of safety.

Yet to be Asian American is to live with a malleable identity, easily manipulated by other people to suit their needs. When Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat in 1982, his murderers received an improbably light sentence (three years of probation and a fine of $3000) on a charge of manslaughter: their innocence in the case was not only expected, not only presumed, but legally upheld, while Chin’s was meaningless. When, last summer, Donald Trump dragged Asian Americans into the debate over affirmative action, suggesting that they as well as white students were discriminated against by the policy, he was enacting another transmutation of

Asian American identity to suit white needs: from that of the perpetrator to that of the victim.

But for a long time, I didn’t recognize these reconstructions as racially-targeted distortions; I didn’t believe that my own identity held, in the eyes of others, the same flexibility.

The ground under my feet—thanks to my parents, who never speak of their pasts, who make enough money for us to live more than comfortably, who chose to move to a pretty New Jersey suburb, where Asian Americans are not just integrated but, by all appearances, accepted—is rarely, if ever, pulled out from beneath me. Maybe this is why so many Asian American families believe in working hard and keeping their heads down. At home, I can look around me and see Asian American families with trim lawns planted with rosebushes and pinwheels, cars buffed to a shine parked in their driveways, trampolines and pools dug into their backyards, and know that the creation of an illusory safety is more than possible for me—so possible, in fact, that I can live believing in its completeness, in its closeness to reality; so possible that I can forget it is only an illusion.

But I have to keep looking back; I have to reread the past. Every friend I mention in this essay is Asian American.

Over the spring 2017 semester, while conducting interviews for an oral history project on Asian American identity, several people told me they’ve never felt as comfortable around white people as they did around other Asian Americans.

We treated it as a joke, put it down to the fact that with other Asians there’s some common ground: we all knew, for instance, to take our shoes off inside the house. But our self-imposed segregation was built from more than banalities.

27

I don’t think it’s revisionist to claim that I never wanted to be white, or that I thought I was white by virtue of my family’s socioeconomic status.

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I don’t think it’s revisionist to claim that I never wanted to be white, or that I thought I was white by virtue of my family’s socioeconomic status. I knew I was Asian American.

But I also believed that being Asian American changed nothing about who I was, what I wanted to become, or where I could one day go. Cushioned by the idyll of suburbia, it seemed obvious: of course my work, my pain, my dreams were as real and as deserving of empathy and reward as anyone else’s.

When I strived to do well in school, it was because my success was also my parents’ success, proof of my love for them, proof that they had survived and survived well; I was complicit in no agenda.

To leave home, to discard the discoloration of the past, is to believe that one’s innocence has been refreshed.

Growing up in Livingston meant that I believed I was innocent, and, moreover, that I believed other people believed I was innocent. Any cracks that appeared I ignored or put down to other causes. A teacher of mine once admitted she had a student who claimed receiving anything less than an A on her report card meant getting beaten. The student was, of course, implied to be Asian American. This was two years after Amy Chua published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a book that generated a buzz in my town, a book I hated without reading because I worried it would leave the wrong impression, because I didn’t want to believe it could be true. The teacher gave me a long, searching look. I didn’t know what to say.

More insidious was the calculus teacher hired when I was a senior. She’d come to Livingston from an inner-city school, a fact she never let us forget. Every day, before starting her lesson, she would lecture us on how privileged we were, how college-crazy, how her inner-city students had struggled in ways we’d never have to. Our class was almost entirely Asian American, and at first we went along with it. But by the middle of the year she’d begun to regularly accuse us of cheating. The fact that several students got full scores on a take-home exam was proof that we used outside resources, not proof that we were smart, that we’d worked hard, that we’d mastered the material. When that December I broke down in her classroom after school because of the impending arrival of early action decisions, she stared at me impassively over her desk, said I had nothing to worry about, then told the class the next day about my tears. It didn’t matter to her that she’d witnessed a private moment; that my stress encompassed more than my own ambition; that my pain had been, if not as threatening, maybe, as the pain of her previous students, then at least just as real. No: I, and the other Asian American students, deserved no sympathy, only suspicion.

These moments are the ones that, looking back, make me wonder how much our acceptance into our town’s culture 29

was genuine. Our suburb has 27,000 residents and two Chinese-only churches. A friend recently told me that the reason why the students with the top ten highest GPAs in the class were no longer permitted to sit on stage during graduation was because it was seen as promoting a competitive culture: “which we all know,” she wrote, “is how white people feel when none of the children sitting on stage are white.” How much did we spend our childhoods living in a racial bubble, segregated not by choice but by a recognition of our alienation?

How much of our sense of safety was granted because it wasn’t seen as threatening? And most of all—how much did we buy into that sense of safety because, surrounded by the debris of material success, we didn’t know how to feel otherwise?

August. New Jersey cloaked in a woolen heat. Lying on my bed, I scrolled through Lana Del Rey’s Instagram: a mash of concert clips, show announcements, professional photographs. Lana Del Rey announced most of her performances via video. “Hi guys,” she liked to start them. Her voice was quiet and just breathy enough to call attention to its register. The videos were bad quality. She seemed always to be alone. Sometimes, behind her, was a glimpse of a chandelier, a row of shoes, a white wall. Taken together her Instagram was a mess of intimacy: Lana Del Rey sang along to her own songs or someone else’s, juxtaposed studio recordings with aerial views of highways or fluttering American flags, posted the same Vanity Fair cover three times in a row. She wore false eyelashes and sweatshirts. She seemed simultaneously to care about her image 30

and to be beyond caring.

In her essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamison defines a subcategory of women’s attitudes toward their own hurt as “post-wounded”: What I’ll call “post-wounded” isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect: these women are aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama, so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much….

The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-pity.

I first read the essay in 2014, when it was published in Virginia Quarterly Review, and it felt like a revelation.

Jamison called for women to own their feelings. She demanded the necessity of expressing female pain. In an earlier piece I wrote about Lana Del Rey, I’d co-opted Jamison’s phrase. The singer’s persona seemed like the epitome of postwoundedness—in her music and videos, she flung herself into relationships with married men, she drank too much, she sanctioned domestic abuse. Yet Lana Del Rey almost always looked as if she didn’t believe in the drama of her own existence. As if she were beyond it.

A year later I read Jenny Zhang’s “How It Feels” in Poetry magazine. The point of the essay was, ostensibly, the same as Jamison’s: the importance of feeling. Zhang, too, sanctioned angst and melodrama; she wrote about suicide and dying young. She described the “bland, unexciting-to-describe, lowgrade” depression that made it difficult

for her to get out of bed even to use the bathroom. Yet nothing in “How It Feels” applied to Lana Del Rey. Somehow, it couldn’t: it was too sincere, it cared too much. I read it over and over. I bookmarked it on my computer, printed out a copy to keep on my desk. Though the piece wasn’t explicitly about being Asian American, its call to arms felt closer to what I knew than Jamison’s.

Zhang’s family—her mother rubbing her earlobes to help her fall asleep— reminded me of my own.

For pain to be aesthetic, it must be far away. In Lana Del Rey’s music, pain is reduced from the real to the illusory, the profound to the surface; it becomes decorative, an ornament, a beautiful inevitability. Like all performers of post-woundedness, her detachment from her pain becomes stirring: it seems to imply a depth we can’t fathom. What I wanted of Lana Del Rey—that beautiful pain, the beauty I sought when I wrote story after story about girls diving into empty pools, slitting their wrists in the bathtub, burning down their houses— could, I think, never be mine. To be Asian American is to lack the luxury of distance. No: when innocence is an illusion, when your safety is one you must work every minute to retain, when your life is tangled up so profoundly in the network of your family’s survival, how can you ever give yourself up to abandon?

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Doing Laundry in Beijing Annie Cheng

It wasn’t much. I could cross every panel of yellowed laminate in a single breath. Even when I close my eyes, thousands of miles away, I still remember the scent of my grandparents’ third-floor Beijing flat. It always smelled of the wrinkled tangerines that nestled alongside aging chopstick rests on the glass-top dinner table. The sweet citrus scent was accompanied by a fragrant blend of tiger balm and Chinese herbal medicine. Elderly people smell, a recognizable yet indescribable scent, permeated as well. There was a whiff of the familiar but generic, powdered laundry detergent my grandparents have used since Ma was born. I’ve visited the flat every couple of years since I was little, and the smell has never changed.

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A breakfast nook is something of a Western spatial luxury — in Beijing we ate on that squat glass-top that’s supposed to seat four, pulling up dusty mismatched chairs and crowding around our meals. My grandma, Wai Po, ate deliberately, picking up each bite with wooden chopsticks and chewing thoughtfully while my grandpa, Wai Gong, gobbled indifferently. After dinner, we often played cards on that table.

Wai Gong would retrieve a dull pink tablecloth from a wooden cabinet older than me, and spread it with a flourish. No deck ever matched, and we’d have to count out a full set of cards every time we played. Beneath a flickering golden light, we traded laughs and hands, intermittently slamming our palms against the glass victoriously.

Dinner was chased by a cocktail of international news delivered through static. My grandparents never upgraded anything they didn’t need to. The 20-year-old beast of a television did the job just fine. A dilapidated yellow couch — always sagging in the middle — was crammed next to an armchair whose pattern could give a Rorschach test a run for its money. Wai Po used to drape dingy doilies along the spines of the aged couch and armchair. As a child I remember sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the sinking cushions, pulling at the loose embroidery on those doilies. The bottoms of my feet were always gray from picking up dust across the Beijing streets, and my grandma’s eyes crinkled when she told me to sit properly, to “zuo hao.” Sitting on the couch, I always zoned out during the news, fiddling with the ever-present walnuts on the coffee table. Faithful to Chinese medicine, Wai Po preached the ancient habit of rotating walnut pairs in one hand to increase dexterity and prevent arthritis.

She has an unshakable belief in traditional Eastern remedies, evidenced by her bedroom, just a few steps away from the living room. Dozens of powdered concoctions and “plant extract essences” littered the nightstand, and a bookshelf cluttered with knowledge of blood pressure points and spirituality stood nearby. At night, I could hear Wai Po shuffling about in bamboo slippers, shaking pill bottles and brewing teas. I would peer through a hairline crack in the door, watching her muttering to herself and squinting at the tiny writing on the bottles. Inevitably, my toddler stomps and giggles would attract her attention, and she would open the door and invite me in. We laid on a weary mattress, talking about everything but really nothing at all. Wai Po was always quick to warn me of the everyday threats to my life. The leaky air conditioner unit hummed constantly in the background, set at a toasty 26 degrees Celsius because cold air would make you sick. Sleeping on wet hair was a carcinogenic practice. Swimming during menstruation would cause fertility problems.

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Next door was Wai Gong’s room.

The centerpiece was an ancient radio with squeaky dials. For hours every day, he would sit on a rocking chair, eyelids shut and fingers interlaced lazily on his lap, listening to that radio. Music rarely crept from the speakers — Wai Gong didn’t care much for the arts. He was a stubborn man of science, rising to the top of China’s petroleum industry in the mid-1900s after a childhood of poverty in the mountainous Szechuan province. He listened to modern politics and Confucian seminar discussions, the radio voices characterized by bombastic personalities and opinions.

He was the tone-rich accent of Szechuan, the creaking of wooden hinges rocking back and forth, the late Saturday afternoon stories about his ancestry and home, his “jia xiang.” He loved to read, and found sanctuary among the numerous musty, dog-eared books in his study. Though he was only average in height and wiry in physique, his mind and memory were astoundingly sharp.

I could ask him about anything from Ming Dynasty vases to the breakdown of feudal Japan and he’d have both fact and opinion ready at hand.

I smudge my fingers on the dust that clings to these memories.

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My favorite spot in the apartment was the balcony that hung over the building, covered in lacy metal. Every Saturday afternoon, we would drape freshly washed blouses and pants and discolored white socks over a smorgasbord of hangers.

I was too short to reach the rusted clothes bar, so Wai Gong fashioned me a wooden stick with a hook. I’d stand on the tiptoes of my plastic red sandals, hanging up the damp heap of fabric piece by piece. The balcony was about two feet wide and ten feet long, just big enough to fit a hanging woven-reed chair.

I curled up in the chair, finding comfort in the overlapping shadows cast by the canopy of laundry. More than once, I fell asleep here. The next morning, we’d take in the dried laundry, inhaling the acrid sweet of Beijing-polluted sunshine.

I smudge my fingers on the dust that clings to these memories. Wai Gong passed away last year — his room has stood vacant, collecting mothballs and time. When I visit Wai Po, I notice that she seems to shrink progressively. As she withers into a frail whisper of a woman, the space around her seems exponentially bigger. She is raspy lungs and ten layers of faded shawls, five feet of tired smiles and tired hands. Every once in awhile, Ma would call her and hand me the phone.

Wai Po’s diminishing voice trails through in a murmur.

When you live thousands of miles away from your family, your lives exist in separate spheres of mind. In the United States, I listen to Kendrick Lamar and eat burritos. I take notes in classes where my professors lean liberal and Democrat. When I am on the phone with Wai Po, I am once again a bored toddler, rambling in fragmented Chinese phrases. As she inquires about my health and academic progress, I picture her in my head.

She sits alone on that garishly Rorschach-patterned armchair.

She lives vicariously through the successes of her children and grandchildren. She drinks in every update with enthusiasm.

Although she is elderly, she has carefully archived the progress in my new life. I feel guilty that my life has diverged into a different culture and path, that our Beijing memories are like pieces of crumpled paper that I must unfurl to decipher.

I have moved out now. I do my laundry indifferently in industrial machines, paying in rusty quarters. As I toss in artificially scented dryer sheets, I think about how much I prefer the fragrance of herbal teas and gray sunshine.

35

Emma Dinh

36

Her World and Mine

One chilly evening in late December, my mom and I stood side by side at the kitchen stove. The oil in the frying pan in front of us had just begun to sputter. My mom, a hair shorter than me but chubbier around the waist, mixed together minced pork, crab meat, egg, garlic, fish sauce, and ground pepper, spatula beating and folding and stirring the blend until it became evenly pink and smooth. She scooped up the mixture and dropped it into the oil, gingerly so that the delicate paste wouldn’t break. “You can cook the riêu directly in the soup, but frying it first brings out the flavor.” She then turned to the pot of pork bones nearby and added in wedges of tomatoes along with a spoonful of fish sauce. My mom was teaching me how to make bún riêu, our favorite dish. We’re both fans of cooking, but I’m a newbie whereas she’s a veteran in the kitchen, having started when she was but a child.

The week before winter break, she’d texted me asking what I wanted to eat when I came back home. The question was a change of pace from the usual “How are you?” and “Did you eat dinner today?” to which I always respond in the midst of an assignment or a meeting with one-word answers, effectively ending our conversation. This time, after I’d given her the expected response, she bought all the necessary ingredients days before and stocked them in the fridge in preparation for my return. She drove home from work early that evening so that she could show me how to cook her signature noodle soup.

After the pieces of riêu were fried to a golden brown, we added them to the pot and sat tight. I learned from my mom that the secret to flavorful noodle soups is time. The longer the broth sits and simmers, the deeper the flavor becomes. While waiting, I retreated into my room as usual, closing the door to signal to my mom that I wanted to be by myself.

When I stepped back into the kitchen after my mom had called me out to dinner, the dining table greeted me with a neatly-arranged ensemble of sliced banana flower, basil, lime wedges, and chili. The entire house was filled with a salty smell of pork and shrimp paste, the aroma of home. My mom brought out two big bowls of bún riêu, springy vermicelli doused in a rich orange-colored soup topped with soft buttery crab patties, puffy tofu, and a sprinkle of fresh green onion.

We ate in silence. As the soup warmed my stomach, I glanced over at my mom, at her long sleek hair, its blackness untouched by any white strands. People often say that she looks younger than her actual age of forty-nine. But the signs of age had begun to show in the form of wrinkles on her forehead and at the ends of her eyes, which I only really noticed now.

I saw the features I also have: the upturned eyes, the elusive dimple oddly placed along the jawline.

“Did you book your hotel for Mexico yet?” she asked me 37

in Vietnamese, the only language she knows. My suitemates and I were taking a winter break trip to Mexico City in January right before the start of our last semester together.

“Yes Mom,” I answered. I thought about telling her that we’d booked an Airbnb but decided against it. One, I didn’t really know how to explain to her what Airbnb was. And two, she would shriek at the idea of me staying in a stranger’s apartment instead of a formal establishment.

“You need to be careful when you go over there. Text me every day to let me know what you’re up to.”

I rolled my eyes and kept on eating my noodles.

“Don’t give me that look.” She hates it when I dismiss her advice. She’d brought up the issue of safety many times even though I kept reassuring her that Mexico City was not as dangerous as she believed. The name conjured up images of criminals and drug cartels for her. But what does she know?

“What are you going to do for your birthday?” my mom changed the subject. My twenty-third birthday was coming up in February.

“I don’t know yet. Probably just going to hang out with friends.” I shrugged, slurping the last of the soup in my bowl.

When my mom was my age, she was already married with a two-year-old son, my brother. She never went to college or traveled outside of her homeland, confining her adult years to a country still caught in the memories of a civil war and held together by the rigid rules of hierarchy, patriarchy, conservatism, and family blood. At age twenty-three, here I am, a boyfriendless, confused college student living in a land thousands of miles away from where my mom spent most of her life, speaking a language she doesn’t understand and leading a life she never knew. Her world seems very far away.

My mom was born near the end of the Vietnam war, the oldest child of a stern, no-nonsense, self-righteous father who worked for the Southern Vietnamese government and a meek, soft-spoken, stay-at-home mother. Her ancestors – our ancestors – were honest, hard-working farmers and rice planters. My mom didn’t grow up in luxury by any means, but until she was six, life was comfortable. When the war ended in 1975 and the North seized control of the country, my grandfather was deported to reeducation camp, leaving my grandmother with three young daughters. At age six, my mom had to take care of household chores, babysit her two younger sisters, and work on the farm with her mother to earn income for the family. She walked to school barefoot because they didn’t have enough money for food, let alone shoes. “I have no idea how I was able to handle all of that when I was so young,” my mom always says whenever she recounts her impoverished childhood years. “You’re extremely lucky to have grown up the way you did. You never had to go through 38

“You’re extremely lucky to have grown up the way you did. You never had to go through any poverty or hardship.”

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any poverty or hardship.”

When my mom was seventeen, she met my dad. A mason, he was hired by my grandfather to paint the house and fix the kitchen. They married two years later and had my brother two years after that, in 1990. While she was building a family with my dad, she lost her own when they left the country in 1993. Her parents and siblings moved to Connecticut on a visa program that allowed people like my grandfather, who was employed by the U.S. government during the war, to relocate to America. Because she was married, my mom was left behind.

For a time we were living in the same world. I came into the world my mom’s only daughter. As an infant, I would only let my mom hold me and would cry whenever she handed me to someone. She’d have me in the kitchen watching her cook even when I was too small to realize what was going on.

I’d be bouncing in a baby jumper, and she’d be going around making lunch and dinner, white rice with spicy braised pond fish and Vietnamese mustard greens soups. She sewed us matching outfits– sleeveless button-downs and tea-length skirts in breezy, flowery fabric. She took me everywhere she went, first on her hip then on her moped when I was old enough to sit by myself behind her back with my arms wrapped around her belly. We scooted along the streets of Long Khánh, to outdoor markets that smelled like fish and herbs and colorful storefronts decorated with red envelopes and yellow apricot blossoms in celebration of Tết, our favorite holiday.

She was a stern mother, the product of a long cultural emphasis on parental rule and her personal desire to raise me to be a decent person. As disciplinary actions toward children were customary, she was not afraid to spank me or make me stand in a corner for a period of time determined by the atrocity of my misdeeds. But she was not shy to spoil me either. I went through a phase in elementary school where I was obsessed with Barbie dolls. In the commercial, the blondhaired, porcelain-skinned doll lived in a house complete with a bed, a fashion closet, a dining table and chairs. I thought these pink tiny plastic pieces of furniture were the most charming and special things in the world. So every day for a few weeks, my mom and I rode on her moped to as many toy stores in Long Khánh as she knew in an attempt to scout out dolls that came with not only sparkly dresses but also furniture. We couldn’t find a single one. To make up for it, she bought me a tall plush doll that must have cost a sizable portion of her savings.

We were inseparable. One time when I was seven years old, she took me with her to a medical procedure. I fell asleep on the bench outside the operating room while waiting. Years later the memory of the incident is still fresh to me, and when 40

I look back it makes no sense. “Why did you bring me along?

I was so small and totally useless. I just slept and offered no emotional support!” My mom shakes her head, “No, I needed you. I felt less scared when you were with me.”

That perfect world crumbled after we moved to Connecticut to reunite with my grandparents in 2008 when I was thirteen. My mom found her family again, but not without sacrifice. To make ends meet, she worked two jobs, as a seamstress at a tailoring shop on weekdays and a housekeeper for a nursing home on weekends. Sometimes she’d work straight for a month without a day off. She had no time or energy to go to ESL lessons after long hours at work. When she was home, all she did was cook, as if food was all we needed.

She couldn’t answer the phone, order food at restaurants, or go to doctors’ appointments by herself. When shopping for anything, clothes or food, she couldn’t read the labels, the tags, the fine print, and didn’t know how to ask the store associates for help. She became out of touch with what was going on around her because she couldn’t read the newspaper or watch television, and she had no desire to seek out news or any sort of information about recent events, social movements, political changes because these things didn’t put food on the table.

Meanwhile I was struggling myself. At school, I tried without success to fit in as the new kid with broken English and skin darker than that of my Caucasian classmates. At home, I spent hours doing homework with a dictionary on my desk. Like my mom, I was also working two jobs to contribute to our meager income. The only time we went any place together seemed to be when I accompanied her to doctors’ appointments or on any errands where my interpretive skills were required. These trips were always clouded with a sense of duty and obligation, grumpy looks and disgruntled, mistranslated words, and with none of the joy and wonder our adventures used to bring.

One day when I was in high school something snapped.

I must have been sixteen or seventeen then. On one of my mom’s rare days off from work, I woke up and found her scrubbing down the kitchen counter. Half-asleep and starving, I made myself some instant noodles and nonchalantly ate them right by my mom while she was hunched over the counter.

“Children these days. They just eat like nothing is happening while their own mothers are slaving away. Why can’t they love their moms?”

Something that had seethed inside me now exploded.

“You’re the one who doesn’t love me. You left me to do everything on my own!” I yelled at her.

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My own mother tongue now feels foreign to me when I struggle to find the right words to articulate my thoughts to my mom.

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A shouting match ensued. We both started to cry. It was the first time we’d fought in the U.S. After that incident, I built borders between myself and my mom. Her effort to instill in me the traditional values she grew up with couldn’t cross the barriers. “You’re a Vietnamese girl, act like one,” she scolded when I wasn’t being demure or soft-spoken enough. Be a good housewife, know how to sew and cook and clean the house. Always listen to your parents, never talk back. Marry a Vietnamese man so that you have things in common and we can talk with him. Get an education and a well-paying job close by so that you can live at home to support us financially and take care of us when we’re old.

I never listened. I shut myself in my own world and waged war with my own mother, the cold, silent one fought with quiet tears and pent-up anger. I scoffed at her values as old-fashioned, senseless, incongruous with the modern American society. I blamed her for the hardships I had to endure. They weren’t war or poverty or famine, but that didn’t make them less real in my self-pitying adolescent mind. Why do I have to do all these things other kids my age don’t have to? Why can’t my mom just learn some damn English and help herself instead of relying on me all the time? Why should I listen to her when she doesn’t know a thing about this society we’ve called our new home?

The borders have only hardened since I went to college, which I’ve come to regard as my escape from responsibilities at home. The Ivy League and everything related to it was and is still an elusive concept to my family. I applied to Yale with no expectations and didn’t say a single word about it to my parents until the day I received the acceptance letter, to everyone’s disbelief including my own. At Yale, I study the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, and Paul Krugman, white men whom my mom has never heard of. I take part in conversations that involve words like “colonialism,” “militarism,” “racial equity,” and “ethnic identity” while the world she was brought up in only had one color. I go out to drink on the weekends and flirt with boys, behavior she would never have considered when she was a young woman in ultra-conservative Vietnam.

Like citizens of two different worlds, we do not speak the same language. At school, I speak exclusively English and have let my Vietnamese deteriorate over the years. My own mother tongue now feels foreign to me when I struggle to find the right words to articulate my thoughts to my mom. Her food isn’t the only thing I need; I want to talk with her about what classes to take or what to say in job interviews or how to deal 43

with friendship drama. During exams or chaotic times, I wish I could just call her and break down in tears. But my tongue is tied by both my inadequate grasp of Vietnamese and the seemingly unmendable distance between us.

Then I resent myself for resenting my mom. She raised me all these years. She brought me to this country so that I could have the opportunities she never had. Am I being too selfish and unfair to her?

I just want to love my mom, without doubt, and I want to hate my mom, without guilt. But we are worlds apart.

The thin layer of rice batter slowly thickens into a creamy crepe on the hot pan. My mom deftly flips the pan over on a plate and the thin crepe slips cleanly onto the ceramic.

She then spreads across the glutinous surface stir-fried minced pork and chopped mushroom and rolls the rice crepe into a perfect bánh cuốn.

I’m home for the weekend because I have to interview my mom for an assignment. But I also need the break. Perhaps the maturity that comes with age and the looming prospect of leaving home after graduation have softened my mind. Even though I still don’t feel comfortable telling my mom everything, nowadays I often find myself longing for the warmth of her bún riêu, for the warmth of her hugs and laughter. She laughs easily and has a booming, contagious laugh. One of my favorite things to do is to laugh with her at Vietnamese comedy shows and at my dad. We like to tease him for his thinning hair, his poor taste in fashion, and his habit of slurping soups loudly.

As I watch my mom at work, anxiety and dread swirl in my mind. Although we are both sentimentalists at heart, we never like to discuss sentimental subjects with each other.

Since I arrived home, our interactions have consisted of her coaxing me to eat more food and me mumbling half-hearted and often untruthful answers to her questions about school and my state of being.

“Mom, did you miss Vietnam when we moved to the U.S.?” I finally find the courage to ask.

“I missed it at first, but not anymore. I lived in Vietnam for thirty something years. Everything was new to me when I first came, so I missed Vietnam a lot. So did your dad. But once we got settled in, once you and your brother went to school then your brother graduated from college, I gradually got used to the new life.” My mom responds, not missing a beat with her crepe rolling.

“What did you miss most about Vietnam?”

“I missed our house the most. We saved money for years and your dad built it himself. It was there that we watched you 44

and your brother grow up.” Her voice sounds a little broken around the edges.

In my head I can see our almond-colored one-storied house, its metal roof and its brown tiled floor. I see my mom and dad, wrinkle-free and spirited, smiling as they watch my brother and me chase each other around the living room in oblivion.

My eyes start to water. I have never once thought to ask my mom what she missed about Vietnam. All these years I’ve wallowed in my own sadness and self-pity and never once have I considered what my mom has also gone through.

It’s taken me years to see that motherly love knows no languages, no borders. My mom attacks back, quietly but relentlessly, with the delicious noodle soups she cooks me every time I’m home, the daily simple text asking how I’m doing. Whenever I give clothes to her to tailor, she stays at the shop late to fix them for me. Whenever she hears that I’m sick, she drops everything and makes my dad drive her to New Haven to make sure I’m okay.

She has made an effort to understand my world, writing treaties to protect our mutual peace. You don’t have to abide by the traditional ideals of domesticity and femininity, but always remember that you’re Vietnamese at heart. You don’t have to live at home after graduation, you can move to New York City, just be sure to visit home over the holidays. You can marry anyone you want as long as you’re happy.

I need to make an effort to understand her world as well.

After the interview, I help her dress the table with chopsticks and plates. I lay out bowls of blanched bean sprouts, sweet and spicy fish sauce, and crispy fried shallots, the various accompaniments to our dish.

My mom and I sit side by side and enjoy the steamy rice rolls together. I won’t pretend that a single conversation can change everything. The borders are still there. But when I look past the borders and at my mom, at the wrinkles on her face and the dimple that shows every time she smiles, I see the sacrifice and love she’s given.

In this tranquil moment when we’re both at the table, I can’t help but wonder if one day there will somehow be a place for her in my world, and for me in hers.

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Don’t Worry Just About Yourself Tran Dang

“You have to worry about yourself first. Don’t worry about anything else,” my mother said over the phone one evening last November, in response to my attempt to explain the protests that reverberated throughout campus. Although my Vietnamese often splinters under the weight of topics with substantial social commentary, my mother had gotten the gist of it, and she swept what she did understand under the rug. Instead, we went through the usual checklist. Did you do laundry? Yes, I did it yesterday. How is the food in the dining hall? Good. How are classes? They’re OK, chemistry is hard. Did you get the flu shot? I got it two weeks ago, and you’ve asked me five times since.

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What she doesn’t ask and what I don’t tell her is that I had stayed up until 4AM the previous night to help my suitemate take pictures of women of color and post them on a bulletin board on Cross Campus. The thrill and pride of bringing together women of color, running through campus, and stapling every single picture cumulated into one of the best nights I’ve ever had at Yale. I don’t tell my mother that I was one in over a thousand students who gathered on Cross Campus in the March of Solidarity. I don’t tell her that on the night of the presidential election, I could not open a single PowerPoint lecture to study for my biology midterm.

For my parents, the key to success is to stay at home and keep your head away from “drama.” This attitude is echoed by the parents of many of my Asian peers, the idea that as long as you take care of your own health and success, nothing else matters. A friend shared that her mom continued to text her the daily “What did you eat today?” for days following the election until my friend had to ask her mom if she knew that Trump was elected. Another friend jokingly told her parents she was going to Canada, and her mother’s response was,

“We won’t send care packages all the way to Canada.” With every political or social crisis, there comes a nagging prescription from an Asian parent to avoid it.

This sentiment is best attributed to first generation Asian immigrant parents, and we must take into account their past experiences to understand why.

Some immigrants were able to come to America under auspicious circumstances, but many others were forced out of their countries for being on the losing side of social or political unrest. For many immigrants, being involved in activism was a threat to education and livelihood.

For my mother, activism had meant that she wasn’t allowed to attend college because her older brother was a soldier for the southern Vietnamese army.

Similarly, millions of other Vietnamese citizens were persecuted if their family records showed any connection to the losing side of the Vietnam War. When Asian immigrants came to America, they were no longer on the losing side of political turmoil. They were on the winning side. They were seen as the model minority. Supposedly, Asian Americans are the model minority because they are able to attain academic and professional success by pulling 47

themselves up by their bootstraps, working hard, and being law-abiding citizens. This narrative of Asian immigrants in America is often used as proof of meritocracy, of the American Dream. If my mother knew the concept of the model minority, she would revel in being one, because for her and for my father, it is long-deserved validation for the sacrifices they’ve made to live in this country. They can give you every reason to defend their position as the model minority. My parents have had stable incomes ever since we’ve been in America. No one in my extended family has a record of criminal history. All of my cousins and my sister are enrolled in or have graduated from college. And with my enrollment at Yale, it seems as if my family has finally made it onto the winning side of social inequality.

I believe my parents feel that participation in activism isn’t necessary, and at times, can be harmful, because we have already found success within the social and political structures that are currently in place. This is why my parents perpetuate the isolationist rhetoric that “you will be successful as long as you study hard, stay healthy, and mind your own business.

Only worry about yourself.”

However, contrary to what my parents would like to believe, the model minority doesn’t exist. In fact, my family epitomizes the contradiction of the model minority. Although we have been in America for over a decade, we have not made it outside the bracket of “low-income.” Although my parents extol the values of education, they themselves are blue- collar, unskilled workers. And although I am the younger daughter who goes to one of the top universities in the country, I’ve had to sit my mom down and tell her that my sister needs an extra year and a half to graduate from the local college at home.

Perhaps my own family can be waived off as anecdotal evidence, but deeper research will show you that many Asian Americans aren’t on the “winning” side of inequality.

The model minority concept fails to account for the complex makeup of the Asian American demographic, which ranges from end to end of the socioeconomic ladder. The model minority does not include the history of Asian immigrants that have died while building this country’s infrastructure.

The model minority doesn’t hear the racial slurs and discriminatory stereotypes that are casually thrown about in elementary school classrooms, down city sidewalks, and on television screens. Asian Americans still have much to fight for, and we can’t let success blanket into complacency.

The model minority is as much a myth as the supposition that this generation of Asian Americans can find success with isolationist and survival rhetoric. Perhaps this rhetoric worked for our parents or grandparents under the circumstances they had to face as immigrants, but we have privilege that they 48

The model minority is as much a myth as the supposition that this generation of Asian Americans can find success with isolationist and survival rhetoric.

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did not. We have the privilege of living in the current American society whose members are resolutely fighting for not just integration, but for inclusivity. We have the privilege of seeing the first Vietnamese-American woman elected to Congress and the number of women of color in the Senate rise to a recordbreaking four. We have the privilege of being old enough to understand the ramifications of a Trump presidency.

Furthermore, we must realize that there really is no such thing as the “winning” side. When inequality exists, there are only losers. The fight for social justice is not a zero-sum game.

The success of one ethnic minority does not have to come at the expense of another’s. Now, more so than the decades previous, solidarity among minorities is necessary, and the voices of Asian Americans are not only requested, but demanded.

This isn’t to argue that Asian American activists don’t exist, because that isn’t true. They do and to not acknowledge them in this narrative is to undermine their work, of Yale and across the nation. I have seen Asian American activism in many forms, in Architecture of Rain, a Yale student production that was written and performed by Asian American women, in the works of Mary Lui, the first tenured professor in Asian American Studies at Yale, in the beautiful and poignant stories crafted by Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

As students, we need to do more. In November of 2015, there was a call for solidarity from Asian American student groups, and it was left sorely unmet. The response from Asian American Yalies was described as “disunified” at best and “apathetic” at worst. Indeed, I recall sitting in a board meeting for the Vietnamese Student Association, debating on what to include in our statement of solidarity, and never reaching a conclusion. We moved on to planning for Pho Night. Pho Night happened as planned, but a statement was never released, and as an organization, we found ourselves asking what more we can do than just food events.

I realize I write this with the privilege of a Yale student who will have relative security in her professional and financial prospects. I write this with the privilege of an American citizen who does not have to worry about her family’s safety under the forthcoming presidency. I write this as an Asian who benefits from “racialized privilege” that is not afforded to other groups of color. There is a limit on the views that I can truly understand and the perspectives that I can relate to.

I cannot tell you what enough is. I cannot tell you it is to make a declaration of solidarity. I cannot tell you it is to sign a petition or attend a demonstration. But there are barriers of the model minority that are still intact but surely can be torn down. You can still pursue engineering, medicine or law, if you’d like, but you can also write poetry. Or if writing isn’t your forte, you can read poetry, share poetry. Listen to a black poet when 50

she stands in front of the crowd with a microphone and shares her vulnerability and pain. Or understand that when your friend wants to transfer to Pauli Murray College, it isn’t just for “a name on a diploma.”

Still, I fall critically short of being a dynamic participant of social and political activism, because I often find myself boxed in by the ideals of the model minority. I find myself buried beneath piles of science textbooks, where the fear of mass deportation is a distant reality. I find myself ticking off the same checklist with my mom, even when I forget that some of my closest friends are weary of leaving their suites, because they do not have the privilege of being the “model minority.” If you find yourself in the same position, realize that you may not be doing your part or even have a good understanding of what the problem is. Realize that you are not an isolated presence on this campus nor in this country, and you cannot just worry about yourself. We have to worry about others, lest we want America to be a country that others will have to flee like our parents once did.

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Foreign Reflections Heidi Dong

My parents immigrated to the United States by plane. It only took fourteen hours of airborne twilight for them to emerge, bewildered and blinking, under a foreign sun.

But for some reason, in my mind, I have this vivid image of a boat. I can picture my mother and father clinging to the mist-slicked rails of a lumbering ship, faces upturned into the sea spray and salt. I can imagine them swapping horror stories of squalid conditions below deck and of debilitating seasickness. I can feel the deck rolling beneath their feet.

It is all a lie, a shiny movie cut from the fabric of an overactive imagination. But somehow, I can see 52

it, clear as day—a punishing journey of months and months, just to reach a whisper of a dream on the other side of the Pacific, a shimmering mirage of a promised land.

My family goes to China every other year. We see a few sights, we take some photos, but mostly we visit family. My parents embrace relatives they haven’t seen in years, people I know only by a vague memory of a face and by a pair of Chinese characters that describe in extreme specificity their familial relation to me—a term that our

parents coach us on before we arrive.

They chatter in their native tongue, free from the entangling traps of the English language, as my brother and I stand awkwardly in corners. The two of us are quiet during these interactions. If we open our mouths, we give ourselves away with our mangled Chinese. Instead, we speak our politeness with smiles and nods. Still, my mother tells us that even when we’re silent, people know we are different, just by looking. “You don’t look Chinese,” she informs us. “You look American. It’s the way you walk.”

with the woman’s careless words. I wanted to say something, anything. I was born here, a couple hundred miles away. I have lived in the States my entire life. Even if you don’t think I belong here, I belong here more than anywhere else in the world.

But I didn’t speak. I let myself be led away, the words still bubbling in my chest.

When I was in high school, my family took a grand tour of America’s national parks—arches and glaciers and skies dripping with stars. Of all the places My brother hates junk food, on our itinerary, Yellowstone was the dislikes most seafood, and loves steak. He one I most wanted to see. Its hot springs also loves Lao Gan Ma, a spicy oil that he and bubbling mud pits were the stuff of puts on everything, and zha cai, pickled legends; its beauty was infamous. More vegetables. We joke that when he goes to than anything else, I wanted to see the college, he’ll have to take some of each. geysers, those hidden creatures that When we go to China, my brother disappeared into themselves, waiting is the first to tire of Chinese food. When and waiting and holding everything back we are in the States, he craves it more until the pressure built to a crescendo often than I do. Even our tongues are and the tension burst all at once in a confused about their identity. stunning display of hidden power.

It was pouring when we went to see Old Faithful, so we huddled under overhangs, seeking shelter from the One year, as we flew back from silvery bullets of pounding rain. As we China and landed in O’Hare, we stumbled waited for the geyser to erupt, an old blearily towards customs, groggy from lady next to me turned and asked, “Does unsatisfactory dozing and parched from it rain like this in Japan?” stale plane air. We shuffled into the line “I wouldn’t know,” I told her. “I’m for U.S. citizens and residents, where from the Midwest.” glowing kiosks waited with open mouths to accept our passports. Our machine, however, was being uncooperative, so my mother went to a TSA agent to ask for As I grew up, I learned to be help. embarrassed by my parents. In public The woman took one look at us places, when they speak to me in and jabbed her finger over her shoulder. Chinese, I am extra careful to reply in “The line for foreigners is that way,” she English. When we order in restaurants, barked.

I enunciate clearly and say more words My even-tempered and unoffended than necessary, just so the waiter can mother began patiently explaining the hear my voice and know that I am not a situation, but my ears were still ringing foreigner. And sometimes, as I have since 53

childhood, I make phone calls and write emails on my parents’ behalf, knowing that my unaccented English and native grammar will be perfectly understood.

Whenever my parents ask me to do this, chalking it up to my good language skills, I feel like I have been asked to protect them from something quietly vicious, an inference of competence solely from pronunciation.

In China, our roles are reversed.

My brother and I sit quietly and smile shyly as our parents interrogate waiters and order foods from their childhoods.

We savor the meals as much as they do, but I know that we could never have eaten those things without my parents’ initiative. How do you ask for something for which you have no words?

I am kinder to my parents in China. They are no longer the ones who don’t understand the simple things, the ones who frustrate me with their incomprehension of Facebook or prom or fast food. Instead, I am the one who clings to them as they navigate through subway systems and seas of people—in this bewildering whirlwind of foreignness, my parents are the eye of the storm.

My brother and I were enrolled in Chinese school for a while, just like all the other Chinese-American kids in our area. Every Sunday, we dragged ourselves to sit in a classroom and practice vocab and passages. I hated giving up my Sunday afternoons, but looking back, I wish I’d never quit. I wonder if I would feel more at home in my Chinese skin if my language was as Chinese as my face.

At Yale, I work as a tour guide.

I love it. I love watching the light in 54

I hated givi Sunday aft but looking wish I’d ne someone’s eyes when they see Beinecke for the first time. I love watching visitors gaze up at Harkness Tower, its spires cloaked in mist. And I love my conversations with prospective students.

As part of my job, I work shifts in the visitor center. There, I take phone calls, answer questions, and patiently direct people to the bathroom. And every now and then, a visitor will come in, see me, and unleash a torrential flood of Chinese. I do my best to answer, my sentences sprinkled with words I only know in English. (What is “liberal arts college” in Chinese, anyway?)

I know they are disappointed by me—I can feel it. I can hear the thought on their minds. “She’s an ABC,” they say, always with that same knowing smile.

Somewhere, somehow, it became an insult to me, this concept of an American-Born Chinese. I am angry at myself for feeling hurt by it. At Yale, students talk of identity and culture, of representation and pride. They discuss the “model minority myth” and

soft yellow as the sounds curled behind my teeth.

ing up my ternoons, g back, I ever quit. “intersectional identity” and “systematic oppression,” concepts I had barely heard of before coming here, and they preach love for who we are and where we came from, which in a way is its own form of protest. There is nothing wrong with being Chinese. There is nothing wrong with being Chinese American.

And yet, every time I hear those tourists gossip, it stings. My head whispers that I am not a good Chinese daughter. In coming to the United States, my parents gave me everything, and I can’t even do justice to their own tongue.

My freshman year of college, I was assigned a single bedroom. This meant I lived alone for the first time in my life.

Away from judging eyes, away from prying looks, unafraid to make mistakes when no one was watching, I started reading my old Chinese school textbooks again. Words that were once trivial for me to pronounce clumped in my mouth.

I went slowly, reading out loud like a first grader, skipping over characters I didn’t know. At night, my desk lamp glowed a

When I came home from college after freshman year—after a year of eating roasted vegetables and grilled chicken and pizza—I asked my mother to teach me how to cook Chinese food. I was suddenly afraid that if I did not learn this crucial skill, I would never be able to learn it properly.

My mother took me outside, where she keeps her gas stove. She had me light the fire, heat the oil. When I dumped in bundles of bok choy and squares of tofu, the oil hissed, spat. I leapt back, arms singed and pride burnt. My mother laughed. “The oil must always be hot in Chinese cooking,” she said. She showed me her arms, scarred with grease burns like brown moles.

When she went back inside, I looked at my arms, which were smooth and soft and weak.

The summer after my freshman year, I study in rural France, where I find many things to love. Golden fields of sunflowers bobbing cheerfully in the breeze. White-walled houses lined with red roof tiles. The sound of my footsteps on cobblestones.

My biggest complaint is that there are no vegetables in the fridge.

My housemates don’t seem to care.

They eat pasta and bread and cheese, with sauces and jams and crackers. So I do, too, even though the weighty starch hardens in my stomach like a rock. I think of my mom’s refrigerator, the two produce drawers overflowing with baicai and spinach and green beans. We can buy green beans here sometimes, but baicai is nowhere to be found.

When someone buys zucchini, I 55

sauté an entire one for myself.

In France, I find myself eating cheeses that my parents would never dare touch. I taste creamy sauces that they would frown upon. And yet I also find myself sautéing garlic the way my mother taught me—the base sliced off, the skin slipped away, the clove smashed with the side of a wide knife, and the fragrant bundles juggled in a pan lined with hot oil—or stir-frying eggs in a rough approximation of the jiu cai chao dan from my mother’s kitchen. I drink copious amounts of tea boiled from teabags and think wistfully about looseleaf jasmine.

On the weekends, we take field trips together, little excursions to places in the region. Our band of students 56

clambers into buses, chatting and eager, and sets off to explore somewhere new.

In the market at Valence d’Agen, I see ripe fruit and cheap cotton clothes, gleaming knives and fresh-baked bread.

I see handmade cards and pungent meat, bright flowers and fragrant coffee. And I see a man selling samosas and egg rolls, his Asian features half obscured by a wall of glass.

I can’t tear my gaze away. People pass by without a second look, too busy buying bread and cheese to bother with cooling ethnic foods. But I am captivated by this man. Is he an immigrant? When he speaks French, are the syllables jumbled and the words clumsy? Or was he born here, a child of this land? Is his French textbook-perfect? Does he even

When she went back inside, I looked at my arms, which were smooth and soft and weak.

know the language of his ancestors? I wonder what it is like for him to live here, forever an object of curiosity, an exotic face in a homogenous sea. I wonder if he gets the same question as I do—unvoiced or brazenly spoken, abroad or at home—“So where are you originally from?”

I want to stop and speak to him, to hear his voice and to know if he is like me. But the group is getting away, so I hurry to catch up.

In Bordeaux, I can breathe. Here, I do not stick out as much—I am both less Chinese and less American. The bustling diversity of the city cloaks me, shields

me from prying eyes. Here, people do not stare. They glance and turn away.

I find a ramen restaurant and eat a bowl of pork noodles for dinner.

In the French airport, at the beginning of a long journey home, I shuffle my papers and check for my passport, with its deep blue cover and delicate gold lines. The airport is too full of travelers for anyone to question my presence, my identity. There’s an irony in this, I think—only in a storm of strangers am I most at ease.

That day, I leave France. I go home.

57

Gunmetal Immigrants Vanessa Zhang

1

According to the calculated figures by gunpolicy.org, there are 101 privately-owned guns per 100 residents in the United States, 30.8 guns per 100 residents in Canada, 30.3 guns per 100 residents in Germany, and 4.9 guns per 100 resident in China.

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The first things my father bought when we stepped foot on American soil in 2000 were a used Toyota Camry and a shiny, new handgun. He and my mother were born in China during the Communist Revolution, but later lived all across the globe from Germany to Canada, and finally Boston, Massachusetts. When I ask my father where he identifies as home, he never composes a clear response; sometimes it’s America, at times it’s everywhere, most of the time it’s nowhere. Because of my parents’ constant travels, they grew accustomed to blending in, assimilating deeply into every new environment they found themselves, or what they perceived to be the majority culture. In Germany, they pushed the limits of their tolerance and learned to drink hard beer; in Canada, bed and breakfasts could be found at every corner so they took turns working part-time at the B&B across the street from their apartment; in America, they became firm believers in the second amendment.

In China, Germany, and Canada, firearms are not and have never been as popular as they are in America. There are actually more guns per capita in the United States than the other three countries combined.¹ My parents tell me that they didn’t understand the concept of civilian-owned guns until they began watching American TV shows set in the Wild West with heroic cowboys slinging handguns and having shooting duels to protect their honor. To these two hopeful kids, America represented freedom and equality, and guns represented America. So of course to them, it made sense to culminate their long journey to the Land of Opportunity with the purchase of its symbol.

After a change in Massachusetts firearms regulations two years later, my father’s pistol was banned, so he got rid of

it. But what’s interesting is that he had never used it—in fact, my mother told me that he never even touched it after the day they took it home from the store and locked it in the family safe.

At the time that he purchased the handgun, my father was a spirited, Chinese immigrant in his late thirties living in the Northeast; gun ownership in the United States is most common among middle-aged white men in the rural south.² At National Rifle Association conventions across the continental US, it’s impossible to not be aware of the racial demographics, where rooms of burly white men are a common sight. I once read in a magazine that the first thing representatives of the NRA often ask at these conventions is,“aren’t you worried about your kids, what if a thug breaks into your house?”— thug implicitly meaning black man. It made no sense to me how my parents, well-educated, well-traveled and well-versed in issues of morality, given their experiences with communist China and the fall of the Berlin Wall during their stay in Germany, would willingly participate in communities promoting such values seemingly in conflict with their own.

Despite all of that, my father did vote for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. My mother decided against voting but participated in some ‘Chinese Women for Trump’ rallies with her friends over the course of the election cycle. I, for one, organized heavily in support of Bernie in the primaries and later mobilized for Hillary come the general election. At our frequent dinner parties with other Chinese American families, my father always jokes about how two Republicans could raise a bleeding heart liberal.

My parents, who disassociated from the idea of ‘home,’ and ‘identity’ years earlier, as can happen in the immigrant experience, don’t label themselves the same ways that I do. For them, America still hasn’t become ‘home,’ though they’ve lived here for eighteen years; instead, they participate in American culture without ever feeling completely integrated. I found an unfamiliar photograph nestled between the pages of a family album last summer. My father was pictured standing outside the red brick apartment where we spent our first four years in America. Snow covered the ground in layers of pillowy mounds, and my father was beaming, with his head tilted down to look at the object cradled in his arms. I assumed I would see my face there, peeking out from a puffy, down coat, but at closer look, it was a gun. He coddled the pistol in his

2

Data retrieved from the Pew Research Center’s statistics on the demographics of gun ownership: http:// www.pewsocialtrends. org/2017/06/22/thedemographics-of-gunownership/

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My parents, who disassociated from the idea of ‘home,’ and ‘identity’ years earlier, as can happen in the immigrant experience, don’t label themselves the same ways that I do.

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3

According to statistics provided by: http://www. bbc.com/news/world-uscanada-41488081

arms like he would a newborn baby, protecting and covering it from the snow as though it was his small, earned piece of the American Dream.

On February 14, 2018, bullets flew from the barrel of an AR-15 assault rifle and swiftly extinguished the lives of seventeen people, most of whom were high schoolers. A month earlier, my college a cappella group and I spent a week around the Miami area where these kids had lived and thrived. One of my closest fri ends from Yale was at Stoneman Douglas High School that same week, coaching students for local debate tournaments. Already the sixth school shooting of 2018, the massacre at Stoneman Douglas also marks the deadliest school shooting in United States history, surpassing even Columbine.³ I called my parents the day of the shooting, unnerved and unable to comprehend why we have done so little to prevent guns from murdering within the walls of our schools. They told me not to worry, that the police around Yale must be armed— that if a shooter comes, the university has enough guns to protect students. I was shocked into silence, though at this point I probably shouldn’t have been.

Recently, my father has talked about buying another handgun, for “safety reasons,” he explains. But, we live in one of the safest districts in America—there hasn’t been a murder, a robbery, or even a speeding ticket in years. I question why he needs this for himself. Is it to reclaim his sense of America that’s faded through the years? Or perhaps, he believes gun ownership legitimizes him as American—with a pistol in tow, he may be heroic, smart, and integral to American society like the cowboys of ages past. However, just as his first gun was devoid of the utilities that give it power—the barrel hollow and empty of residue from bullets and gunpowder, his conception of the American Dream, different than what he had for so long wanted, may be a morally vacuous one as well.

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What I Ask of You Vy Tran

I forgive my mom. I think. Actually, I don’t really know. I don’t even know if I’m in a position to forgive her, because “to forgive” someone kind of sounds like I’m on some higher moral ground.

And I think that, as her kid, we’re on uncomparable moral grounds. But I do forgive her.

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I remember the very day that I forgave her. Mom and I were staying at my grandparents’ house in Long Island like we do every summer, and she and I went on a shopping trip that day because for once, she had one day off from her 70-hours-aweek job. Whizzing down the highway at twenty miles over the speed limit, the white pickup truck bumped up and down over the familiar cracks in the road. Mom was a reckless driver who thought she was a wonderful driver. My feet were propped up on the dashboard, the ripped denim shorts riding a bit too high up on my legs for Mom’s taste. George Michael was playing on the radio. Mom and I loved this song.

To our left, among gray shopping plazas and restaurants was a Friendly’s restaurant, sitting quietly and full of unwanted memories. Friendly’s is a chain on the East Coast aimed to be a wholesome family eatery with quadruple cheeseburgers and M&M milkshakes that shouldn’t be consumed. The first summer that my mom, my sister, and I visited my grandparents on Long Island, my grandparents took us to Friendly’s for dinner.

Sitting in a bright red booth, my feet dangling above the ground, I ogled the menu, looking at all the fancy, deep-fried goodness I could get. Around me, rich, white, suburban moms fussed over their little blonde kids who begged to have their Oreo milkshake before dinner while the dads whispered to their kid that they could get the milkshake first but only if he could have some, too.

Meanwhile, our table was quiet. I never spoke much during dinner because Mom monitored and memorized every word I said, and a wrong word was a beating later that night.

With Mom, it was better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing. Looking at the menu of food, my eyes glazed over, no longer pursuing a meal I wanted because I’d already known exactly what I had to get even before we pulled into the parking lot.

I remember the one time I dared to get what I actually wanted off a restaurant menu. I was taking my time looking at the menu, thinking about which delectable ice cream I wanted. But as soon as my mother realized what I was doing, she grabbed my upper arm from under the table and ground my bone and muscle between her fingers until I cried. But if I let any tears fall, she’d just grind harder. No one saw. And I’d probably get hit later that night, too, if she remembered. No one saw that, either.

This time, I did what I knew what I was supposed to do what I was trained to do by my overbearing mother since even before I could start speaking. The waitress appeared in front of our table and asked for our order.

My grandmother, who was sitting across from me in the booth, said to me, “Do you know what you want?” I looked 63

up, startled that someone was speaking to me. She had a soft smile on her face, encouraging me to do what she knew I wouldn’t do. She’d always known and the protection she always offered was her presence and her smile. But it wasn’t enough.

“Oh. Yes. Can I have...” I started.

Beside me, Mom bristled. Beneath the table, her arm moved towards mine and malice brewed in her face. Terror swamped over me like a blanket. “A peanut butter jelly sandwich, please.”

Grandma’s face fell. It always did.

My grandparents knew we did it because Mom was there and they knew we’d be punished if we chose what we actually wanted to eat. But I was so deeply terrified of my mom that I just ate my sandwich and aggressively avoided making eye contact with anyone, especially my mother.

I love my mother. She makes the worst jokes and then laughs at her own joke, and then repeats it to herself and laughs again. She will thoughtfully dress herself in all pink and then ask me in all seriousness, “Is this too much pink?”

She loves the pop artist Pitbull, but only because she thinks he dresses nicely and she likes that he’s bald. She’s very proud of herself when she can identify his songs on the radio. After she washes the dishes, she always takes note of exactly where she puts my favorite spoon so I never lose it. As a substitute teacher, some days she’d cover for teachers whose classes she hated covering but did so anyway because then could she drive me to school which meant I could sleep in. She once told me that she used to wish I was born first, ahead of my sister, because I was the tenacious, unafraid one when my sister and I were kids. But then she told me it all worked out okay because it turns out I’m an idiot. Her words, not mine.

For most of my life, I didn’t love my mom. I despised her. Hours spent 64

with her combing over my homework, making sure every answer I had was correct and perfect. Coming home on report-card days was the most horrifying thing, knowing she was going to slam my head against the wall because I had one 98 average amongst all 99s and 100s. I never spent time with my friends outside of school because if I asked her if I could go to Ashley’s house, she’d scream for hours about how I was ungrateful for what she’s done for me and how I was such a burden. And then I’d have to profusely apologize to Ashley that I couldn’t come over even though I’d promised her that this time, Mom was going to let me go. Once, she had held a knife to my leg and threatened to cut me because I couldn’t name all the characters in the book I was reading for class.

It was a lot but I never thought anything of it. I figured that some families just disciplined more strictly than others. That my mom was just training me to be a really good kid. It was normal and I was fine, I thought.

After Mom hit me for whatever reason it was that night, she’d glance at the bruises on my arms and tell me that if someone at school asked where the marks came from, I was to tell them that I ran into a tree. Mom threatened me if I told anyone what really happening. So I never told anyone the truth.

There was one particularly volatile night in the spring of my senior year of high school when Mom left scratches and bruises on my arms and my head because I hadn’t cleaned my room and I talked back to her when I shouldn’t have. It had been a while since she’d hit me but that’s how it always went. She’d get gradually more and more irritated at little things I did, like taking too long to eat dinner or standing too long in the shower, but she wouldn’t say anything for a few days. I’d tip-toe around the house, existing in dread and fear of when

I put my body into bed. But I wasn’t really there.

I’d accidentally step on the wrong tile in the hallway and her fists were suddenly in my face.

That night, I sobbed and sobbed, wanting her to stop screaming in my face about how selfish and horrible of a person I was, and how she wanted me to die. But I let her get all the anger out. I never fully understood her anger, or why she was so angry, or why she had to take it out on me in this way, but I let her do it because I loved her and I had to. I always did.

Afterwards, my face was puffy from crying and I felt like I was dragging my body around to do things I was

supposed to do like it was any other day.

I brushed my teeth, avoiding looking in the mirror because I couldn’t stand to see the fissures in my heart reflected in my face. I put my body into bed. But I wasn’t really there.

The next morning, I woke up with a chest that felt like it was full of water, dreading going to school that day.

I was so exhausted and I had no words, especially none for my mom. But when I went to the kitchen for breakfast, the harsh overhead light of the ceiling fan making me squint even though it was pitch black outside from the very early 65

morning hours, I found a smoothie waiting for me on the table.

I froze.

Mom’s smoothies are the greatest thing on this planet – full of sugar, frozen berries, and clearance fruit from the store.

Mom made me smoothies when she knew I was sad about a boy, or when I was sick. She made me smoothies when she knew I was stressed about school, or when I refused to eat a real meal for dinner because I had so much work to do. She always made me smoothies to say, “I’m sorry for what you’re going through - here’s something that will make you happy.

But for the first time this one and only morning, as I stood there staring at the drink, I realized that my mom made me a smoothie to say, “I’m sorry for what I put you through here’s something that will make you happy because I know I never do.” As soon as I sat down at the dining table to drink my smoothie, my mom left the kitchen without ever looking at me. It was clearance frozen blueberries and strawberries that I could never taste behind the overpowered bananas, ice that never got fully ground in the blender, way too much sugar that Mom never measured, and apologies she would never say out loud. So I drank it and I cried.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to forgive my mom. I see other people the way I see her. Because when I lived with my mom, I had to forgive her. I lived with her. She dictated every facet of my life for years and if I didn’t forgive her for one night of bruises, then I wouldn’t have been able to survive in my own house or in my own head. Forgiving was a survival skill.

And still, I blame myself for her anger, for ruining her life. She had a life I could never understand: a boat-refugee from Vietnam escaping post-war turmoil in her only home; arriving in the United States only to face unparalleled racism, language barriers, a marital affair, and children she needed to tame. She’s been through things I will never experience, and will never have to, especially not as a well-educated American citizen. But I’m not sure if these two things - who she is as a person and who she is as my mom - go hand-in-hand. If they do coincide, then I have to forgive her. I have no choice. What she’s done to me pales in comparison to what the world has done to her. But if I separate those two things, then I no longer know what the right answer is.

Perhaps self-awareness is her way of saying I’m sorry without saying those words exactly. Because sometimes, those words aren’t enough and no other words will do the job.

Because sometimes, saying I’m sorry is only opening the door for so many things wrong with you and no one wants to deal with that. So we settle for the next best thing that we have the energy for. Or at least, this is what I hope Mom’s doing.

“I’ve never had real food at Friendly’s because I only got peanut butter jelly sandwiches,” I said, as the red Friendly’s 66

building became a blur in the truck window.

“Well, yeah, because I didn’t let you get anything else,” my mom said. She paused. “I was too hard on you and Nhu,” my mom added. I froze.

I lifted my legs from off the dashboard and straightened myself to hear her better because I couldn’t believe what she had just said.

“Yeah, I was too hard on the two of you. I forced Nhu to be a lot older than she actually was and I never let you do anything,” she said. She didn’t look at me. My mom then made a joke about something that I don’t remember and I laughed for some reason.

I’ve always imagined that someday, Mom would apologize to me and my sister for having done to us what she did. I imagined that it would be momentous, unforgettable, allencompassing.

But it was in her moment of vulnerability that I found it easier to accept it for what it was. In her brevity and frankess, she acknowledged her mistakes and reminded us both that it was in the past. In her solemn but truthful tone of voice, she knew there was nothing she could do now but there was so much she could do in the years to come. For so long, I thought I needed her grand apology in order to move forward in my life.

I was stuck in the past because it was all I could be sure about.

But her simple words of self-awareness made me realize that I was holding myself back from getting to the future I wanted— one of contentment and healing.

Now, with a pierced nose, ripped jeans, and winesplashed white sneakers, I rush into English class a few minutes early to tell my English professor about how much I love James Baldwin because he reminds me of home. I bite into my tuna sandwich at the radio station, where the radio show that I share with my sister has been canceled yet again for technical difficulties, much to my grandparents’ (our two loyal listeners) dismay. I go home to finish edits on a piece I’m writing for the campus newspaper about how Yale doesn’t do enough for low-income students while also trying to explain to my suitemate why we need to destigmatize homelessness and poverty. It’s unexpected, unprecedented, and I’m unprepared for life as a college student, but here I am, with so much to look forward to, because of Mom’s silent words and my longing to forgive.

As for me, I think I forgive myself. And that’s what I’ve realized is step one.

67

Tongues Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

I was born with an extra long tongue in an extra small body, I was born blue, like Krishna. I was born in an Indian Summer in Pennsylvania, a suitable setting for a displaced body.

My father was born speaking Tamil, the language beginning in the same land as his body, a text with curved edges and round sounds that swallows the dinner table at big family events. He would learn Hindi, English and Sanskrit, the language from which he would choose my name, Ananya.

My mother was born speaking Bengali, a sharp and clean language that sounds like a foreign tone of yellow to my ears, or maybe I am thinking of her turmericstained fingers dipping into the powder dusting the ilish matsch, a small fish native to a green delta.

My parents found a bridge in English, in State College, in Pennsylvania, a small town with evergreens and one Chinese restaurant that served General Tso’s Chicken too sweet.

They spoke English at home, never found the right words to tell me that they were angry that they had found and lost love in the language of their colonizer.

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I never learned the language of the home people assume I belong to, never found the right setting for my tongue, it sits awkwardly in my small set lips, the muscle shifting at night when I am sleeping.

Sometimes I wish to take away that tiny red piece that separates me from all the homes I might have and places me here, on a continent of nothingness with words that belonged to those who hurt my people as they have been told to me and my people as I see them now, the beautiful and complex people of the Americas.

But my mother gave me Mandarin when I was five, the language dripping from the hands of strong women with bouncy perms who didn’t mind that my parents sent me spicy food for lunch.

I didn’t want it.

I wanted to belong here, and then maybe, I wanted to be Krishna, blue and ever-so-Indian and belonging to some place, stuck in the endless imagination of a country which will someday bloom big, bright, and beautiful, I know.

Classically misshapen, my body twisted into different archetypes as it was when I was born blue into that Indian Summer in Pennsylvania, my thumb pressing into the languages of the Indus River Valley and the Far East as I am thrust into an imagination which has yet to be, but until then, every night I think to myself, In Du, Wo Mei Tian Dou Meng Xiang Ni, my tongue pressed, waiting, into the roof of my mouth.

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Form, Order, Distance, Citrus Catalina Ouyang

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It is a lot of work to make xia ren.

The shrimp has to be bought, jumping in a bag full of water, and killed and peeled individually. When you are six years old you are assigned to chase the shrimp and eels around the faux-granite tiles of the kitchen floor. You are supposed to kill them. This is at your grandparents’ apartment. The floor here has a perpetual stink rising from it, the smell of fish and old people in the summer without AC. Your grandmother is much faster at chasing the shrimp and eels than you. Peeled shrimp can be bought frozen from the new supermarket, but the supermarket is a long bus ride away.

The fish market is closer and fresh. Your grandmother rises early in the morning and walks to the market and comes back to peel every shrimp by hand. She has arthritis and type II diabetes. You suspect she has white blood, Russian maybe, because she has the deep-set, hooded eyes of a white woman. Everybody has been asking you if you are mixed ever since you were a toddler and you have been telling them no. Your grandmother’s xia ren is never as good as in the restaurants— they use the frozen shrimp and lots of MSG—because she has never been a great cook and never uses enough salt, though she does use MSG. She is hard of both hearing and taste.

When you are twenty-two years old you have returned from New York.

There is a warm lump in your chest and you cannot stop crying. The two things feel unrelated. The lump alternates between feeling wet and dry. It gets shoved against your sternum. You develop a nervous tick of pressing the back of your hand against your chest and ribs, pushing things back into place. Also you cannot stop yawning.

You are starved for air and your hands are fluttering and bored. The blue-eyed man you live with cannot see or feel the lump—you suspect he has never believed it—but he asks you, “Why do you keep 71

Nobody in your family has ever been raised by their own mother and father. The grandparents are perpetually learning how to rear children.

crying?” It is hard to speak when crying. You like to leak silent, attractive tears, and speaking while crying leads to sobbing. So you don’t speak. This frustrates the man you live with. It goes on for weeks, a month. More. You sit on the man post-coital, or mid-coital, aborted-coital, and cry wordlessly. He is still inside you. He shrinks inside you for months. You are thinking about your grandmother and you cannot tell this to the man who is inside you. In the Midwestern city where you have returned to live with this man, you miss seeing East Coast girls who don’t ask questions and look like you: bananas with stylish hair, clomping in platform heels and an armored aura of experience.

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If he had a choice, you suspect, the blue-eyed man you live with would peel back your exoskeleton and devour readily the flesh beneath. There would be leftovers and he would toss them.

You are faintly sick of hearing: Am not into white women, women...small hands...your hair...but from where...

Nobody in your family has ever been raised by their own mother and father. The grandparents are perpetually learning how to rear children. When you are seven years old your mother’s parents see each other for the first time in ten years, having flip-flopped across the Atlantic. Your grandfather got his visa first, and four years later it expired and your grandmother was granted hers.

She stayed three years. Neither has had a steady relationship with your mother.

They raised you anyway, one after another, in a wide, flat place where they could neither speak nor drive.

Weeping, you say to the man inside you, “I am thinking about my family and sacrifice.” He is offended.

You cannot speak to your grandparents. Their tongue has been sliced from you. You watched, in your youth, two spectral arms emerging from a spot above your belly button, looking like your hands but pinker and with larger pores. They raised a turquoise blade to your lips and made a bloodless cut. It took years for pain to set in.

You sit in the car in the rain in the Midwest next to the young British writer you have been emailing with for some time. The car is parked outside his house and inside the car, the two of you share a cigarette even though you quit months before. Everything feels mysterious and sexy especially when your lipstick stains the end of the cigarette and you watch it go into his mouth. The shadows of raindrops on the windshield cast tears onto his face. His nose is sharp and his dimples deep. The British writer has never seen raw tuna before. He does not

know that it is red. His eyes are big with long lashes. You can’t tell what color they are. He asks you about the man you live with, and you think about swapping one poison for another.

Calvino said about traveling: you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. You follow a thread leading to the disintegrated architecture of an ancestral shrine. It had a shape once. Your mother does not know her grandmother’s name. You have no Chinese name.

An art student from Beijing, newly arrived in your Midwestern city, tries to engage you in Mandarin. She carries a box of snuff that she snorts from and makes acrylic paintings with bright colors and meticulously measured perspective. She points to the large freckle on your chin, then the smaller one on your cheek, and says: that’s lucky.

Your face turns red as you try to recollect words. It seems as humiliating for her as for you. English only, she learns, out of mercy. English only, you learned, out of self-loathing.

You work for an artist named Anna in Queens. She is lithe, trained originally in ballet. She eats foods relentlessly until she gets utterly sick of them. She and her lover moved four years before from Berlin. He is German; she is from Georgia, the country. Every day in the studio at two in the afternoon, she and her lover and their Swiss assistant order the mango/cucumber and cucumber/ avocado rolls with a miso soup side.

She and her lover are vegetarian. Back in Georgia, Anna’s father left for some time. She and her mother started eating carrots, together in the house. They ate the carrots for almost a week, feeling sick at the end. You imagine Anna and her mother with their hair wrapped in scarves, sitting in an old house, a house 73

that maybe does not have internet or has a well in the yard.

It is dark inside the house and maybe there are lemon trees outside. You don’t know what the Georgian climate is like.

Actually you know nothing about Georgia. After the carrots, they ate oranges. “Have you ever had so much orange juice on your hands that your skin started to peel?” Anna says. “It was so stupid.” Their hands were crusted with yellow-white discharge, thickly. They did not stop eating the oranges for a long time.

In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where your studio is, there is a retirement home where everybody looks like your grandfather, like shrunken swaying trees. They pace the steep sidewalk outside, fanning themselves with newspapers and wiping sweat off their foreheads with tissues pulled from plastic packets printed with kawaii characters. You overhear and understand fragments of their conversations—rain coming, your niece. I have...an appointment tomorrow... a ghost that smiles with peaches in its hands. You smile at them every day on your way past and their eyes narrow at you.

You sense you have lost something.

In the Lower East Side you are crying in a bar. You have never cried like this in public. Part of it is because you are drunk. An Italian man who is a friend of a friend is chastising you for asking him not to say the N word, hard R. He tells you that you are a narrow-minded hypocrite, a P.C. diva. The people you are with—new friends—dangle their jaws and wring their wrists. You feel like you have lost your mind. The Italian man repeats the word over and over. His voice is nasal and his small-eyed face looks like a rat’s. The blue-eyed man you live with once told you that if white people can’t wear a qipao, then anybody who isn’t Scottish can’t wear flannel. His father’s side is Scottish; they have a family tartan. He is exceptional in bed.

He takes his time down there. You hear his voice saying, but tell me the dictionary definition of racis— Because you are crying, the Italian man takes your hand and kisses the back of it. Your vision tilts. He tells you that he and his Korean girlfriend have recently broken up. And he was once married to a different Korean woman; they started a menswear company together. There are two Glenn Ligon prints hanging in his apartment. He claims they are real. The next morning, feeling skinned, you offer a feeble no and let yourself be fucked by him. You shake his hand when you part.

His image looms, shrewd and olive, in you. In another life he was named Cassius. In another life you married him. Two weeks later you are not sure if it is fear or excitement that fills you when you unexpectedly see him in Nolita. He is a needle that you sink into your own finger, pressing through the nail bed. Lapping up the red droplets. You bite into an orange and suck the bitter juice from its skin. A piece of peel lodges in 74

your throat. Cum washes it down. This time you let yourself be fucked in the ass. A column of pain lumbers through you: the feeling of having betrayed your grandmother. “You’re a freak,” the Italian man tells you, mirthfully. Several days later on Google, you find photos of him and his ex-wife. She has a severe, moonlike face with shaved eyebrows.

She looks intelligent and cool. You are flooded with an acrid, despicable envy, and you never tell any of this to the blueeyed man you live with.

Months later, you are eating pizza with a woman who carried a mattress for nine months. It plays out like a fable. She tells you that you were, you have been, you know. She delivers the word like a hot oil burn. Her laugh is a hysteric break, splitting her long face.

You become enamored of it and her pink pigtails. She asks you if you are mixed, because she is mixed, and you tell her no.

You tell her maybe. You are dancing. In a bathroom you and she use your pinky nails to scoop powder out of a plastic bag and it goes up stupidly like sugar. You feel fourteen. You fall in love with her.

You remember that the first time you were fucked by the blue-eyed man you live with now, you were seeing somebody else. You turned your face away from his and crossed your arms like a vampire.

You were dehydrated. He was on top of you. You fell in love with him. You lived with him.

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II

Poetry

Emily Hsee

While in a Shangh I wonder if I am

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hai long-tang, m an imposter I wonder while I am smoking, or rather while I pretend to smoke on a stoop, noticing how smoke smells like many things after it leaves the mouth: dry nights, lilacs, a group of men playing mahjong. Shanghai too, smells like many things: damp laundry, Huangpu river, fish markets as big as the ocean.

I remind myself it’s easy to get from one side to the other, just 7000 miles, maybe more.

But in this alley, anything beyond my popo’s cooking inside feels far—even the bike lights barely touch me— let alone home. The smoke leaves the cigarette not violently but not gently either, unabashedly tainting another street.

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Pursuit of Happiness Holly Zhou

For 5 hours, I soak in ventilated cumulus & when I leave the stratosphere, halogen cities whir & beat into my cheeks plastered against double-layered plexiglass, & I will have 3 extra hours to live, I will brag that I touched the sun’s belly & survived, tonight I will be LA’s very own vivimancer, with my Basquiat crown & silkscreened Warhol face, my spells will turn molly into holly & coke into yolk (sunny-side up) & bullets back into Ming & Ying, guns into golden pineapple buns, fingers into fat baby carrots, & I will enchant myself so when I die my body will pop & all the sunflower seeds I ever ate will split open, blossom like simmering corn tortillas, oil spitting into the sky, & maybe then I will be happy.

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The Mountains Know of Rebirth Cindy Ren There is one side of Wutong Mountain in China that shoots up straight, veils of foliage dripping down craggy rock.

No gentle sloping there eases the journey of passengers, no tranquil wind or paved paths. To climb, only a bar for hands and a thin trail breaking through shrouded fog, precarious enough for a misplaced step to send one tumbling over the edge.

When young I knew the rust peeling from that bar, hands stained orange, my body slender enough to press itself close against Wutong’s body.

It never betrayed its feelings about me – this trembling girl born from the same dynastic roots and common history, housing within myself the fear that I would reject myself from the mountain, lean back and fall.

You, Wutong seemed to whisper, lifting vines and tipping over gravel shards.

You are not welcome. The deathly heights frowned upon me.

It seemed to know, even then, that years later its home would no longer be my home, that my skin and native tongue would flip inside out, my roots upended from East to West.

It will wonder why I forsook its being in all but touch, my feverish skin clinging to the lithic surface, vine-like all those lifetimes ago.

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My Country – म ेर ा द श े Ananya Kumar-Banerjee 82

It doesn’t listen.

No one outside of my father’s caste-bound bloodline gives a damn.

I see my mother smudged, black-blue ink bleeds into her hair dye at the salon.

She has made herself more palatable as a perfect object, relinquished that burgundy-brown which flashes through my hair in summertime When the living is easy Because it is hot over there and South Asians are made for red humidity, nevermind the blue of the surrounding sea or the white of my grandfather’s cotton dhoti.

The living is easy, my mother is good looking, The question of brownness, a stormcloud that goes on thickening like honey, like the name I was almost given, meghana.

My mother dyes her hair with circuity because she prays the color will make her Transcend but the truth is, it doesn’t listen to us. I don’t get to take to the sky, I am unable to sing. I do not get to rise.

My body sinks like hardtack. Untold histories: my father, the real Boston brahmin, the diaspora of the Americas, my people.

It doesn’t give a damn.

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Motherland Tastes Kathy Min

She makes it just right, Sesame oil so your tongue is filled with xiangwei, a mild savory ambrosial warmth Soy sauce and vinegar, two ebony cousins that sharpen and sting A petite droplet of peppercorn oil, just to taste, so your lips hum, but not too much And the secret ingredient, a nectar of crisp flames: 84

This is what we are made of, my lineage contained in this jar of black-red fried chili flakes, orange-red chili oil, mala flavors as numbingly red as my blood You need the store bought kind, with the middle-aged woman (laoganma, an old dry mother) framed in the center (this jar of chili oil is her epitaph) And the homemade, the kind my mother tries to teach me to make but I am still scared when hot oil crackles over a fire I don’t know how to cook these breakfast noodles So I can only watch from the countertop, Dreaming of their flavors in spaces and letters Sesame seeds, walnuts, peppercorns, chili flakes Flicker in a pan filled with peanut oil And a sprinkling of green onions like April rain So that the flavor isn’t all pantry and preservatives When I return to the motherland, The only place to find these flavors Is in the cabinets of my mother’s mother’s mornings.

Isn’t it a shame that I don’t even their name?

These are my mother’s noodles, They tell me she has traveled a thousand miles To express the love of a mother to her daughter.

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III

I

Academic

Manhattan’s Ch Challenging the Minority Myth

An Oral History Pr Interview with Kar Monica Wang

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hinatown: e Model

roject and rlin Chan

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I. Introduction

1

Erika Lee, “Chinese Immigrants Now Largest Group of New Arrivals to the U.S,” USA Today, July 7, 2015.

2

Kate Hooper and Jeanne Batalova, “Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, January 28, 2015.

3

Kirk Semple, “In Chinatown, Sound of the Future Is Mandarin,” New York Times, October 21, 2009.

4

Peter Kwong, The New Chinatown (New York: Hill and Wang New York, 1987), 40.

5

Frank Shyong, “Why This Cop’s Conviction Brought Thousands of Asian Americans into New York’s Streets,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2016.

6

This number is from a 2003 report published by the Asian American Federation of New York Census Information Center: http://www. aafny.org/cic/briefs/ Chinatownbrief.pdf.

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Chinese immigrants have become the largest group of new arrivals to the United States ever since China replaced Mexico as the top country of origin in 2013. “Once excluded now admired, their families could see a newfound status in America complicated by China’s rise,” so historian Erika Lee wrote in light of this immigration trend.¹ Today’s Chinese in America are widely regarded as educated and well-to-do professionals: In 2013, 47 percent of Chinese immigrants aged 25 and above held at least a bachelor’s degree, and more than half were employed in professional fields such as business, management, and science.² These figures are higher than those for other immigrant groups as well as native-born Americans.

Additionally, as more Chinese arrived in the United States following the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, which eliminated the national origins quota system and prioritized reuniting immigrant families and attracting professionals, many moved away from urban centers to join middle-class suburbia. As a result, the Chinese have been labeled as the “model minority”—successful on their own because of their hard work and values, and unassuming compared with other minority groups in American society.

Nevertheless, Chinatowns in major cities across the country continue to be ethnic enclaves that challenge the success story of the model minority. At the end of the gold rush and following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the late 19th century, Chinese laborers who remained in the country were forced to settle in specific areas of American cities, derogatorily known as urban ghettos, and only allowed to take service jobs that did not threaten white labor. These Chinatowns slowly grew in size as immigrants from China’s Canton (Guangdong) province—especially from the Toisan (Taishan) region—arrived throughout the exclusion era, often through forged “paper son” networks of kinship. After 1965, they witnessed the influx of newcomers from places like Taiwan and Hong Kong, who spoke in tongues other than the once-dominant Toisanese dialect.³ And following 1979, when the People’s Republic of China resumed diplomatic relations with the United States and instituted an open door policy of direct emigration, Chinatowns began to receive immigrants who came from all parts of mainland China.⁴ But the ghetto image never quite left these communities. In 2016, around 22 percent of Chinese in New York lived in poverty.⁵ Compared with that general population, 31 percent of Manhattan’s Chinatown residents—the majority of whom are Chinese— were below the poverty line in the early 2000s.⁶ A more recent community health profile published by the New York City government in 2015 showed that 28 percent of inhabitants

of the Lower East Side and Chinatown continue to live below the federal poverty level.⁷ The myth of Chinese immigrants succeeding in America and overcoming racial and other barriers through sheer determination does not seem to hold true in Chinatowns.

As dynamic spaces that change with the ebb and flow of Chinese immigration to the United States, Chinatowns should be examined both as microcosms of the larger American society and as their own unique case studies. This particular project focuses on the 1960s onwards—in part because the subject of this oral history came of age there during the 1960s and 1970s, and also because the Immigration Act of 1965 marked an important turning point in Chinese American and larger American history. It was no coincidence that Congress passed this piece of legislation a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his Great Society initiative in hopes of tackling poverty and racial injustice, and the government was eager to “make America a color-blind society.”⁸ Under the old system, each country was assigned an annual immigration quota based on the number of individuals of that national origin already residing in the United States. As a result, the policy heavily favored immigrants from Western Europe. But after 1965, every nation could send up to 20,000 individuals, which benefited Asian and Latin American immigrants. The Chinese population increased dramatically from 236,084 in 1960 to more than one million in 1985.⁹ Chinatowns experienced the changing immigration patterns and especially the boom in the number of Chinese immigrants at first hand. Chinatowns were also unique in that they only received a certain kind of immigrants. The Chinese who immigrated because they belonged to the professional skills category were often different from the Chinese who were allowed to enter as relatives of American citizens. The former group was more likely to settle in suburbs and achieve middle-class status. The latter mostly came from rural areas of southern China, such as Canton, and many joined their relatives in Chinatowns.

Some commentators noted that Chinatowns have developed self-sustaining economies that provide new arrivals with job and living security as well as a semblance of upward mobility within the neighborhood.¹⁰ In essence, they argued that Chinatowns function as closed communities that do not need the help of outsiders. But historian Peter Kwong, whose 1988 book The New Chinatown explores the conditions in Manhattan’s Chinatown, describes the Chinese there as suffering from a form of dual oppression. “Modern Chinatowns are not like black or Latino ghettos, which lack jobs and capital.

Nor are they like the earlier European immigrant communities, which were essentially way stations leading to integration.

7

“Community Health Profiles 2015: Lower East Side and Chinatown,” NYC Health, 2015.

8

Kwong, The New Chinatown, 22.

9

Ibid.

10 Ibid., 62.

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11 Ibid., 7. Here, Kwong highlighted that drastic differences and hierarchies also existed within Chinese communities in New York.

12 Mary Lui, “Lecture 16 Japanese American Internment — Resistance,” March 29, 2017.

13 Min Zhou, Contemporary Chinese America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 7.

14 Stephanie Clifford, “Public Divide on Police Hangs Over Brooklyn Officer’s Manslaughter Trial,” New York Times, January 24, 2016.

15 Clifford, “Public Divide on Police Hangs Over Brooklyn Officer’s Manslaughter Trial.”

16 Karlin Chan, “There Are No Winners in the Peter Liang Ruling,” New York Post, April 19, 2016.

17 Interview with Karlin Chan, October 8, 2016.

18 Frank Shyong, “Why This Cop’s Conviction Brought Thousands of Asian Americans into New York’s Streets.”

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The Chinese confront not only the racism of the larger society but also the dominance in their communities of a traditional political order.”¹¹ Alluding to Manhattan’s physical geography, Kwong differentiates between the affluent “Uptown Chinese” and the struggling “Downtown Chinese,” who often work in poor labor conditions for their wealthier counterparts.

The “Downtown Chinese” are not necessarily firstgeneration immigrants: some are native born and have lived in Chinatowns for several generations. Indeed, it is convenient to think of assimilation and socioeconomic advancement along a generational arc, that second- and third-generation Chinese Americans tend to integrate seamlessly into American society and do better than their first-generation immigrant parents and grandparents. But the intergenerational narrative does not always progress in one direction.¹² Assimilation and advancement depend as much on structural factors, such as the attitude of the general population toward accepting Chinese in America, as on the education and income levels of the individuals themselves.¹³ This oral history project spotlights a third-generation native-born Chinese American man who has lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown for almost his entire life: Karlin Chan.

I first met Karlin when I was working on an article about the trial of ex-New York Police Department officer Peter Liang, which took place last spring when Liang was convicted of shooting and killing an unarmed black man during his patrol of a Brooklyn housing project.¹⁴ The trial created deep fissures within Chinese communities across America. Some condemned Liang’s behavior, seeing it as another case of fatal police violence against black Americans; others defended him, arguing that the death was an unfortunate accident and that Liang was being tried as a scapegoat for the white police officers who also killed blacks but avoided any responsibility.¹⁵ Karlin stood firmly in defense of Liang. In fact, I first contacted him after reading an opinion piece he published in the New York Post, in which he described his role as a community organizer and Liang’s adviser throughout the trial. “Over time it became apparent to me that this case was too politicized and [Liang] was being thrown under the bus,” Karlin wrote in that piece.¹⁶ He later explained to me that he believes Asians are racial minorities oppressed by the justice system just like blacks.¹⁷ He agreed that Liang had been negligent and rash on the night of his patrol, but manslaughter—Liang’s original indictment, which could have resulted in up to fifteen years in prison—went beyond the appropriate punishment. When Liang’s ruling on April 19, 2016 made it clear that the former cop would not need to serve any prison time, Karlin sighed in relief.¹⁸ This project, however, does not focus on Karlin’s

involvement in the Peter Liang trial. Instead, it tells the larger story of Manhattan’s Chinatown through his perspective as he witnessed the transformation of the community from his childhood in the 1960s to present day. Chinatown, he said, is at once his home village and an ethnic ghetto. His narrative demonstrates how the complex, multifaceted space has reckoned with both outside racism and post-1965 newcomers, whose presence highlighted differences and tensions within the Chinese community.

On a personal level, Karlin’s experiences as a longtime Chinatown resident have shaped his view of the Chinese not as a model minority in America but as permanent outsiders excluded from easy access to the American justice system.

Perhaps reading his story would help one better understand why Karlin and others like him chose to defend Peter Liang.

Perhaps reading his story would help one better understand why Karlin and others like him chose to defend Peter Liang.

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II. The Story of Karlin Chan

19 The family’s original surname is Chin, but Karlin changed his to Chan in the late 1970s.

20 Karlin’s paternal grandfather went back to China and retired in Hong Kong after his son took over.

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Karlin Chan (꯴㵶벇) was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on June 23, 1957. His family had been operating a Chinese restaurant and hand laundry there since the 1930s, when Karlin’s paternal grandfather immigrated from Toisan to the United States as a paper son and inherited the surname Wong.¹⁹ Karlin’s father, the eldest son, followed suit and came to America not long after the grandfather, eventually taking over the family business in the late 1940s.²⁰ But the economic outlook in Rhode Island was not optimistic—there were almost no Chinese in Pawtucket, Karlin explained—and his maternal grandfather beckoned the family to New York City’s Chinatown, where he owned a poultry store.

The Chans moved to New York City in 1960, when Karlin was just three years old. He was the middle child of the family, with two older siblings and two younger ones.

The family settled on Mulberry Street, which was mostly Italian at the time. In fact, he remembered Chinatown in the early 1960s to be a small community centered around Mott Street and spanning just three blocks, sandwiched between the much larger Italian and Jewish neighborhoods. Even then, Chinatown was predominantly a bachelor’s society, though wives and children began joining the community in the post-war period, especially after the Immigration Act of 1965 was signed into law. Karlin was one of the few toddlers who could be seen trotting up and down Mott. By the time he reached school age, there were two elementary schools serving Chinatown and the rest of the Lower East Side. He attended PS23, which was on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard, and then Charles Sumner Junior High School on Hester Street. The majority of his classmates throughout his elementary and middle school years were other Chinese children from the neighborhood. They started school every morning at 8:15AM and came home around 3PM. Afterwards, everyone headed to Chinese school from 4PM to 6PM for written Chinese and oral Cantonese. Karlin went by his paper name Wong in regular school but switched to his real Chinese surname, Chan, in the afternoon sessions.

For high school, he took entrance exams that qualified him for the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, among other selective public schools in New York City. But he didn’t like either—he did not care too much for school, he said—so he eventually attended Seward Park High School on Grant Street, not too far from his childhood home. Asked if most of his friends attended college after high school, he shrugged and answered that some did while others did not. Karlin himself spent two years at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, where he took a few more classes

“just to make the motion.” The school consisted of several classrooms in leased warehouse space. The rest of Long Island City, still a warehouse district in the early 1970s, was rather deserted. Karlin did not remember if he actually received his diploma, but he did graduate college in 1974.

Karlin fondly described his neighborhood as a Toisanese village—that is, before the influx of the post-1965 immigrants.

The Chinatown he grew up in was small in size, but it had all kinds of stores, from butcher shops and fish markets to general groceries that sold Chinese canned goods. The store owners would always have teacups on a serving tray and a pot of hot tea in a wicker basket for any customers who stopped by. Whenever Karlin accompanied his father around these stores, the helpers would chat with the father and son about the home country. Almost all of Chinatown was Toisanese at the time, but Toisan was a sizeable region, and every Toisanese in Chinatown wanted to know exactly where his compatriots were from. Karlin had a good grasp of Chinese American history: He labeled the figures of his childhood as the “old immigrants,” the ones who left Toisan—a poor area prone to flooding—in search of a better life as early as the 19th century.

In the United States, they were relegated to the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. When they were recruited to construct the transcontinental railroad, one group of Chinese laborers would clear the rubble as another group blasted dynamites just a few feet away. “Not a Chinaman’s chance” was a phrase that came directly out of these experiences. After the railroad was completed, a few of the early immigrants settled in the Five Points area of New York—a notorious crime-ridden ghetto at the time—and started New York’s Chinatown. Karlin said this part of history was his to remember and recount, and the neighborhood was his village to cherish and protect.

At the same time, he also portrayed the Chinatown of his childhood as a violent space, especially when gang wars erupted in the 1970s and 1980s. He blamed it on the new immigrants from Hong Kong, who did not speak English and were at odds with each other and with native-born Chinese Americans. Donning bell-bottom jeans, wide belts, and suede leather moccasins, these youngsters hung around Chinatown and came up with gang names like the Flying Dragons and the Ghost Shadows. Soon, shootings were occurring on a regular basis and bodies were being laid out on the streets every week.

Language barriers created some tensions, but the fighting between various Chinese gangs was mainly over extortion rights and protection money. “It got out of hand quickly,” Karlin recalled.

To escape the violence, he left New York City for Cleveland, Ohio after graduating from LaGuardia Community College in 1974. His uncle and cousins had opened a Chinese 95

21 According to Peter Kwong, chop suey means “miscellaneous pieces” in Cantonese. He wrote that “it is a dish that combines leftovers—something no self-respecting cook would be caught making” (Kwong 34).

22 When antitrust laws forced AT&T to break off into smaller companies, Karlin stayed with the one that eventually became Verizon. He was promoted to the role of a technician and remained at Verizon for the last thirty years of his working career.

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restaurant in a Cleveland suburb, and Karlin worked there first as a waiter and later as a cook. He soon learned how to make egg foo young, pepper steak, chop suey, chow mein, butterfly shrimp, and other Americanized Chinese dishes. He chuckled as he marveled at the ingenuity and resilience of Chinese restaurant owners. “We’re buying garbage and selling it back to them for a profit,” Karlin said. To make chop suey, the Chinese bought the cheapest and toughest cuts of meat, the dark green outer stalks of celery (not the whole celery), and other low-cost vegetables.²¹ “We cooked it all together, tossed it around, threw some soy sauce on it, and we sold it back,” he continued. “That fed two to three generations of Chinese in this country.”

But Karlin did not want to work in a restaurant his whole life, so after four years in Cleveland, he came back to New York City’s Chinatown in 1978. He took a job as a data processor at AT&T, where he worked with computer punch cards to enter and send billing information to the company’s finance department.²² Not too many Chinese worked in the same place, so he became responsible for addressing negative stereotypes about his fellow countrymen. For example, an Irish co-worker once pointed at him and told him that everyone in Chinatown ate dog feet. He responded by asking if he wanted to try one. “I told him I’ll stick it down your throat,” he said.

“And we got along just fine after that.” In his spare time, Karlin helped his father manage a floral shop in Chinatown, since all of his siblings had moved out of the neighborhood by that time. After his father passed away in 1980, he was left to take care of his aging mother, who had developed Alzheimer’s following her retirement as a seamstress. The mother and son pair lived together until she died thirteen years ago. Without a family of his own, Karlin still resides in Chinatown today, in an apartment not too far from the one in which he grew up.

When he retired from his full-time job in August 2004, Karlin became a Chinatown community organizer in earnest.

He said he works much harder as an activist than he ever did as a salaried employee. “I grew up here and I’m probably going to die here. This is like a village to me,” he told me. “If a fellow villager needs help, I’ll be there.” In his opinion, the Chinese often “get picked on” because they don’t speak English well or don’t understand how to navigate the American legal system.

He recalled a Chinese man living in a Brooklyn housing project who almost lost his life because he was the target of a local gang initiation. At Karlin’s insistence, the man reported his case to the police, who took little interest in the matter since he was unable to identify members of the gang. As a result, Karlin took it upon himself to move the man and his family out of Brooklyn and into a housing project on the Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive by Manhattan’s Chinatown. There

“We didn’t have social media and other people to validate us back then.

So we had to stand for ourselves.”

are established nonprofits that provide assistance to crime victims, but Karlin said many Chinese immigrants do not trust these nonprofits. Instead, he likes to think of himself as the goto community figure in Chinatown.²³ On closer inspection, Karlin’s activism is different from the kind that is common on college campuses and among progressive Chinese Americans today. His motto is that the Chinese need to fight racism whenever and wherever it appears—sometimes, that means physically fighting back.

“Forty years ago, a guy called me a chink and I sent him to the hospital,” he told me. “We didn’t have social media and other people to validate us back then. So we had to stand for ourselves.”

With the arrival of new Chinese immigrants after 1965, Chinatown has been expanding and changing at breakneck speed. Karlin lamented that these newcomers care very little about the 150-year history of Chinese in America, and their irreverent attitude has caused some resentment among the older immigrants who have lived in this country for several generations. “It’s like the old Chinese dynasties,” he said.

“Every new dynasty will try to wipe out the history of the old dynasty. It shouldn’t work that way, but that’s how it is here in Chinatown.”24

23 Karlin was once in charge of the nonprofit Chinese Action Network, but the organization no longer exists. He has been operating on his own ever since.

24 See Figure 1 in the Appendix for an illustration of Chinatown today.

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Works Cited Chan, Karlin. Interview by Monica Wang. New York, NY. October 8, 2016 and April 14, 2017.

Chan, Karlin. “There Are No Winners in the Peter Liang Ruling.” New York Post, April 19, 2016. Accessed April 30, 2017. http://nypost.com/2016/04/19/there-are-nowinners-in- the-peter-liang-ruling/ Clifford, Stephanie. “Public Divide on Police Hangs Over Brooklyn Officer’s Manslaughter Trial.” New York Times, January 24, 2016. Accessed April 30, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/nyregion/public-divide-on-policehangs-over- brooklyn-officers-manslaughter-trial.html?_r=0.

Hopper, Kate and Jeanne Batalova. “Chinese Immigrants in the United States.”

Migration Policy Institute, January 28, 2015. Accessed April 30, 2017. http:// www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-united-states.

Kwong, Peter. The New Chinatown. New York: Hill and Wang New York, 1987.

Lee, Erika. “Chinese Immigrants Now Largest Group of New Arrivals to the U.S.” USA Today, July 7, 2015. Accessed April 30, 2017. https://www.usatoday.com/story/ opinion/2015/07/07/chinese-immigrantslargestcolumn/29784905/.

Lui, Mary. “Lecture 16: Japanese American Internment — Resistance.” Lecture. Yale University, March 29, 2017.

“Community Health Profiles 2015: Lower East Side and Chinatown.” New York City Health, 2015. Accessed April 30, 2017. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/ downloads/pdf/data/2015chp-mn3.pdf.

“Neighborhood Profile: Manhattan’s Chinatown.” Asian American Federation of New York Census Information Center, December 2003. Accessed April 30, 2017. http://www.aafny.org/cic/briefs/Chinatownbrief.pdf.

Sempler, Kirk. “In Chinatown, Sound of the Future is Mandarin.” New York Times, October 21, 2009. Accessed April 30, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/ nyregion/22chinese.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&.

Shyong, Frank. “Why This Cop’s Conviction Brought Thousands of Asian Americans into New York’s Streets.” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2016. Accessed April 30, 2017. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-liang-brooklyn-shooting-20160413story.html.

Zhou, Min. Contemporary Chinese America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.

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Appendix Figure 1

Source: http://www.aafny.org/cic/briefs/chinese2013.pdf.

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It Takes a Village: Dong Architecture and Culture in Guangnan Zishi Li

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0.

As I delved deeper into my architecture studies, I started to appreciate vernacular architecture as a source of inspiration. Vernacular architecture is generated through the builders’ personal knowledge and modified around the dwellers’ user experience without any guidance or documentation of actual architects. Different from the static and formalized architectural canons, buildings of vernacular architecture stand out in the details and moments that showcase intimacy with their habitats.

In addition to the Han ethnic majority, China also has 55 ethnic minorities, including Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs and Zhuang people. Each ethnic minority has its own culture and vernacular architecture style worthy of probing into. I finally settled on the Dong (Kam) people, whose architecture, agriculture and forestry is a holistic system that functions as the basis of their culture. Despite its richness, the Dong culture has yet to be introduced to the international world, and Dong architecture has only been studied through its structural parts among Chinese scholars.

I therefore initiated an individual project about the vernacular architecture of China’s Dong (Kam) people, with a focus on family houses in Guangnan Village, a small autonomous Dong village in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, south China. The project consists of two parts: the first part is research about the existing strategies of how Guangnan villagers have preserved their old family houses, which will provide guidelines as a reference for the villagers regarding how their desired preservation goals would be efficiently achieved; the second part is the design of the Center for Dong (Kam) Architecture & Culture Preservation. The center will function as a hub and guesthouse for architects and scholars coming from outside the village to work with Dong families in Guangnan. It aims to demonstrate how a traditional Dong wooden structure can accommodate modern living facilities and show how certain traditionally programmed spaces are customized for new functions. The center will be situated on a 200 m2 piece of land by the Guangnan river (tributary of the Pingdeng River). The land is where Guangnan’s open-air opera stage was once located, which bears a slope that leads down to the 100-year-old iconic stone slab bridge of the village.

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The map and drone image of Guangnan Village (2017 Spring, Chunji Meng).

Arial view of Guangnan from north to south (2017 Spring, Chunji Meng).

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1.

1

Geary, D Norman. The

Like most of the family houses of the Zhuang, Miao and Yao people, the traditional Dong family dwellings belong to the 3-story ganlan-style stilt house type representative of China’s vernacular architecture in the south. The stilt house is primarily crafted from locally-produced cedar wood (commonly known as China fir) with structural parts linked together by mortise and tenon joints prevalent in various genres of traditional Chinese architecture. The choice of cedar wood is because of both its abundance in the forests of the Dong people’s living area, and its ability to regulate the temperature and humidity in those timber structures. The term ganlan indicates “hanging buildings” and “dry balustrade”, and most ganlan-style stilt houses are built on sites of irregular topography with supporting pillars on the lower side.1

Kam people of China: turning nineteen. January 01, 2001, pp. 44-45.

2nd Floor: Living Space & Barn 1st Floor: Living Space (Main Room) Ground Floor: Livestock & Toilet

Figure 1-1 Diagram of a typical ganlan stilt house.

The extent to which those houses are customized for each family brings an informality to the houses’ architectural forms, thereby making it hard to further categorize them in the realm of typology. The initial design of the Dong family house is based on local carpenters’ personal knowledge and long-lasting building conventions within the local community, responding to the family’s daily needs and the condition of the site. The 103

Mixture of brick and wood in a traditional Dong dwelling.

Some of the modern living facilities are arbitrarily inserted into the original structure.

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2

Shan, Deqi. “Chinese Vernacular Dwellings.”

Chinese Vernacular Dwellings, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 126–129.

daily needs of each Dong family vary with the number of family members, the type of agricultural goods they produce, and if they would like to leave unprogrammed space in their houses for flexible functions. The client family reaches out to young people in the village to help construct their house, and it takes approximately one month to put together all the columns and finish the timber cladding on the walls. Upon completion, the houses remain both structurally and programmatically maintained and transform according to the family’s changing needs over the years.2 The Dong family dwellings are all formed on a modest human scale. When I asked Guangnan’s local carpenter Mr. Chen how he worked on his design with the client families, he said that assessment of the site was crucial to start design development. Individual Dong family houses are typically comprised of four to five bays with the width of four to five meters, which generates a grid system whose intersections are intended for supporting pillars. Before determining the locations of bedrooms and other private spaces, the spatial configuration remains an open plan with no dividing walls specifically indicated. As for row houses for extended families that may cover the area of one block in the village, the divisions of dwelling units are specified based on the number of people within each nuclear family, but detailed division walls remain unknown at the beginning of the design. After getting the measurement of the site, the carpenter splits up that piece of site with the appropriate dimension of bays in order to figure out a feasible layout with the generic combination of a main room and multiple bedrooms.

The ground floor that once accommodated piglets are now gathering spaces.

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An original wooden house, a wooden house with faรงade treatment and a brick house on the same street.

A typical kitchen inside the concrete addition to the original wooden structure.

The Dong people who stay in the village at all times are mostly elders and small children.

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2.

In the summer of 2017, I did my research in a Dong village named Guangnan in the mountainous area in north Guangxi Province. Since the No.3 Guangxi national highway had yet to open up when I arrived, I traveled on the bumpy mountain road in heavy rain for five hours to get there from Guilin, the nearest provincial city that has an airport.

Guangnan Village is situated by one of Pingdeng River’s tributaries with three major historical districts. The only public road suitable for cars is Ping-Piao Road that opened in the 1980s, which parallels the river. The village sprawls along Ping-Piao Road, with both wooden houses imitating the traditional form and modern brick houses erected miscellaneously. Guangnan village has five districts today: Dazhai (㝕㷢), Jiajiang (氯尉), Manglan ( 揈), Dula (栃䬕) and Guangxiao (䌦吿). The first three districts are located around where the Pingdeng River forms the tributary, while the last two are located further down Ping-Piao Road in the south. Most of the family houses in Dazhai, Jiajiang and Manglan are in the ganlan stilt-house style and were built 18-70 years ago, but the last two districts contain more brick buildings that are relatively spaced out. Meanwhile, most of the wooden family houses in the three oldest districts have been transformed and replaced by modern houses, which greatly affected the onceuniform image of the village’s built environment. The village also has two ceremonial buildings—the iconic drum tower rebuilt by local carpenters in 2005 after a fire hazard in the 1930s, and the 150-year-old covered bridge marking its east border. There is also a stone slab bridge placed on Pingdeng River’s local branch (Guangnan River). Despite the messy village-scape due to the absence of sensible regulations of building activities, both the local natural environment and traditional Dong culture are relatively well-maintained in Guangnan.

I stayed in a traditional Dong stilt house with my host family, who were both retired middle school teachers and belonged to Guangnan’s Christian community. Most of the Guangnan Christian people are intellectuals, because of the missionaries who brought the education system into the mountains a century ago.

Living in the unrenovated wooden houses was hardly a pleasant experience—there were mice running above the ceiling and spiders clenching on the bathroom walls; several cracks existed on both the timber cladding and the ceiling, so the rain would leak or be blown into the house; many of the wooden houses I visited had poor lighting conditions and drainage systems, and so on. Even if many families had chosen to demolish their old wooden houses and replace them with monotonous brick buildings simply because the latter offers a better living standard, most of the Guangnan villagers agree that the traditional family houses are part of their identities and serve as reminders of their family stories. They claimed that they definitely would have loved to keep them if they had received reasonable suggestions on how to preserve them.

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Same space with different usages in different seasons.

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3.

After several rounds of communication both during my trip and last semester, the administration bureau and I eventually came up with the idea of establishing a Dong culture preservation center in the village. The center will function as a hub for students, scholars and professors from both Chinese and international universities, invited to gather in Guangnan to conduct projects in the areas of their expertise and work closely with Guangnan villagers. On one hand, the village would benefit from the forward-leaning design ideas and technologies brought in by the students; on the other hand, students would get the chance to do hands-on work in a very down-to-earth way. The preservation center has been officially registered under the civil affairs bureau in Longsheng County, and thus far has been carrying projects of Dong tapestry, graphic design, local music and grass weaving.

The design of the preservation center’s work station features a combination of the traditional Dong wooden family house and more modern living quarters. Looking from the other side of the river, it seems to be two, three-story Dong wooden family houses connected to each other due to the clear division of its massing. Its wooden part accommodates the traditional architectural programs, including bedrooms, studio spaces and two main halls. The modern quarter accommodates bathrooms and an open kitchen. In order not to disrupt the street views, the modern quarter is sandwiched in between the two wooden parts on the street’s side and the river’s side. That stripe of glass and steel wrapping the house around is only visible to visitors coming down to the river from its side.

Group picture taken at the launching ceremony of the Preservation Center. From the left: Gaoge Wang (Head of the Village), Jianbang Cao (Donor and Council Member), Z (Founder and Chief Director), Lisi Yang (Executive Board Member), Chunji Meng (Executive Board Member), Tian Meng (Party Secretary, Guangnan Village Administration Bureau).

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Course Review: Asian American History by Mary Lui Jun Yan Chua 112

As an international student, I never associated myself with the term “Asian American.” American did not describe my national origin, and Asian felt too homogenous. That changed when I took Mary Lui’s lecture course, “Asian American History.” Lui’s class exposes the fluidity of racial categories, demonstrating they are as much a product of historical contingencies as they are of individual identification. As Lui put it, U.S. history has been about immobility and forced mobility as much as it has been about geographical and socioeconomic mobility. In 1949, for instance, thousands of Chinese students found themselves stranded in the United States after China fell to the Communists. Lui’s class highlighted my precarity as a neoliberal, cosmopolitan subject, forcing me to ask, “Can this happen to me, too?”

Lui begins with an intriguing proposition: that Asian American history did not begin with railroad workers in California, but with European imperial expansion, which connected Asia and the Americas. In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out to reach Asia, but stumbled upon the New World instead. Within a century, the Spanish galleon trade linked Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico. Chinese and Filipino sailors frequently jumped ship and settled in the Gulf of Mexico, moving northward to the future United States.

Early settlers blended into the local creole population, highlighting the racial indeterminacy which characterized the early modern Americas. In unsettling the origin story for Asian American history, Lui draws on some of the most innovative scholarship about South-South ties. But she also joins a long tradition of Yale historians who have argued against the inevitability of the color line, including midcentury scholars like Edmund S. Morgan and C. Van Woodward.

Lui rehearses a more familiar narrative as she moves into the nineteenth century. Economic growth on the western frontier created a demand for labor, which was met by transpacific migration. But labor importation gave rise to racial animus, and white settlers came to view Chinese workers as the “heathen chinee,” and later the “yellow peril.” Beginning with the Page Act of 1875 and culminating in the Asiatic Barred 113

Zone of 1917, the state developed an immigration apparatus to reset the demographic clock.

This history hit hard the year I took Lui’s class, with the inauguration of President Trump. The day after the White House issued its travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations, Lui admitted it was tempting to rewrite all her lectures in the light of present-day developments. Nonetheless, she resisted.

Instead, she encouraged students to think about how this history illuminated our moment, pointing to the genealogies of practices like racialized immigration restrictions. In her lectures about World War II, Lui argues that the incarceration of Japanese Americans was not just a product of hysteria, but a culmination of longstanding racial assumptions which cast Asians as “unassimilable aliens.”

The class takes a more optimistic turn after World War II, when Lui considers how postwar racial liberalism dismantled the structures of Asian exclusion. Drawing on her own research for her forthcoming book, Making Model Minorities, Lui explains that Cold War imperatives nudged the United States to project itself globally as an emblem of racial equality, even if it failed to live up to that ideal at home. That enterprise led to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which facilitated large-scale Asian immigration to the United States.

However, Lui is quick to point to the limits of formal equality. Indeed, the impact of the 1965 immigration reforms was inadvertent: leaders mistakenly believed that preference categories for family members and professionals would sustain European immigration.

Lui also refutes the “model minority myth,” suggesting it was used as a racial wedge against African Americans. In presenting Asians as slavishly industrious and insularly self-reliant, the “model minority” also embodied many of the same 114

characteristics as the “yellow peril.”

Lui reaches instead for a different redemptive myth, emphasizing the Asian American movement of the 1960s as a moment of political awakening.

By the end of the class, Lui convincingly argues that Asian American history is U.S. history. At the same time, the course has the most impact on students of Asian descent. The final project requires students to conduct an oral history, and for the many students who interview a family member, it’s often the first time they are having an adult conversation with their parents about race and identity. “[The class] gave me really powerful knowledge through which to interpret my family’s story,” one student wrote in an anonymous course evaluation in the Spring of 2014.

With my cohort, Lui gave students the alternative of writing about a window pane in Sterling Memorial Library that depicted a scene from Bret Harte’s poem, “The Heathen Chinee,” prompting them to engage with national and campus debates about commemoration and public memory.

Two film screenings complement the lectures: “Broken Blossoms,” a 1919 period film, and “A Village Called Versailles,” a 2006 documentary about a Vietnamese community’s recovery after Hurricane Katrina. Lui analyzes both films eloquently in her lectures, reflecting the inter-disciplinary ethos of the class. The reading list includes texts of various genres, from memoir (Carlo Bulosan’s America is in the Heart) to monographs (Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates) to community histories (Barbara Kawakami’s Japanese Immigrant Clothing in Hawaii). Characteristically modest, Lui does not assign her own book, even though it’s widely cited and assigned in undergraduate and graduate courses nationwide.

Lui is unapologetically rigorous as a teacher: 60% of students say her classes

have a “greater” or “much greater” workload than other Yale College courses. At the same time, she doesn’t shy away from the personal stakes of her work. Born in Hong Kong and raised in New Jersey, Lui grew up in her parents’ Chinese restaurant.

She later went to Princeton for college, which was, in her words, “a world apart,” despite being just twenty minutes from where she lived (disillusioned with the eating clubs, she hosted a rock show as a DJ for Princeton’s radio station).

Whereas the first generation of Asian American historians came of age during the transformative 1960s, Lui belongs to a second generation which came of age in the 1980s. In a recent dinner with a group of students, Lui recalled the Tiananmen Square episode unfolding the week of her graduation from Princeton, and described the misogyny unleashed when students and alumni pushed for women to be admitted to the university’s selective, all-male eating clubs.

These moments of rupture indelibly marked Lui and her future scholarship, prompting her to explore racial and gendered formations from a transnational perspective.

In many ways, Lui’s career has evinced her theme of historical contingency. After college, Lui had no intention of becoming a historian, but stumbled into a job at the New York Chinatown History Project (now the Museum of Chinese in the Americas). That experience was so formative that she decided to do a PhD at Cornell, where she studied with pioneering Asian Americanist Gary Okihiro. When Ethnicity, Race, and Migration became a standalone major in 2012, the Committee on Majors cited Lui’s promotion to tenure as a guarantee of the program’s sustainability.

In 2015, Lui became the first Asian American woman — and only the second Asian American — to be appointed Master of a residential college. But Lui’s visibility has also eaten into her teaching load, highlighting the dilemmas that faculty of color and women often face in balancing their various responsibilities. Since her appointment, Lui has only offered “Asian American History” twice, and her departmental seminar on “Asian American Women and Gender History” once. While this challenge confronts all faculty with 115

By the end of the class, Lui convincingly argues that Asian American history is U.S. history.

administrative responsibilities, the burden of representation falls particular on those who teach in under-represented fields like Asian American Studies.

Like any course worth its salt, Lui’s class ultimately left me with several lingering questions. While Lui presents the 1960s as a founding moment for Asian American activism, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were significant continuities with earlier modes of resistance. In the 1920s, for instance, Japanese immigrant Takao Ozawa and Indian immigrant Bhagat Singh Thind litigated their right to naturalized citizenship by arguing in court that they were “white” under the “free white 116

persons” clause of the 1790 Naturalization Act. Although their legal strategy might seem quixotic to the modern-day activist, their tactical acumen must surely be understood on its own terms. Just as scholars of Black history now speak of a “long Civil Rights movement,” the time has come for us to explore a “long Asian American movement.”

Moreover, the political history of Asian America in the second half of the twentieth century is one of conservative mobilization as well as liberal insurgency. Many Vietnamese refugees were fans of Reagan because of his strident anticommunism, and many Korean Americans subscribe to a mode of evangelism with significant ties to the Christian Right. In the 1992 presidential election, 55% of Asian Americans voted Republican; just over 30% voted Democrat. While it’s true the dominant culture foists the “model minority myth” on Asians, Asian Americans have also adopted it as what post-colonial thinkers would call a “strategic essentialism” to advance their interests (one thinks of Yale Law School professor Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother). Though it’s hard to tell this story without evoking the specter of complicity and racial shame, I hope historians will explore these questions in the near future.

Within academic circles, the term “Asian American history” has acquired a slightly old-fashioned ring. Driven by the “transnational turn” in history,” and influenced by Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic,” Asian diaspora studies has experienced a spurt of growth. But in taking the Pacific as its theater, such “global” or “transnational” approaches also risk reproducing the epistemic logics of U.S. imperialism and militarism, conflating U.S. history with the history of the world at large. In the light of these developments, Lui’s class is a timely reminder of why “Asian American” — and indeed, “American” — remain salient units of analysis. Despite the importance of transnational kinship and Third World Liberationist thinking, Asian Americans have also spoken a distinctly American idiom of franchise, dispossession, and protest, gaining purchase on the nation, with all its attendant promise and perils.

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IV

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Visual Art

Terranium Catalina Ouyang

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Terrarium imagines the white-walled space of Rubber Factory as an extended terrarium, following the model of Victorian-era “Wardian cases” and conservatories. These early greenhouses were created in order to keep living things alive as they were plundered by men called “plant hunters” (often working under conditions of espionage) from their native lands and shipped to far-off imperial powers, following the contemporaneous trend of spectacle-driven museological exhibits and ethnographic displays. This terrarium is transmuted into a scarlet desertscape in which the imagined lotus feet of my great-grandmother either bloom, or die. My mother’s grandmother was of the last generation of women in China to have their feet bound. She was supposed to help raise my mother while my grandparents worked, but because of her feet, she fell down the stairs one day while carrying my mother. After that, she was relieved of her duty and my grandfather left the house hours early every day to push my mother on his bicycle to a daycare, where she was raised away from her family; this left generational implications in how my family to this day navigates nurture and intimacy.

Foot binding itself, as a thousand-year-long practice, has an ambivalent legacy in Chinese history; it was about feeding a patriarchal erotic frenzy, it was about denying the physicality of women, mutilating (sometimes killing) them, stunting their mobility, it was about demonstrating high civility and subservience to the state. Yet it was also a sacred practice shared between mother and daughter, passed down with thick blood and tough love; later, under European invasion, it became an emblem of a dying culture fighting to resist imperial takeover.

I do not know what my great-grandmother’s feet looked like.

Their likeness is sourced from various Google image searches, as I reach through digital proxy to try to know my greatgrandmother. Any one, or none, of the five stone feet could represent hers. I think of the sculptures as 3D prints of my photographic research, carved slowly by hand with hammer and chisel. Carving stone to me is a performative process that references and reembodies the Western canonical form of the marble sculpture; here, that fundamental material has been overtaken by traditionally decorative stones, their form shifted to desiccated flesh. These objects, as vestiges of familial memory as well as a fraught national history, have in a way been plundered—by way of my own diasporic migration and attendant internalized colonization—to come to rest, ultimately, at Rubber Factory, in Manhattan’s fast-gentrifying Chinatown.

This piece is installed at a gallery called Rubber Factory: https:// catalinaouyang.com/ Terrarium

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When the moon kissed the earth Rosa Chung

My visual narrative unfolds through the figural and symbolic imagery I have adapted from East Asian painting. I manipulated, twisted, and transformed them in order to think about my own fluid identity as an immigrant in this country. I rooted myself in this type of artmaking in order to explore the different ways in which this history continues to affect my life today. Thus, the story inherently contains hybrids of these different cultures, something that speaks directly to my everyday experience.

I also hold unto themes of femininity, trauma, and healing. But I wanted to concentrate on optimism more than anything else.

I worked while reflecting on that sense of hope – a hope that seems pertinent to the social and political climate right now. In this reflection, a sense of play and fantasy became a large source of inspiration for me. I wanted to visually convey that spirit so that when one looks at these pieces, we can share that feeling together. Color relationships helped me create different realms for my figures to live in. Each one inherently contains a different mood and emotion; they pushed me to experiment with the landscapes I started to create.

Through this body of work, I thought about the past five years and in particular, where I am right now. I can’t really think of a proper answer, which actually feels OK. Painting will continue to push me in a good direction.

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Untitled Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

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Chinese Grocery, a MingLiU Type Specimen Poster Julia Ma

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POCKY The bell rings as I walk through the front door of the bustling store. A warm gust of air hits my face and with it brings the familiar smell of Chinese snacks and desserts. The space is much louder and more crowded than usual. It must be

hi-chew

hi-chew hi-chew

dumpling wrappers

because of Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year. That was why I was here after all; I needed to buy ingredients for the dumplings I was making with friends the following

LAO GAN DRIED TOFU MA HOT DRIED TOFU hi-chew sticky SAUCE

POCKY

POCKY POCKY POCKY

green rice bean RICEzongzigreen onions vermigreen tea celli mochi noodles lychee thai red bean POCKY

morning.

I walk towards the back of the store, where the tofu is usually stocked. I pass by shelves stuffed

jelly jelly drink drink

full of multi-colored packaging, messy but somehow organized. It's not difficult to find what I am looking for.

I look through the different hard tofu packages. Their designs are all atrocious, using a dozen different fonts, some weirdly stretched and others multi-colored... but they bring me back to my childhood and remind me of my mother, and so I happily

pick one and place it in my shopping basket.

As I make my way to the checkout line, I make a short detour to take a look at the frozen section. The freezer is lined with boxes

fresh fresh GINGER GINGER

chives

chives

chives

of red bean popsicles and green tea mochi. I don't buy any but I spend a few moments reminiscing about those times I would beg my parents to buy one for me. They rarely treated me, but when they did, it was the best thing in the world.

iced

coconut tea jelly

popsicles SHRIMP sesame kang shi fu CHIPS spicy beef oil instant dry noodles squid kikkoman strips soy sauce melon melon melon ramune ramune ramune

NAPA CABBAGE

I wait behind a few people at the cashier. I overhear the owner speaking in Mandarin with the woman checking out.

"I heard you switched piano teachers!" she asks.

"Yes! This new one is much better. We have to drive an hour to get there, but it's worth it," the woman replies.

"And your daughter is how old now?"

"She's 11! She'll be in middle school next year."

These conversations are normal to hear in the Asian grocery store. My family knew the owners of the ones in my town very well. The stores are a hub for friends to share news in the community, different events to take

WANG WANG CRACKERS

WANG WANG CRACKERS

fresh tofu

DISPOSABLE CHOPSTICKS

advantage of, and the latest gossip.

When I leave the store, I take away more than just my dumpling ingredients.

On this New Year's Day, I leave with a little taste of home.

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Grandfather and C

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Car

John Lee

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Dad Standing Abov 138

ve LA Traffic

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Negative Space illu Haewon Ma Negative Space: An Asian & Asian American Oral History Project aims to create a more nuanced portrait of Asian American identity by collecting the voices of students and faculty at Yale who identify as Asian or Asian American. Our goal is to celebrate the heterogeneity of all those who consider themselves to be Asian or Asian American and, in so doing, to encourage a broader and more inclusive view of the kinds of narratives encompassed by that label.

These illustrations were done for our Spring 2017 batch of interviews. They reflect sentiments expressed during our conversations with the interviewees.

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ustrations

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Corrosion Ivory Fu

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Edi Dai

Us

2016, cottonrounds, cotton, paint, thread, and glitter on canvas 143

Untitled (2018) Josh Feng

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Lunchbox for Janc (Korean Banquet N Janchi Guksu is a simple noodle soup with anchovy broth, thin flour noodles and stir-fried vegetable toppings. It is a traditional Korean dish that has been served at large banquets and weddings.

The simplicity of the ingredients and the straightforwardness of assembling the three different components of the dish fulfill its purpose of serving hundreds of people at once. The lunchbox illustrates this simplicity and ease of assembly.

You simply pull out the two discs so that the noodles and toppings in the top two compartments fall into broth in the cup noodle-sized bowl on the bottom. Parts of this dining set serve dual purposes, such as a carrying bag which unfolds into a placemat, lids as condiment dishes and discs as chopstick rests.

This dish carries a special significance to me as my mom has always made these noodles at home, whether it was back in South Korea or in Sweden, where we currently reside. This dish is one of the family traditions that followed my family’s migration to Sweden and reminded us of our sense of home and collective Korean identity throughout our time abroad.

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chi Guksu Noodles)

Sheau Yun Lim The Roti Canai lunchbox is a custom made vessel for roti canai, a Malaysian Indian flatbread, and its three accompanying condiments –sambal, curry and dhal.

Commonly served as street food in newspapers or plastic bags and eaten with your hands, this lunchbox aims not to “elevate” but to make transportable a plate, a food and an experience for two.

The Roti Canai lunchbox 149

Monument to Lost Voices of Japanese Internment Emily Golding A collage to accompany the design of “The Monument to the Lost Voices of Japanese Internment” using Japanese paintings and textile designs, Toyo Miyatake’s photography of Manzanar, and the text of Executive order 9066, the order for internment.

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Bad Korean Kyung Me http://sunflowercat.com 152

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Rabbit Canal Kyung Me

http://sunflowercat.com 155

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Biographies Annie Cheng is a sophomore at Yale College.

Jun Yan Chua

is a senior history major in Yale College.

He is a former Opinion Editor of the Yale Daily News and a first-year counselor.

Rosa S. Chung

is a senior undergraduate studying painting and art history at Yale University.

Kristine Sungyeon Chung Edi Dai Tran Dang

Emma Dinh

is a junior in Saybrook, majoring in architecture. is a first year M.F.A. candidate at the Yale School of Art. is a junior at Yale College. She was born in Vietnam, and her family current resides in Houston, Texas. is a senior Economics major in Morse College with an interest in writing and cooking. She's enjoyed getting involved with the Asian American community at Yale, and she's very excited to see her writing in print.

Heidi Dong

is a sophomore in Morse College from Peoria, Illinois. She is studying Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology as a pre-med student and is also part of the Global Health Scholars program.

Josh Feng

is a senior at Yale studying Sociology and Chinese. He really enjoys photography as well.

Ivory Fu is a first-year student in Pauli Murray College at Yale. Her work has been featured at the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Penguin Random House Foundation Creative Writing Competition, and elsewhere.

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Emily Golding

Emily Hsee

is a senior undergraduate studying architecture; xyr work has appeared in Seltzer, Q Mag, and Paprika!. is a senior architecture major at Yale College. She is a designer at the AACC and a 295 Magazine editor.

LiLi Johnson & Courtney Sato are Ph.D. Candidates in American Studies at Yale. At the AACC, they served as Graduate Assistants from 2014-2017 and Interim Co-Directors from May 2017 to October 2017.

Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

is a first-year undergraduate of South Asian origin. Her writing has appeared in Paper Darts, Crab Fat Lit Mag, Sprout Magazine, and elsewhere.

John Lee is from the northern suburbs of Baltimore.

He took the photos of his father and his father's father in northern LA with his mother's father's 35 mm Minolta, purchased in the mid-60s.

Zishi Li is a senior at Yale College studying architecture.

Sheau Yun Lim is a junior Architecture major in the History, Theory and Criticism concentration.

Julia Ma is a junior in JE double majoring in art with a graphic design concentration and mechanical engineering.

Haewon Ma

Kyung Me

is a junior at Yale College majoring in architecture. She is the president and cofounder of YAWA. is a Painting/Printmaking MFA candidate in the School of Art. Her work can be found at http://sunflowercat.com.

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Kathy Min

is a first-year student at Yale College from Boise, Idaho. She loves politics, trying new food, and watching The Office.

Catalina Ouyang

is a first year Sculpture MFA candidate in the Yale School of Art. Her writing has appeared in River Teeth, Cura Literary Magazine, Little Fiction and the Blueshift Journal, with two Pushcart Prize nominations.

Cindy Ren is a first year undergraduate in Yale College.

Oriana Tang

is a junior English major from Livingston, New Jersey. Her poetry and prose have earned her recognition as a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts and a Davidson Fellow in Literature.

Vy Tran is a first year undergraduate at Yale College.

Monica Wang

Rebecca Yan

is a senior in Trumbull College and a double major in History and Economics. She was editor of the Yale Daily News Magazine and her work has appeared in the Yale Daily News, Forbes, and other places. is a junior in TD majoring in economics.

When she's not writing other people's Instagram captions for them, she is working on her biography project or running to East Rock Park.

Vanessa Zhang is a first-year at Yale College studying economics and pre-med. She's originally from Lexington, Massachusetts and on campus, sings in Out of the Blue a cappella and works with the Roosevelt Institute.

Holly Zhou is a senior biomedical engineering major in Silliman. In her free time, she enjoys climbing, taking photographs, and eating taro buns.

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