Joan Is Okay(43)

Was it harder to be a woman? Or an immigrant? Or a Chinese person outside of China? And why did being a good any of the above require you to edit yourself down so you could become someone else?

As my brother liked to point out, the cycle was vicious and unending. The Mayflower carried the first Americans, but newcomers seen as too foreign are so often labeled “fresh off the boat.” Immigrants become settlers who go on to call out the new immigrants. The Mayflower was centuries ago, I’d said, making excuses, I suppose, for the Mayflower. What about the railroads? he replied. The gold rush wasn’t so long ago. Fang cared about U.S. history way more than I did and had sat me down before for lessons.

Following the gold rush, after the completion of the railroads, the Chinese accounted for 0.002 percent of the U.S. population but were blamed for stealing American jobs. Entire communities were massacred, entire groups of Chinese men, women, kids. To solve the problem of job theft and thus the massacres, exclusion laws were enacted for the next sixty-some years. The women were banned first, as few were believed to have come to America for honorable work. Whores. Concubines. Hard not to wonder if the ban’s more insidious motive was breeding—remove the women first, tarnished already, and you stem an unwanted population. After the men were banned, no Chinese were allowed into the country or allowed to return if they’d left. Chinatowns, Chinese food, the red gates of equality that sometimes led to dingy streets where the aliens, or so the leftover Chinese were known, could retreat. The first immigrants were barred from citizenship, owning property, and marrying outside of their race. A woman took the citizenship of her husband then, so equally unfortunate for the Chinaman who could not gain citizenship was the woman who, if born here, would lose hers for marrying him. And who would’ve married the long-suffering Chinaman then, except for the longer-suffering Chinawoman? By no coincidence, the year the ban was lifted was at the end of the Second World War, when China was our ally against Japan and a third of the Japanese population in America, mostly citizens, had already been interned. As a token of thanks, the Chinese were granted paths to citizenship, and for the next twenty years, the annual immigration quota for the Chinese was raised to a generous 105, a number that still worried some Americans who believed if you give those greedy aliens an inch, they will take a mile.

U.S. history was appalling, but I also didn’t know what my brother expected me to do about it. These events predated us and our parents. We weren’t descendants of railroad workers or the first Chinatown restaurateurs.

Nothing to do with us? he’d say. How many ethnic groups has this country ever banned? History repeats itself. Asians are often pitted against other Asians, and even citizenship can’t always save you.

If history did repeat itself, then I needed only to wait for the next round to experience the trauma firsthand. Though maybe the next round was now in my exile from the hospital, the city, apartment 9A, and a virus problem on the other side of the world.

A daughter of immigrants is the daughter of guests, is a part-time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow. She stays in a guesthouse.

Asians are often pitted against other Asians—when my brother broached the subject, I didn’t give it another second of thought because medicine still strove to reward merit and the system had treated me well. But at every application gate and interview, I was not so subtly reminded that I wasn’t competing against white or black Americans, I was competing against the Koreans, the Japanese, and other Chinese Americans vying for the exact same spot.

Quotas haven’t gone away, nor have the large groups of us willing to race against time and one another, but never call ourselves a race.

Proud to be an American, a feeling that I lacked but also a phrase that I didn’t think applied to me.

So, othering, did that term apply to me and was it what I’d internalized? Whenever I heard news of deportation or the line that people must enter the legal way, fear of my own removal would start to reflux. Then I had to remind myself that I was born here, that this land was as much mine as it was theirs. But were these facts written on my face? Was my being born here and my parents’ legal arrival carved into our facial features or the color of our skin? And even if I hadn’t been born here, had I been one of those kids brought over by her parents at age two, five, twelve, then naturalized, what made them and their families any less American if they were the most American of all things—fresh off the boat, in search of better days?

Little you can do about which era or group you’re set into here, was another direct line that I could draw. An immigrant family controls nothing, and so raises two average children obsessed with gaining it back, albeit in different ways. The same trait that I was criticizing Fang for was what I liked about attending intensive care units. A ring of twenty beds, an entire wing of the hospital, all under my domain.



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SLEEP NEVER CAME, SO I just lay there for hours, watching light come in through the window, through the blinds. I looked for cracks in the ceiling (none found). I started to hear not street noise, as in New York, but small, faint sounds—the breeze of a passing car, maybe that cab and its driver.

Then I got up and washed my face.

The kitchen windows were fogged, and as I was wiping off the condensation, I could vaguely make out two figures coming down the footpath from the main house under a giant black umbrella. When the aide and my mother came inside, they dusted off their thick coats and collapsed the umbrella with the push of a button. My mother was holding a small pot; the aide, a tray of tiny dishes.