Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(26)
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I am now in the habit of collecting bad English. I browse Engrish.com, a gag site that uploads photographs of mistranslated English from East Asian countries. The images are separated into signs (“Please No Conversation, No Saliva”), T-shirts (“I feel a happiness when I eat Him”), and menus (“roasted husband”). The most viewed image is a cartoon ad of a popular sweet tapioca pearl beverage with the caption “I’m Bubble Tea! Suck my Balls!”
I steal these lines and use them in my poetry. Take the phrase “I feel a happiness when I eat him.” It has all the traits of a surprising poetic line. A familiar sentiment is now unfamiliar because chance has turned Error into Eros. That needless “a” is crucial since it tweaks the tone into a slightly sinister animatronic pitch while indicating that the lover is not awash in happiness but feels happiness at a remove. Like an extra tooth, that “a” forces open a bead of uncertainty, or cold reflection, while she takes into consideration her happiness. She is not sure why she is happy, but she is, as she eats him.
One day, I was browsing through the T-shirt category. I happened upon an image of a young Chinese boy innocently wearing a shirt branded with the word “Poontang.” This photo triggered my own memory of the time I arrived in elementary school wearing a Playboy Bunny T-shirt. I had completely forgotten about it. Thinking of that memory, I was made sharply aware of the people who were taking these photos: backpackers traveling through Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China—white and Asian American tourists. Outsiders who were at home treating the natives like they were the outsiders.
English is our ever-expanding neoliberal lingua franca, the consumer language of brand recognition and outsourced labor. The more developing the nation, the more in need that nation is of a copy editor. When I lived in Seoul for a year in 2005, I too snapped photographs of the Engrishisms that plastered storefronts like bad wallpaper. But I was also disturbed by how much globalization has led to English cannibalizing Korean. Reading a sign in Hangul characters, I slowly sounded out an unfamiliar word, only to realize that the word was lipo-suk-shen. A friend told me that teenage couples preferred saying “I love you” in English rather than the Korean equivalent because they thought it was a truer expression of their love.
Apparently, Asian children innocently wearing profanity-laden T-shirts were at some point an Internet meme. I found images of a young girl wearing a sweater of Mickey Mouse giving the finger; a kindergartner wearing a sleeveless “Wish you were Beer”; a forlorn boy sitting on the bleachers in a “Who the Fuck is Jesus” sweater.
I thought, I have found my people.
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It was once a source of shame, but now I say it proudly: bad English is my heritage. I share a literary lineage with writers who make the unmastering of English their rallying cry—who queer it, twerk it, hack it, Calibanize it, other it by hijacking English and warping it to a fugitive tongue. To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.
In the essay “Other: From Noun to Verb,” the poet Nathaniel Mackey draws a distinction between the noun other, which is social, and the verb other, which is artistic:
Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a noun against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.
Mackey borrows his title from Amiri Baraka, who aptly defines the history of white musicians profiting off of black music as turning “a verb into a noun.” For instance, swing, the verb, meaning reacting to music, was a black innovation, before white musicians stole and encased it in the commercial brand Swing. Mackey demands we wrest back the white man’s noun and return it to a verb by “breaking into” the colonizer’s English and alchemizing new words out of local vernacular. My own method of othering English is to eat English before it eats me. In that process we might eat each other like a scene out of Park Chan-wook’s film Oldboy, where a man marches into a sushi restaurant and orders a live octopus, which comes whole and slithering on a plate. He tries to stuff the entire octopus into his mouth but it’s too big. The cephalopod covers his whole face while cinching its tentacles around his head so that he can’t breathe. Eventually, he passes out.
On good writing days, I am the octopus.
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My mother’s English has remained rudimentary during her forty-plus years living in the United States. When she speaks Korean, my mother speaks her mind. She is sharp, witty, and judgmental, if rather self-preening. But her English is a crush of piano keys that used to make me cringe whenever she spoke to a white person. As my mother spoke, I watched the white person, oftentimes a woman, put on a fright mask of strained tolerance: wide eyes frozen in trapped patience, smile widened in condescension. As she began responding to my mother in a voice reserved for toddlers, I stepped in.
From a young age, I learned to speak for my mother as authoritatively as I could. Not only did I want to dispel the derision I saw behind that woman’s eyes, I wanted to shame her with my sobering fluency for thinking what she was thinking. I have been partly drawn to writing, I realize, to judge those who have unfairly judged my family; to prove that I’ve been watching this whole time.