Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(28)
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Rather than “speaking about” a culture outside your experience, the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests we “speak nearby.” In an interview for Artforum, Trinh says:
When you decide to speak nearby, rather than speak about, the first thing you need to do is to acknowledge the possible gap between you and those who populate your film: in other words, to leave the space of representation open so that, although you’re very close to your subject, you’re also committed to not speaking on their behalf, in their place or on top of them. You can only speak nearby, in proximity (whether the other is physically present or absent), which requires that you deliberately suspend meaning, preventing it from merely closing and hence leaving a gap in the formation process. This allows the other person to come in and fill that space as they wish. Such an approach gives freedom to both sides and this may account for it being taken up by filmmakers who recognize in it a strong ethical stance. By not trying to assume a position of authority in relation to the other, you are actually freeing yourself from the endless criteria generated with such an all-knowing claim and its hierarchies in knowledge.
I turned to the modular essay because I am only capable of “speaking nearby” the Asian American condition, which is so involuted that I can’t stretch myself across it. The more I try to pin it, the more it escapes my grasp. I tried to write about it as a lyric poem, but the lyric, to me, is a stage, a pedestal from which I throw my voice to point out what I’m not (the curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you’re not that you never arrive at what you are). I admit that I sometimes still find the subject, Asian America, to be so shamefully tepid that I am eager to change it—which is why I have chosen this episodic form, with its exit routes that permit me to stray. But I always return, from a different angle, which is my own way of inching closer to it.
If I’m going to write nearby my Asian American condition, however, I feel compelled to write nearby other racial experiences. Students have asked me, “How do I write about racial identity without always reacting to whiteness?” The automatic answer is “Tell your story.” But this too can be a reaction to whiteness, since white publishers want “the Muslim experience” or “the black experience.” They want ethnicity to be siloed because it’s easier to understand, easier to brand. Ever since I started writing, I was not just interested in telling my story but also in finding a form—a way of speech—that decentered whiteness. I settled on bad English because, as the artist Gregg Bordowitz said about radical art, it bypasses social media algorithms and consumer demographics by bringing together groups who wouldn’t normally be in the same room together.
You can’t tweet bad English. If I tweeted a line from my poem, it would sink like a lead balloon. Bad English is best shared offline, in a book or performed live; it’s an interactive diction that must be read aloud to be understood, but even if I don’t quite understand it, those chewy syllables just feel familial to me, no matter the cultural source, which is why it brings together racial groups outside whiteness. But bad English is a dying art because the Internet demands we write clear, succinct poems that stop us mid-scroll. If you want to truly understand someone’s accented English, you have to slow down and listen with your body. You have to train your ears and offer them your full attention. The Internet doesn’t have time for that.
So as long as it lasts, I want to write nearby Rodrigo Toscano, who pulls his Spanglish phonetic syllables apart like taffy (“tha’ vahnahnah go-een to keel joo”) or LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, who recombines black slang, Japanese, Spanish, Chamorro, and Tagalog into a remastered Afro-Futurist song (“…bubblegum kink a Sheik’s interloper. A radical since 1979. / a brujo. A tommy gun. A werewolf.”). I can’t speak for the Latinx experience, but I can write about my bad English nearby Toscano’s bad English while providing gaps between passages for the reader to stitch a thread between us.
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Wu Tsang is a half-Chinese trans artist who has a long, feminine face and warm brown empathic eyes. She ties her hair in a topknot like a modern dancer and wears loose oversized tank tops that bare her toned, sinewy shoulders. She looks otherworldly and earthy at the same time, like she could either be a woodland sylph or a sincere RA talking about the importance of safe spaces.
In 2012, Wu made a documentary, Wildness, that begins with tracking shots of L.A. at dusk, the most magical time. Shadows are liberated, adding depth to a city otherwise flattened by the oppressive sun. Against the sky’s phosphorous pink glow, streetlights awaken, at first softly, but then, as darkness descends, their white beams become so eerily incandescent, empty streets look like airstrips for a UFO landing. Strip malls recede into night and neon signs come to life, from storefront Helvetica to the art deco hieroglyphs that grace the tops of hotels. I see illuminated the verdigris terraced crown of the iconic Bullocks Wilshire tower right outside Koreatown. My mother had a friend who worked the jewelry counter, so she visited often, sometimes dragging me along. I recall being surrounded by white women in various stages of undress while my mother tried on pants in an open dressing room. Then, in 1992, looters broke into the building, leaving a confetti of broken glass on its travertine floors, and the department store closed for good.