Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(38)
“That’s because she was crazy,” Erin said.
“Well, yes,” I said, “but you spent all your waking hours with her. Surely you must have memories of you guys just hanging out. Or profound conversations you had about art? That would be great.”
“You know my memory sucks,” Erin said. “We were in that Heidegger independent studies group. Remember that?”
“That was awful,” I groaned.
“I don’t think so. It was beautiful how serious we were about improving our intellect.”
I recall Helen, Erin, and myself sitting at Campus Diner, struggling through Being and Time. I felt anxious and claustrophobic at the time. As Helen and Erin were pontificating about Dasein, I thought, We have no clue what any of this means.
“Do you remember anything else?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Erin. “You spent as much time with her as I did.”
“No, I didn’t. I was always the third wheel.”
“I doubt that. Helen was intimidated by you.”
“Please.”
“We knew what we wanted to be,” Erin said. “She didn’t know who she was.”
“I mean, she did move around a lot.”
“She had no culture,” said Erin, “so she took from other people’s cultures.”
“You know, I don’t think she ever lost her shit around her white friends.”
“Yeah, well,” Erin said ruefully, “we were family.”
* * *
—
In truth, I was too neurotic for art. I was frustrated I couldn’t translate the image in my mind into an art object. With poetry, I didn’t have to realize the image as anything else but as that idea on the page. In fact, I began writing poetry as an ekphrastic description of all my irreproducible art. The lyric was the pure possibility of what my art could be if I had infinite resources to not merely build an object, but create a world.
Erin and I enrolled in Myung Mi Kim’s poetry workshop. She was a visiting professor in her late thirties, a ministerial-looking woman with closely cropped hair and a long black skirt. That first day, she gave a talk on silence that ripped the page of literary history in half for me. She talked about how the circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back. The poem is a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather than the perfectly formed phrase. Attention to silence is itself an interrogation. In the case of Paul Celan, a Jewish German poet who lost his family in the Holocaust, Kim said, “He was navigating between the impossibility of utterance and finding the means in which to utter.”
Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to “translate” my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience. No other mentor afterwards was as emphatic about this idea as her. Illegibility was a political act. In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it the way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet. When Kim first read my poems, she said, “Why are you imitating someone else’s speech patterns?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “What is your earliest memory of language? Write a poem from that memory.”
A friend and poet, Eugene Ostashevsky, said that “if you knock English enough, it becomes a door to another language.” This is what Myung Mi Kim first taught me: to knock at English, using what I considered my ineloquence—my bilingualism, my childhood struggles with English—and fuse that into my own collection of lexemes that came closest to my conflicted consciousness.
* * *
—
I was the beneficiary of a mid-to-late-nineties college education, when multiculturalism was having its swan song. My most brilliant friends and professors were people of color. I took it for granted that a class should have a diverse reading list. Of course I learned about black conceptual artists like Adrian Piper alongside Bruce Nauman in studio art classes. Of course I read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha alongside William Carlos Williams in poetry class. I didn’t study the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Pe?a because I needed a sample of the “Chicano experience” like a vitamin supplement. I studied these writers and artists because they were the most interesting thinkers.
Erin, Helen, and I parried ideas between us and then applied them to whatever medium we were working in. Whatever we did in our studio, in the library, in our notebooks, onstage, on the streets—wherever—was art. We didn’t think disciplines had to be isolated. Inspired by Myung Mi Kim’s class, Erin made her own books, repurposing the covers of old engineering texts, and filled them with her minimalist poems. Inspired by Erin’s and Helen’s work, I decided to do a poetry performance as a “site-specific” installation. I found an old unused basketball court beneath a dorm building that was flooded after a rain. That space had the glorious smell of mildew and half a foot of green rainwater that reflected the nets. I thought that I was cheating because I didn’t have to do anything; the space itself was so mysterious and so full of absence. I planned out my performance, including the plastic baggies that people would wear to wade into the rainwater, and then, the day before the performance, to my horror, there was a gigantic sump pump suctioning out all the water. When I freaked out, Helen said, “Let’s fill it back up.” Later that night, she helped me reflood the basement with a hose.