Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(50)
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We’re everywhere now. We have taken over Orange County. Some of us are even rich housewives in Orange County. The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing opening scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: if you discriminate against us, we’ll make more money than you and buy your fancy hotel that wouldn’t let us in. Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn’t that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it’s through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?
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I began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to see what throbbed beneath it. This was harder than I thought, like butterflying my brain out onto a dissection table to tweeze out the nerves that are my inhibitions. Moreover, I had to contend with this we. I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them. But I feared the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.
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I never finished my father’s story about the war. After the interpreter recognized my uncle as an old friend from school, the interpreter turned to the American soldiers and spoke to them in their strange language. Like magic, the GIs eased their guns. My father was astonished by the power of the English language. After they tried to shoot my grandfather in his own home, these giants dug into their rucksack to give my father a round blue tin of Charms Sour Balls. My father popped a sugar-crusted molecule of cherry, lemon, and lime balls into his mouth and was stunned by the firework of flavors.
The wretched of the earth know this candy. Hershey’s doled out after a firefight, M&Ms handed out before a raid. Americans sprayed Dum Dums lollies from a fighter helicopter and the children of Afghanistan ran after the chopper with their arms raised. Sometimes candy was used as a trick. In Vietnam, bored guards planted candy under barbed wire so they could watch street kids lacerate themselves trying to grab it. More recently, two U.S. marines were handing out sweets to four Iraqi kids when they were all killed, ambushed by a suicide bomber. In 2003, during the Iraq invasion, the U.S. marines threw out the Charms that came with their MREs because they believed they were a curse. A lemon Charm meant a vehicle breakdown; a raspberry Charm meant death. Abandoned packets of Charms scattered the roads of southern Iraq. No one would touch them.
But the hearts of South Koreans were won.
Sow the cratered lands with candy and from its wrappers will rise Capitalism and Christianity. About her homeland, the poet Emily Jungmin Yoon writes, “Our cities today glow with crosses like graveyards.”
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Throughout my life, I had felt the weight of indebtedness. I was born into a deficit because I was a daughter rather than the son to replace my parents’ dead son. I continued to depreciate in value with each life decision I made that did not follow my parents’ expectations. Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted.
If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.
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Indebtedness is not the same thing as gratitude. In his poetry, Ross Gay gives thanks to small moments in his life: tasting the “velvety heart” of a fig, drinking cold water cranked from a rusty red pump; he even gives thanks to his ugly feet, though when they’re bare, his feet make him so self-conscious he digs “his toes like twenty tiny ostriches into the sand.” To truly feel gratitude is to sprawl out into the light of the present. It is happiness, I think.
To be indebted is to fixate on the future. I tense up after good fortune has landed on my lap like a bag of tiny excitable lapdogs. But whose are these? Not mine, surely! I treat good fortune not as a gift but a loan that I will have to pay back in weekly installments of bad luck. I bet I’m like this because I was raised wrong—browbeaten to perform compulsory gratitude. Thank you for sacrificing your life for me! In return, I will sacrifice my life for you!
I have rebelled against all that. As a result, I have developed the worst human trait: I am ungrateful. This book too is ungrateful. In my defense, a writer who feels indebted often writes ingratiating stories. Indebted, that is, to this country—to whom I, on the other hand, will always be ungrateful.