Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(53)
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I had my twenty-eighth birthday party in Seoul, and celebrated it at my sister’s little apartment with four of our new Korean friends, who were noise musicians. My sister and I went to their shows in tiny back-alley clubs where onstage one of them would sit on a folding chair and click on their laptop while an ongoing buzzing sound, with occasional blips and screeches and snares, would emit from the stereo system. At my sister’s, when we were already drunk, they proposed a drinking game and I suggested we play “Never Have I Ever.” This is a game where people take turns declaring an act they’ve never done before, and anyone who has done it has to drink. It’s a game that often starts with the mildly embarrassing (“Never have I ever peed in the shower,” for instance) before it drops off the precipice into the frank and sexual. I thought I would begin with a silly question so they would get the hang of it, before one of the musicians, the one who called himself Fish, with a hipster mid-aughts mullet and black plugs in his earlobes, announced that he’d start. He raised his shot glass of soju.
“I have never tried to kill myself,” he declared, and downed his glass.
The other musicians clinked their glasses and also downed their drinks. There was nowhere to go after that, so we stopped playing.
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I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists used to say, “I am here because you were there.”
I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon, David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a double-eyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.
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I was never satisfied with those immigrant talking points about “not belonging” and “the sense of in-betweenness.” It seemed rigid and rudimentary, like I just need the right GPS coordinates to find myself. But I also understand the impulse to search for some origin myth of the self, even if it’s shaped by the stories told to us, which is why I keep returning to Seoul in my memories, to historical facts that are obscure to most and obvious to few, to try to find better vantage points to justify my feelings here. In Seoul, I still found myself cleaved, but at least it wasn’t reduced to broad American talking points. At least the “arsenal of complexes” that Frantz Fanon talks about was laid bare.
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Upon my return to the United States, the air thinned; my breath shallowed. As the scholar Seo-Young Chu puts it, I was exiled back to the uncanny valley, where I was returned to my silicon mold and looked out of monolid eyes. To be a writer, then, is to fill myself in with content. To make myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human and a little more relevant to American culture. But that’s not enough for me.
Poetry is a forgiving medium for anyone who’s had a strained relationship with English. Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry. The poet Louise Glück called the lyric a ruin. The lyric as ruin is an optimal form to explore the racial condition, because our unspeakable losses can be captured through the silences built into the lyric fragment. I have relied on those silences, maybe too much, leaving a blank space for the sorrows that would otherwise be reduced by words. “It is horrible to be tangible inside capital,” said the poet Jos Charles. I used to think I’d rather leave a blank space for my pain than have it be easily summed up for consumption. But by turning to prose, I am cluttering that silence to try to anatomize my feelings about a racial identity that I still can’t examine as a writer without fretting that I have caved to my containment.
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Our respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our thoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except others in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human is not enough for me. I want to destroy the universal. I want to rip it down. It is not whiteness but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority. By we I mean nonwhites, the formerly colonized; survivors, such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have already lived through end times; migrants and refugees living through end times currently, fleeing the droughts and floods and gang violence reaped by climate change that’s been brought on by Western empire.