Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(55)
* * *
—
I can’t entirely renounce the condition of indebtedness. I am indebted to the activists who struggled before me. I am indebted to Cha. I’d rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history. I’m also indebted to my parents. But I cannot repay them by keeping my life private, or by following that privatized dream of taking what’s mine. Almost daily, my mother demanded gratitude from me. Almost weekly, my mother said we moved here so I wouldn’t have to suffer. Then she asked, “Why do you make yourself suffer?”
* * *
—
“In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s sun has set.” Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American, I felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O’Grady. I heard the ring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book. Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise.
Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence.
But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only answer that through the actions of others. As of now, I’m writing when history is being devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The administration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to fill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp survivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever happened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why didn’t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, “We need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans didn’t have in 1942.”
We were always here.
For Meret
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU TO MY AGENT, PJ Mark, for his extraordinary generosity, intelligence, and savvy. Thank you to my editor, Victory Matsui, for their compassion and rigor, and for pushing me toward a vulnerability that I couldn’t have expressed without their guidance. Thank you to Chris Jackson, for launching One World, an imprint where authors of color feel at home. A special gratitude to John Cha, Prageeta Sharma, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis for their time and bravery in sharing their stories.
A special thank-you to Adam Shecter who has looked at countless drafts with care and honesty. And for their advice, assistance, and life-giving conversations that have helped shaped this book, I wish to thank Meghan O’Rourke, Idra Novey, Monica Youn, Jen Liu, Farid Matuk, Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, Evie Shockley, Nell Freudenberger, Ghita Schwarz, Chris Chen, Claudia Rankine, Joe Winter, Julie Orringer, Ken Chen, Chelsey Johnson, Malena Watrous, Tracey Simon, my former mentors Cal Bedient, Martha Collins, and Myung Mi Kim, and my colleagues Rigoberto Gonzales, Brenda Shaughnessy, John Keene, and Jayne Ann Phillips. I also wish to thank the curatorial board of the Racial Imaginary, my students in the Race and Innovation seminar at Rutgers University–Newark MFA program, where some of my ideas for these essays gestated, and the editors at the New Republic. I also wish to thank the writers and scholars whom I haven’t had the chance to meet in person (or have met only once) but whose ideas have been instrumental to Minor Feelings: Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant, Diane Fujino, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Sara Ahmed, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Robin Bernstein, Glenda Carpio, Judith Butler, Saidiya Hartman, and Lorraine O’Grady. I am especially grateful to the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Lannan Residency at Marfa, the MacDowell Colony, Denniston Hill, and the Guggenheim Foundation for granting me the resources and time to write this book.
To my parents for always being there for me and supporting me as a writer. To my sister Nancy for her encouragement and her heart. And lastly to Mores. I could not have written this book without his support, patience, humor, and love.