Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(8)

I had unresolved feelings that extended beyond her. Maybe I was undergoing a kind of transference, to use the psychoanalytic parlance, but was she supposed to be my mother, my lover, or—what? After that phone call, I wrote an angry evaluation on RateMyTherapist to get back at her. In my long screed, I started taking my resentment out not only on her, but on Koreans as a whole. “Koreans are repressed! Rigid! Cold! They should not be allowed to work in the mental health care profession!” I banged out. I clicked submit, but for some reason my long unsaved rant never posted. It dissolved into the ether.



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The writer Jeff Chang writes that “I want to love us” but he says that he can’t bring himself to do that because he doesn’t know who “us” is. I share that uncertainty. Who is us? What is us? Is there even such a concept as an Asian American consciousness? Is it anything like the double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois established over a century ago? The paint on the Asian American label has not dried. The term is unwieldy, cumbersome, perched awkwardly upon my being. Since the late sixties, when Asian American activists protested with the Black Panthers, there hasn’t been a mass movement we can call our own. Will “we,” a pronoun I use cautiously, solidify into a common collective, or will we remain splintered, so that some of us remain “foreign” or “brown” while others, through wealth or intermarriage, “pass” into whiteness?



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    A week after Trump’s election, I had to fly out to Kalamazoo, Michigan, for a reading. I sat next to a young South Asian man who was exceedingly polite to the flight attendant, enunciating his “ma’am” and “please” and “thank you.” Was he always like this or was he being cautious? After the plane landed, while I was struggling to extract my rollaboard from the overhead, a bull-necked white guy in a Michigan football jersey growled “Excuse me” and shoved past me. Was he just being rude or was he acting like this because I was Asian?

I’ve been living in Brooklyn way too long.

As my car ride sped past bleak concrete stretches of strip malls—an Outback Steakhouse, a Costco-sized Family Christian Store—I saw a handwritten cardboard “4 Trump” sign whipping ominously on a streetlight against the blustery November sky. I’d held no strong opinions about Michigan before, but after the state went to Trump, clear lines were drawn. I was in enemy territory.

I was then surprised by the audience at Western Michigan University, which was more racially mixed than I had anticipated. The crowd seemed as upset as I was. That week, Republican senators were using the Japanese internment camps as precedent to justify the Muslim registry. I talked about the internment camps and how history must not be repeated. Then I read an essay from this book. A few students of color sat up front and approached me afterwards to tell me how much they appreciated the reading. Among them, a Korean American student said how alone and alienated she felt on campus. She asked if she could hug me. When I hugged her, she began sobbing. It is for her, I thought, that I’m writing this book.

    Then a white woman in her seventies came up to me. She was a gaunt, unsmiling, flinty-looking woman, her two hands gripping a cane.

“I want to thank you for mentioning the internment camps. I was a POW in the Philippines during the war,” she said. “I came from a family of missionaries. We were all imprisoned even though I was a child. The Japanese soldiers threatened to torture us because of what the U.S. were doing to their Japanese American citizens. What Trump is proposing is wrong. He’s putting us all in danger.”

After I thanked her for her story, she gave me a hard look.

“I wish you’d read your poems,” she said sternly. “We need poems to heal.”

“I’m not ready to heal,” I said as gently as I could because I was afraid how she’d respond.

She nodded.

“I respect that,” she said, and walked away.



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    More than three million Koreans died in the Korean War, roughly 10 percent of the population. Among them, untold numbers of innocent civilians were killed because they were in the way or were mistaken for Communist collaborators. During that war, my father was at home with his family when they heard a pounding at their door. Before they could react, American soldiers broke into their shack. The GIs kicked down earthenware jars of soy paste and trampled their bedding to shreds. In a matter of minutes, their home was in shambles. The soldiers boomed out orders in their alien language. But no one could understand anything. “What do they want?” the family asked one another frantically. “Why are they here?” The soldiers gestured at my grandfather to go outside. These gigantic men dwarfed my grandfather. Still, my grandfather was noncompliant. He kept asking, in Korean, “What do you want from us? We did nothing wrong!” Finally, one of the soldiers rifle-butted my grandfather in the head and dragged him out of his own house.

The whole family followed them outside, into the courtyard, and my grandfather kept pleading in Korean. The soldier fired a warning shot into the ground to shut him up. He, along with the rest of the family, was ordered to lie on the ground with his hands behind his head. The soldier cocked his gun and aimed it at my grandfather’s head. And then my father’s older brother recognized the soldiers’ translator, who arrived at that moment. They had gone to school together. My uncle called out to the translator, who recognized him as well. The translator told the American soldiers their intel was mistaken. These villagers were not Communists but innocent civilians. They had the wrong people.