Evan Li | An Ekphrastic Asian Melancholia | Memoir

anekphrastic asian Evan Li

When she looks into the iPhone, face covered by a white facial mask and hands clasped around her neck, there is something in her eyes. It is ungraspable, a shadow thrown upon her retinas, a ghostly haunting. I took this photo of my mom in our home in Charlotte. I remember it was one of those slow days when school had just started, and I, having been frustrated by my first attempt at this photograph, wanted to try again. The photo was my meditation upon the recent upsurge and awareness of anti-Asian hate in the United States. Before movements like #StopAsianHate or #BLM, I had been blissfully ignorant of the racism that still permeated American society. A school survey once asked the question, “Has anyone discriminated against you because of your race?” I had answered no. I had not lied, or at least I did not think that I had lied. Perhaps such utter unawareness was because I had been told that racism was a thing confined to the past. Something that wallowed at the very fringes of civil society. Maybe it was because my family refused to talk about discrimination (the only time I had heard it mentioned was when my parents had complained about the coronavirus being called the Chinese virus). Racism is everywhere, found in a thousand points of tension. In every uncomfortable cringe I have when my parents struggle to speak in broken English. In every one of my thoughts about my narrow eyes. It is difficult to admit that the world has not been shaped for me or you. Does not bend, but contradicts our individual contours. But opening my eyes after weeks of internal grappling, I could not deny that it was my reality. I began a feverous search for books on Asian identity and how it operated in American society (perhaps to make up the years I had ignored it). It was during this time that I discovered Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation. Using Freud’s theory of loss, David Eng and Shinhee Han argued that Asian immigrants, and immigrants as a whole, exist in a state of melancholia, where they perpetually grieve the loss of their homeland but also never attain total assimilation into their new country. This idea of assimilation as a psychological process fascinated me, and so I wanted to portray it. It was looking through Carl Jung’s archetypes of the mask, the personality we show in public, and the shadow, every trait we have cast into oblivion, that I took the photograph. In it, the facial mask represents the persona of whiteness that Asian Americans feel forced to wear. The shadows everywhere else portray the heritage and homeland many have discarded and repressed. We can chase whiteness forever, but we will never truly attain it, and if we get anything, it will never be more than a mask. We are born of emperors, of spiraling temples, mosques, palaces, of jade, gold, and billowing silk. We will no longer exist as shadows.