Author’s note
This past year has been the most powerful yet in informing my understanding of the world I live in––both that which is personal to me and shared among all of us.
My sense of identity began to unfurl when I first visited my grandparents’ home country, Taiwan, last summer and has continued to rapidly expand since. I had returned to the United States with a greater consciousness of what it means to be “American”, and especially what it means to be a queer, biracial, and Asian American.
The Brooklyn House of Detention has already been torn down and we are in the liminal space before it is reconstructed taller and more capacious; there is an even larger project that threatens to revive what was once “The Tombs” of Chinatown, and several more in each of the boroughs of this city.
Combined with the increasingly dire conditions of the occupation of Palestine, I’ve been impelled to think ever more critically of our notions of land, nations, and carceral systems.
The Wing on Wo Project and its Resist, Recycle, Regenerate fellowship has been the one space where I have been given room to grapple with these matters that have weighed on me, and I will forever be grateful for its nourishment of my personal growth. This zine is by no means a culmination of my thoughts, but a first bud of what I have begun to articulate.
Thank you to my mom, who has always been key to documenting our family’s life so that we can remember our history; to my grandparents, who have come together to bring us to where we stand today; to Mr. Sanchez, who has inspired me throughout my high school years as a force of deep introspection into myself and my world (and provided me with the literature that has influenced this zine); and of course, to all those who have taken me in at Wing on Wo & Co. and given me a space for my identity and ideas to come to fruition.
Max McCall, June 2024
An ever-stoic bouqet
Our inherited North star a horizon that begs us to bid farewell, fly skyward, forward backwards, in circles All strings attached, creating one binding thread –a newborn–we’re going
This land is my mother, bound to be an empty-nester
I wonder if it is possible to be an American child borne into love
(I was named for a Slovakian stallion)
Held in a place sanctified to the rest of worldliness, or maybe taking up all the space in the world and pushing all else beneath it. Whiteness does not constitute a people, it is often not even an identity. It is this scheme that was at birth man-made and now almost autonomous, a runaway reaction.
I will never quite understand if it runs through me. It’s funny, expressions that involve the word “blood” when discussing such things. When blood runs, it calls out, “this is what it means for us to be real.”
(Musing over hypodescent on Qingmingjie)
...Even so, sometimes I think I feel this “mixed blood” feuding in my veins, at some kind of odds with itself while it keeps my heart pumping.
(I imagine because that is the only thing it knows must be right).
It’s funny, to think that there is actually nothing blood-borne about the dual weights I have inherited.
There is no tangible twoness within me. Whatever I am is itself––it is only the events and people that have come together to create me. But I feel it, I feel that duality every day, in that seemingly untouchable plane we have created.
“We must deal here with a dislocation of life involving millions of people, a dislocation so vast as to stagger the imagination; so fraught with tragic consequences as to make us rather not want to look at it or think of it; so old that we would rather try to view it as an order of nature and strive with uneasy conscience and false moral fervor to keep it so (…)
The very concept of injustice rests upon a premise of equal claims (…)
We marked up the earth and said, ‘Stay there!’ But life is not stationary (…)
Can the human mind devise a trap more skillful?
(…) a separate nation, stunted, stripped, and held captive within this nation, devoid of political, social, economic, and property rights” (Richard Wright, Native Son).
I watch mothers grip clothing that has been stripped from the bodies they once belonged, because there is nothing else to hold on to.
I call my A-kong to ask him about his coming to America.
He tells me that he left Taiwan with just two hundred dollars and two suits that A-mah’s family made for him. He spent the first fifty on a camera during his layover in Haneda Airport so that he could send back photos.
“When the plane took off”, he describes to me, “I thought, ‘finally, I am free. And no matter what happens, I don’t plan to go back.’”
I think of Haneda Airport, of our the first glimpses of that unknown land after twelve hours of flying over the endless Pacific, of what it means to have an American dream.
I think of his Plymouth Fury–
“When I drove that car, I could feel not only my hands control the wheel, but I could feel myself in the tires themselves.”
“There’s nothing in me that is not in everybody else,
We’re
trapped in language,
I’m saying and nothing in everybody else that is not in
language, of course (...)
I have nothing to prove.
The world also belongs to me.” (James Baldwin, 1984) me.
“I am most often rendered invisible perceived as a threat to the family or I am tolerated if I am silent and inconspicuous I cannot go home as who I am and that hurts me deeply
(...)
What is it that we see in each other that makes us avert our eyes so quickly? Do we turn away from each other in order not to see our collective anger and sadness?
It is my pain I see reflected in your eyes
Our angers ricochet between us like the bullets we fire in battles which are not our own nor with each other
The same angry face donned for safety in the white world is the same expression I bring to you I am cool and unemotional, distant from what I need most
It is easier to be furious than to be yearning easier to crucify myself in you and perhaps easiest to ingest that anger until it threatens to consume me” (Tongues Untied, 1989).
He has always had problems sleeping at night
And as dusk approaches, he begins to feel more invigorated than he did during his sleepy day
And as he crawls into bed at night, he is filled with the urge to escape from the house after another day spent a homebody
He begins to experience an insatiable hunger, and as the hours pass, he is left restless, with a growling belly that seems to know that its mothers were supposed to have eaten at that time
He thinks that he is hard-wired for another home that has never been his own his blood knowing he is meant to be moving, very conscious, during these hours on Earth
And he thinks bitterly that it’s nice to know that at that moment, thousands of miles directly through the planet’s core to the land on the opposite side, there are clouds rolling on a blue sky, and green grass that drips with morning dew where he is sure his soul resides
He stays restless, immobile, in bed.
This America is but a fledgling.
These
hegemonic habits of punishment and power have become our private compulsions
Threatening to spill out,
to soil our mutual images of one another.
Tell me how you take me in Are we ill-equipped to see through our collective skin?
How does it feel to be but a far, impossible leap away from the world?
It seemingly vanished overnight.
I stepped outside one day and walked down the block to face it but was met with a vast sky instead of gray walls and a gray tower.
I had never seen such a blue filling the colors of this city. We have never been so removed from our home.
The Brooklyn House of Detention
