Margins, issue ii: Ghosts by dukeaaswg

table of contents 2

Land Acknowledgement

Margins Team and Thank Yous

Foreword

The Quimby Road Jogger | S.Z. (cw: reference to gun violence)

What does it mean to be (Asian) American? | Jiahui Shen (cw: anti-Blackness, Indigenous genocide, discriminatory policies, deportation, ICE, xenophobia)

ghost lottery | Shania Khoo

Forgetting: for my mother | Mona Tong (cw: xenophobia, discriminatory immigration policies, hate crimes)

Growth Spurt | Holly Ren (cw: reference to child abuse)

Symmetry | Carrie Wang (cw: xenophobia)

Old Haunts | Lindsey Shi

transfixed | Theo Cai (cw: references to transphobic violence and death)

Gui | Jerry Wang

New Year’s Eve | Tiff Wei (cw: homophobia, transphobia, suicidal ideation)

m(other) | Tiff Wei (cw: homophobia, transphobia, suicidal ideation)

we love you | Shailen Parmar (cw: anxiety, panic attacks)

:0 | Elayna Lei

ghost | christina w. (cw: disordered eating, references to miscarriage, xenophobia, and sexual harrassment)

Self-portrait as the ghost of 奶奶’s gallery | Lucy Zheng

To the highly vocal ghosts | 魏新琳

Ghosts Reading List | curated by Celine Wei

front cover: Lucy Zheng, Celine Wei, Rachel Qu, Elayna Lei, Shania Khoo, Sebin Jeon back cover: Shania Khoo

We would like to respectfully recognize and acknowledge that we are on the traditional, ancestral, stolen, current lands of the Catawba Nation and Shakori Tribe. This process is a way of honoring and expressing gratitude for the Catawba and Shakori Peoples who have been and continue to be on this land. Readers, we ask that you reflect on the histories of the peoples of the lands you occupy as the entire United States is built on top of Indigenous communities.

The ability to create this publication here in Durham and at Duke is predicated on the dispossession and genocide of the Indigenous Peoples who lived and continue to live with this land. Beginning in at least 1880 (according to archival records), students from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were enrolled within Trinity College’s special “Cherokee Industrial School.” The federal government offered financial incentives to schools around the country, including Trinity College, to assimilate indigenous students into Euro-American culture and strip them of their culture in the infamous “boarding schools.” At Duke, we fail to support Indigenous students and people through a lack of Indigenous faculty, classes, and administration. In spite of the lack of visibility, reparations, and Duke’s deliberate or ignorant silence in confronting its colonial history, Indigenous students continuously work to decolonize and reclaim their space. Only recently did space at Duke and recognition by Duke emerge, such as the Wekit, a new space in the Center for Multicultural Affairs in the Bryan Center for the Native American Student Alliance and Native students on campus, and the start of a hiring process for Indigenous faculty. But this can only be the start. As settlers and non-native people on Turtle Island, we — the Asian American Studies Working Group and the Margins Publication Team — benefit from the ongoing dispossession and colonization of Indigenous Peoples on this continent. In order to act in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, it is our responsibility to proactively challenge and dismantle colonialist and imperialist thought and behavior in our communities. Additionally, the theme for this year, “Ghosts,” is largely inspired by Indigenous people and academics doing important theoretical work on settler colonialism and the ghosts that unsettle us. These spectres haunt us and refuse to stop until we decolonize. We must recognize that we as Asians and Asian Americans are complicit in settler colonialism as settlers on this land and that our struggles for social justice may not align with struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. But because we are settlers on stolen land, the leadership and priorities of Indigenous people come first. While a land acknowledgment alone is not enough, it is an important social justice and decolonial practice that promotes Indigenous visibility and a reminder that we are on unceded Indigenous land. Let this be an opening for all of us to contemplate ways to join in decolonial and Indigenous movements for sovereignty and self-determination. We urge that you not stop at realization and reflection but actively and continuously find ways to support Indigenous peoples in their struggles for liberation. INDIGENOUS ORGS TO SUPPORT: Duke Native American Student Alliance: https://www.facebook.com/DukeNASA North Carolina Native American Youth Organization: http://ncnayo.weebly.com Native Youth Sexual Health Network: http://nativeyouthsexualhealth.com Kahea: The Hawaiian-Environmental Network: http://kahea.org Unist’ot’en Camp: https://unistoten.camp The Red Nation: https://therednation.org INDIGENOUS FOLKS TO FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Allen, @lilnativeboy Ruth Hopkins, @ruthH_Hopkins Jisu, @dearnonnatives Terisa Siagatonu, @terisasiagatonu Dr. Adrienne Keene, @NativeApprops Dr. Eve Tuck, @tuckeve Seeding Sovereignty, @SeedSovereignty Chelsea Vowel (âpihtawikosisân), @apihtawikosisan C. Ree, @reetown on Instagram

margins margins team team Afreen Ashraf she/her/hers Theo Cai he/they Meghna Datta she/her/hers Sebin Jeon she/her/hers Shania Khoo she/they David Lee he/him/his Elizabeth Lee she/her/hers Elayna Lei she/her/hers Deney Li she/her/hers Amber Park she/her/hers Irene Park she/her/hers Rachel Qu she/her/hers Miriam Shams-Rainey she/they Jiahui Shen he/him/his Lindsey Shi she/her/hers Mona Tong she/her/hers Carrie Wang she/her/hers Celine Wei she/her/hers Ami Wong she/her/hers Lucy Zheng she/her/hers

thank you! We are beyond grateful for each and every person involved in the process of creating the second issue of Margins. Thank you to the Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program for supporting us and funding the printing of this publication. Thank you to everyone who submitted art and prose and analyses. Thank you for sharing your ghosts that haunt, follow, comfort, and torment. Thank you for being brave with us, for facing your fears with us. Thank you for contributing to this ongoing knowledgelearning-creating process.

Last year, we created Margins as an invitation to and intervention into Asian/American communities at Duke. Margins invited Asian/Americans to engage in more nuanced, critical conversations about identity and power. Margins intervened into Asian/American communities that have and continue to remain complicit and passive in the face of injustice and/or have contributed actively to our oppression and the oppression of others. With Margins, we have learned, grown, and created from the margins, for the margins, in hopes of (re)politicizing the Asian/American identity. We have expanded our vocabulary to better understand how we, as Asian/Americans, navigate our varying positionalities and experiences in a racialized, sexualized, classed society. Throughout 2020 and 2021, our lives have been marked by a national (re)intervention into issues of anti-Blackness and racial injustice of carceral systems and by a global pandemic that has exposed the lasting and living legacies of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. In these moments, we have seen how necessary revolutionary love, care, healing, and growth are in expanding our imaginations and reshaping our worlds. As the Asian American Studies Working Group and Margins Team, we have learned to embrace being and collaborating in separation, creating alternative virtual spaces in order to sustain our work, ourselves, and our communities. Our second issue of Margins aptly follows last year’s theme of Bodies as we consider the hauntings, longings, and sightings of Ghosts. Ghosts opens up the realm of the subconscious, of history, of Bodies of a past time. All around us, Ghosts linger–familiar as family, terrifying as what goes bump in the night, mysterious as what hides unheard and unseen–and shapes the present with its omnipresence. This issue’s collection is haunted by family, by cisheteropatriarchy, by colonialism and imperialism, by traditions, by white supremacy. Together, these (ghost) stories, essays, and artwork (traditional, digital, and multimedia) consider the complexities of Ghosts. We are unsettled by their legacies, but also comforted by their gestures toward the past, toward everything and everyone that once was. Margins is an attempt to shout, scream, and cry from the margins. We are here! We are carving out our own space to raise political consciousness, build and sustain solidarities, and smash the imperialist, anti-Black, white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal status quo! Asian/ America is haunted, comforted, and tormented by ghosts that compel us to dream of something better. Ghosts represents a temporality; it is through learning from the ghosts of our past and present that we can work towards building our future. The racialization of Asian/Americans is deeply haunted by American and European military intervention and imperialism in Asia and the foundations of settler-colonialism and anti-Blackness in the United States. Yet, official historical narratives that foreclose or willfully forget minority histories in order to uphold a fictive national harmony. Ghosts are the constant anxiety over an American amnesia that threatens to erase fraught histories of violence, war, colonization, and exclusion. Ghosts remain as our reminders of what used to be, where we have come from, and who has come before us. They remind us of how “Asian/American” emerges not as a mere identity label or census category, but rather as a political identity and project arising out of intersectional, pan-ethnic, anti-imperialist organizing. And as such, in learning from ghosts, our ancestors, our cultural mythologies, our past histories, we are driven to dismantle all systems of exploitation with one another and oppressed people everywhere, from Duke and beyond.

S.Z. (she/her/hers) cw: reference to gun violence One Every evening, just as the street lamps click on, the Quimby Road Jogger comes up the road. The first time you see him, you scream at him to get off the street, away from the silver Nissan Altima hurtling forward at a breakneck pace. But the car passes through, and the jogger keeps running. You make a habit out of it. Every day, after dinner at 6:30, you leave the house and ask your grandmother to lock the door behind you. Then you walk a few blocks right until Quimby Road. And you wait. At the top of the hill, all you can discern is a dot. Then limbs. An expression. Clothing. He has the stony face and set jaw of a marathon runner, but not the outfit of one. It almost looks like a thrifted suit, a shoddy attempt at business casual. He doesn’t have the right shoes either. It takes a few visits for you to see that he’s wearing oversized sneakers, the weakly woven shoelaces flapping against the pavement. You imagine them as Erlandson’s basket trees, with holes in abundance. Then he starts to fade. As soon as he disappears from your line of sight, you walk back home. Your mother pulls into the driveway at 9:00. You think you should tell her not to work so hard. But when you practice the words and run them over in your mouth, they sound rude and clumsy. An encouragement to relax would be like the bitter oranges in your backyard.

Two Your best friend loves ghost stories. She says that San Jose is full of them. In 1886, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester came West. Mrs. Winchester had cleaned up her life in New Haven with a kind of reluctant determination; when she walked out her family’s home for the last time, it took all of her resolve not to look back. And when she went West, she began the construction of a mansion for all the tortured spirits killed by her husband’s rifles. Your friend tells you that there are doors and stairs that go nowhere, and windows that overlook other rooms. You ask if the spirits ever left her alone. Your friend shrugs. They were unresolved, she says. It’s an odd choice of words. You tell her about the Quimby Road Jogger and she nearly shakes your head off of your shoulders in excitement. That evening, you go out to find him again. Unresolved, you think. He’s unresolved. Maybe he’s running from something. Or maybe he’s running towards something. He comes down the hill, passes in front of you, and fades into the distance. There are two kinds of fear. One grips you and makes you shake and feels like lukewarm steel pressed against your breastbone. The other is slow, like an acidic, burning sensation that starts in the bottom of your stomach. It’s the same kind you saw in your mother when she didn’t know if you’d have a bed to sleep on next month. You decide: he’s running towards something. For something.

Three At school, your counselor says that you’ll cinch a few scholarships at the very least. You step out of the office and call your mother. Once, when you were in elementary school, you called her and your friends laughed at you for addressing her as Mommy. After that embarrassment, you’ve only ever texted her. Today, you break that tradition. You tell her about what your counselor said. You’re not sure what you’re expecting, but in the deepest corner of your imagination, you picture her leaving her crappy little office and heading into the city. She’ll go to Fisherman’s Wharf, get clam chowder in a bowl, and watch the seagulls fly over the sea. Just like she did with you years ago. She doesn’t. She tells you it’s good news, and then that she’s late for a meeting. She hangs up, and you go to math class. This time, you leave to find the jogger before dinner. You turn right and walk a few blocks until Quimby Road. Then you sit down on the edge of the sidewalk and stick your legs out into the bicycle lane. The pavement scratches your palms. You try to think of a word to describe your mother. Unresolved. The word barges into your thoughts like a salesman tired of false pleasantries. The Quimby Road Jogger comes down over the hill. He has become so familiar that now, you can imagine his movements and breaths before he makes them. You stand up and cup your hands around your mouth. “Stop running! You can stop running!” He keeps running. You keep shouting. “Stop! You can stop!” You scream yourself hoarse. He keeps running.

What does it mean to be (Asian) American? Jiahui Shen (he/him/his)

content warning: cw: anti-Blackness, Indigenous genocide, discriminatory policies, deportation, ICE, xenophobia

Dominant frameworks of the Asian/American experience are often characterized by exclusion and Otherization. One of the most popular understandings of Asian/American racialization, both in academia and in common discourses, is the “perpetual foreigner” narrative. This holds that Asian/Americans are excluded from American-ness, and “even” naturalized and native-born citizens are nonetheless barred from being accepted as true Americans. Embodied by the mainstream tropes of the “lunchbox moment,” “where are you really from?” and a focus on media representation, these frameworks posit that the United States sees Asian/Americans as uniquely foreign. Underlying this narrative, however, is the troubling implication of who is considered “native” to America. In pushes for liberation, we must acknowledge the hauntings of America’s colonial legacy. Immigration narratives typically erase the colonial history of America, instead treating the status quo as a given. Understanding what it means to be Asian/American necessitates understanding the nature of America – a nation entirely defined and enriched by the violence of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. Euro-American colonizers killed millions of Indigenous peoples and constructed an entire world economy based upon Black slavery. To quote author J. Sakai, “Amerika began its national life as an oppressor nation, as a colonizer of oppressed peoples.”1 The ghosts of the colonial/imperial system are fundamentally ingrained in the United States. What does acceptance by this settler-colonial state entail? The less acknowledged implication of the perpetual foreigner narrative is that it categorizes Asian/Americans as foreigners vis-a-vis white society. The positioning of Asian/Americans as foreign to American society creates the problematic acceptance that white colonizers, rather than Indigenous peoples, have legitimate claim to the land. Such frameworks and their conclusions, whether implicitly or explicitly, are grounded in settler futurity.

9 In this context, characterizing non-Black Asian/Americans as uniquely excluded by American society is a myopic understanding of the nature of whiteness, anti-Blackness, colonialism, and immigration into a settlercolonial state. Especially for Asian/Americans who were “accepted” by the settler project by entering the United States through classed legal immigration channels, the assertion that Black and Indigenous peoples are somehow less othered by a white supremacist society is hardly reflected by the material realities of America. This is especially true when Asian/ Americans have long been complicit in and benefited from the foundational structures of anti-Blackness and settler-colonialism. The nature of whiteness and proximity to whiteness is fundamentally rooted in antiBlackness. And indeed, the implicit acceptance of white America as the “nonforeign” America manifests in material incentives for Asian/Americans to uphold white supremacy. With favorable access to education, housing, employment, and societal standing, Asian/Americans have material incentives vested in the expense of Black people, serving as a “racial buffer” in the American racial hierarchy.2 Whether turning out in the thousands to support Chinese American cop Peter Liang, who shot and killed Akai Gurley, taking part in highly publicized anti-Black lawsuits against affirmative action, and benefiting from discriminatory lending and housing practices to capitalize off of Black communities,3 Asian/Americans have often taken the side of anti-Blackness. Furthermore, the model minority myth is leveraged by white supremacy, using the economic standing of the most visible Asian/ Americans to exemplify the “good minority.” This ignores the foundational anti-Blackness that Black people face,4 while also erasing the discrepancies in socioeconomic status between different Asian groups.5 Asian/Americans have often benefited from or explicitly sided with white supremacy and antiBlackness, especially among the class lines of the diasporic bourgeoisie. If Asian/American racialization is defined by the perpetual foreigner status, it sets the end goal for Asian immigrants as “not being foreign” to white American society. Alongside other discourses of Asian/American representation and the “bamboo ceiling,” the logical conclusion to the perpetual foreigner narrative is to gain access to whiteness, or at least to the status of a subordinate settler.6 So-called resistance for Asian/ Americans becomes asserting our “American-ness” with declarations that we’re loyal citizens in service to the American empire. What use is the perpetual foreigner framework if the conclusion is that we’re not American enough to reap the spoils of American imperialism and racial capitalism? The logical end goal of frameworks of Asian/ American racialization that portray Asian/Americans as uniquely excludable and foreign is an investment in white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and settler-colonialism. That is not to say that Asian/Americans have not and do not face exclusion, ostracization, and racial violence. Undocumented immigrants and refugees, particularly Southeast Asians, continue to face deportations and ICE raids.

10 Low-income Asian/American enclaves face gentrification, houselessness, and housing exploitation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, racist violence against Asians has increased dramatically, spurred by the sinophobic associations such as “China virus” and “Kung Flu” and claims that it had been intentionally manufactured by China. Anti-Asian violence is a function of global white supremacy; the targeting of Asian/Americans today serves to cover the degenerative nature of racial capitalism.7 As America’s government and healthcare system have heavily failed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, directing blame towards China has unsurprisingly led to violence and hate incidents towards Asian/American communities. Meaningfully addressing violence towards our community does not come from accessing white supremacist institutions of police and prisons that perpetuate harm against Black and brown, low-income, undocumented, queer, and other marginalized people, including in Asian communities. Rather than hedging our calls for justice on acceptance as “being American,” we must recognize the forces of white supremacy and racial capitalism underlying the violence that are inherent to Americanness. Instead, we can learn from Asian/American organizations that are committed to building anti-capitalist networks of community safety that emphasize racial and economic justice, accountability, and anti-violence infrastructure.8 What does it mean to be Asian/American? I take solace and inspiration not in the hope that I will be accepted by America, but in the knowledge of the long history of radical Asian/Americans who fought for liberation. Throughout history, radical Asian/Americans have developed alliances and multiracial coalitions with Black, Indigenous, and Latinx organizers, as well as people in the Global South who suffered under Western exploitation. The very term “Asian American” emerged from the Third World Liberation Front, a radical multiracial student coalition that was part of civil rights movements in the 1960s. Those who called themselves “Asian American” did so as a commitment to anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism. Justice does not come by futilely grasping at acceptance from the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, but in a commitment to tear it down. Sakai, J. Settlers. Kersplebedeb. 2014. Pg. 25. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Racism Without Racists. Rowman & Littlefield. 114. 3 Liu, Roseanne. “Dismantling the barrier between Asians and African-Americans.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. 2018.https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/stop-and-go-asian-africanamericans-20180608.html 4 Pan, Jennifer. “Beyond the Model Minority Myth.” Jacobin. 2015. https://www. jacobinmag. com/2015/07/chua-changelab-nakagawa-model-minority/ 5 Shah, Sono and Ramakrishnan, Karthick. “Why Disaggregate? AAPI Unemployment and Poverty.” AAPI Data. 2017. http://aapidata.com/blog/countmein-unemployment-poverty/ 6 Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne, “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society vol. 1, no. 1 (2012). Pg. 18. 7 Bae, Minju and Tseng-Putterman, Mark. “Reviving the history of radical Black-Asian internationalism.” Roar Magazine. 2020. https://roarmag.org/essays/reviving-the-history-ofradical-black-asian-internationalism/ 8 “We Want Cop-Free Communities: Against the Creation of an Asian Hate Crime Task Force by the NYPD.” Asian American Feminist Collective. 2020. 9 Kandil, Caitlin Yoshiko. “After 50 years ‘Asian American,’ advocates say the term is ‘more essential than ever’.” NBC News. 2018. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/after-50-yearsasian-american-advocates-say-term-more- essential-n875601 1

the smell of frangipani means the pontianak - the ghost of a long haired woman in all white with her organs exposed - is nearby. schools and hospitals are haunted because they’re so often built on top of mass graves and cemetaries. you can’t go swimming during the hungry ghost month (鬼节), because if you do, spirits of those who have drowned will actively look for someone to take their place. people casually live alongside ghosts and spirits. schools casually have masoleums. thursday is the scariest day of the week. you have to ask permission from spirits and ghosts for everything. being from such a haunted place meant constantly consulting a infamous little pink dictionary book that would convert spooks, haunts, visions, and dreams into three and four digit lottery numbers. none ever seemed to strike big (especially since everyone seemed to own the exact same dictionary), but it gave solace in knowing everyone saw the spirits and ghosts.

from Malaysia, the ghosts follow us. but here, there are no dream-to-lotterynumber dictionaries to make sense of the spirits. here, there is skepticism, exorcism. here, alone, I am filled with ghosts, spirits, phantoms, plagues, sadness, and the anxieties of living and being. ghosts are relentless, forever, unbreaking, constantly with me. we believe that the spirits of all our dead ancestors must be catered to, comforted, taken care of, remembered to avoid angry hauntings. the ghosts are hungry. what if we can no longer see the ghosts right in front of us? there is no what if, it’s already happened.

shania khoo she/they

for my mother content warning: xenophobia, discriminatory immigration policies, hate crimes

mona tong

Ma says if you think about suffering too much, it becomes real. Why do you always think like that? Why do you choose to make yourself suffer? It is like bringing ghosts up from the dead. They are better left buried. Forgotten. I ask you about your stories of leaving your life of urban poverty in Wuhan and coming to America. Of your experiences with racism, discrimination, grief, and loss. Your answer is the same every time: I don’t remember.

she/her/hers

Have you felt discriminated against in America? No, I don’t think so. No racism at all? No. Is it possible that you didn’t know how to feel when you experienced it? I don’t know. I don’t remember.

mona tong

Have you felt foreign in America? Like you didn’t belong? No, not really. Did you feel anyone looked down on you because of your accent? No, everyone is nice to me. But do you feel more at home in China, where you can use your mother tongue? No, why would I? America is my home.

she/her/hers

Ma, if America is your home, why doesn’t it feel like mine? If you feel no shame for your accent, if you feel no racism in this country, why do I? Why does my face still heat up hearing you speak to white parents, cashiers, teachers? Why do I still feel compelled to speak for you, to protect you from the flame of mockery I see in every white person’s eyes? Are those flames real or merely ghostly abstractions of my own perceived racialization? Narrative identity is a psychological theory in which individuals make sense of who they are through selectively reconstructing their past and imagined future. The idea of the “intergenerational self” stems from narrative identity, positing that multigenerational family stories are an integral part of how one constructs their definition of self.

All my stories of China and home, of poverty and loss, of immigration and grit are yours, Ma. But your unwillingness to remember these stories leaves a hole in my narrative identity— remnants of an “intergenerational self” I cannot make sense of. Ghosts only haunt what is missing, and I am haunted by the parts of me I cannot understand, the parts that you have chosen to bury and forget. I am haunted by your imposed silence and willful denial—all in the name of avoiding suffering.

Your mother—my grandmother—is more open with her stories. Perhaps old age makes people more willing to reflect. She tells me about her lifelong poverty in Wuhan, about her sacrifices as a single mother, for her two daughters. You passively listen to these stories of your past, offering only bits of translation in-between. But when I ask my grandmother about her experiences in the Cultural Revolution, she grows silent for a moment. People don’t like talking about that, she says. Why is that? They just don’t. My grandmother was a schoolteacher during the Cultural Revolution, a group targeted for being “capitalist counterrevolutionaries.” She told me about her co-workers being verbally and physically attacked in “struggle meetings,” about how she was spared as long as she “confessed” to her fictional crimes because she was pregnant at the time with you. But there is so much she didn’t say, so much she has forgotten. It broke me, she said, to turn into an enemy overnight.

I ask you if you’ve heard these stories before. You shake your head. Like me, you know nothing about your mother’s history. Whether you never asked or my grandmother—like you—never wanted to share, our multigenerational family story seems to be one of silence. Ma, I wonder if you too are haunted by the gaps in your narrative identity. But maybe I am partly to blame too. I never told you why I feel like an imposter in America. I never told you about the white boys who made fun of my “Chinese grandma” at the bus stop every day while my grandmother smiled kindly at them, unable to understand the cruel words that left their mouths. I never told you about how I silently hated my grandmother, hated you for years after that. I never told you about how up until middle school I drew my self-portrait with bright yellow crayon because that was how the other kids drew me. My silence reinforced your insistence that as long as we buried our ghosts, we would not suffer. ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• David Eng and Shinhee Han define racial melancholia as a series of failed integrations into whiteness during the process of immigration, assimilation, and racialization. They present the Asian “model minority” myth as a melancholic mechanism facilitating the erasure and loss of repressed Asian American identities and histories of discrimination and exclusion. “These identities and histories can return only as a type of ghostly presence,” they write. You tell me to embrace the model minority. Why wouldn’t we want to be praised? That’s what I worked for! If we’re successful, we should be recognized! Maybe you use the model minority myth to forget. To bury your ghosts so you do not have to suffer. To bury your ghosts so you can feel at home in this foreign nation you left home for.

But Ma, our inclusion will always be conditional. The model minority is an empty promise of whiteness—empty because it is conditional on our collective forgetting of our own histories and identities, on our complicity in the oppression of Black and Brown communities. It is conditional on our ability to obediently perpetuate white supremacy. The model minority haunts me, Ma. I am haunted by our conditional whiteness, by the histories of discrimination and exclusion that remind us of our conditional whiteness— histories that you ignore. I am haunted by the Chinese pioneers who endured endlessly for Gold Mountain. I am haunted by the way this nation’s Chinatowns were born and lost from discrimination and exclusion; haunted by the sinister histories of New York’s Chinatown restaurants and laundromats you used to take me to. I am haunted by anti-Asian violence, from an 1885 violent expulsion of 200 Chinese residents in Tahoma to an April 2020 acid attack on an Asian woman in Brooklyn. I am haunted by the string of anti-Asian immigration policies, from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to the 1921 Immigration Act; haunted by ghosts of “illegal aliens” that emerged from anti-Asian exclusion. I am haunted by Vincent Chin, a Chinese American murdered in Detroit by two white men who mistook him for a “Jap.” After Chin’s murder in 1982, Asian Americans came together in a pan-ethnic alliance. Activist Helen Zia said, “Suddenly people who had endured a lifetime of degrading treatment were wondering if their capacity to suffer in silence might no longer be a virtue.” Ma, when will you too realize that it is no longer a virtue to silently endure? When will you too realize that to believe the model minority is to forget the histories of Asian discrimination, the history of Vincent Chin, the history of you and me? When will you too realize that forgetting and denying our racialized histories will not stop these ghosts from haunting you and me? Burying your ghosts won’t make them disappear, Ma. They demand to be acknowledged and remembered. As Asian Americans, we must collectively remember our histories and identities. We must break our collective silence and reconcile our unresolved intergenerational and racial traumas—the ghosts that haunt us. To suffer is to heal.

holly ren, she/her/hers

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

content warning: reference to child abuse

Like many people, I moved back home during the pandemic and to some extent I wasn’t surprised that I felt transported back in time. Going to sleep and waking up in my childhood bedroom. Remnants of my past were all around: a dusty stack of the Twilight series on my nightstand, post-its on my mirror that I wrote back in middle school reminding me to burn a CD of my favorite songs including my angsty Lana del Rey phase, the corner of my piano room stacked high with old science projects and theatre dioramas. There was one important change though: since my grandfather’s death back in high school (my 爷爷 to be exact, Chinese always has been far better in specifying just where exactly you fit in the hierarchical placement of the family tree), my grandmother had been living with us since my sophomore year of college but this year would be the first time I had spent any extended time around her.

GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH

SPUR SPUR SPUR SPUR SPUR

RT RT RT RT RT

SCAN FOR FILM

Stuck in a country whose language she would never learn, in a setting that would seem strikingly provincial in comparison to cosmopolitan Shanghai, and most terrifyingly trapped inside her own mind that was starting to fray at the edges because of her Alzheimer’s, only one thing remained clear: the past. Every day she would pray and lament about our history, of all the ways that family can hurt each other when your family is an ocean, a generation, a culture away. Before I had even realized it, I was pulled into it too and we became eerie mirror images of each other. She was haunted by the past and in the process transformed into a ghost herself, pacing around our house, repeating events long passed. In Chinese culture, there are many different rituals and practices to lay ghosts to rest but this year I became obsessed with how do we lay the past to rest? How do we acknowledge our history and honor its legacy but move on from it, how do we learn from it but also let it go?. And so the story of Growth Spurt and of Ava Mae was born, a girl who remained forcibly in her childhood by her mother but knew she had to grow up and move forward.

Carrie Wang gnaW eirraC she/her/hers sreh/reh/ehs content warning: xenophobia

I. my father must have gotten his placidity from her, along with the crows’ feet wreathing his eyes. he doesn’t laugh much, but when he does, it’s like an explosion of cherry blossoms crowning her mountaintop tombstone. what i can remember of her are nebulous flickers of warmth, sepia-toned hazes scintillating till they disintegrate like specters. so i color in the gaps with photographs: picture me clinging to her bear hug in a pink-white striped toddler onesie on a trip to Disney World. less than a year after she returned across the pacific, cancer stole her away, just as my sister was born. there must be some terrible balancing act. II. everyday i run my fingers along the round form of my face, the progeny of nature and nurture from both my grandmothers: the apple cheeks passed from my

father’s mother to him to me, the curvature further molded when my mother’s mother lay me supine as an infant on floral bedspreads and not on my sides so my face and our families would know symmetry. there was a time i convinced myself i should smooth out the jowls that make me look twelve instead of twenty, but now i wear them proudly every day like the fu character on chinese new year’s. III. when trump banned flights from the homeland, citing “china virus” through xenophobia-stained teeth, my mother was there in dalian with her parents who are nearing ninety, so she posted a photo with them —wrinkled, but smiling as ever— and booked an earlier flight home. later that summer, the whole world and its weight collapsed within the walls of our house, relayed through a tiny phone screen. and everyone was dying, but she must really be, because look, her pain now is too much to muster a smile, even for the camera. she was normal, lively even, just in february, my mother says.

within starched medical rooms my uncle, a doctor, had recalled the prognosis: parkinson’s. her spine brittle as bamboo, she sprawls on the couch in the same way she placed me down on the duvet in my newborn frame. there is so much i want to say through mandarin that garbles when it leaves my mouth, but my family has only known how to conversate on easy topics, like townsperson gossip or the stock market or politics so when my sister and i are shouting at my mother, who proffers $25 in a red envelope to trump’s reelection campaign all i can see tracing her sharp contours are my grandmother’s lost laugh lines and i think about how one day, i will lose them both completely. and i remember the ghost stories my mother tells of her and baba’s arrival into this strange country, dirt poor, driving a $100 ramshackle car until the grandparents sent money, bless them. she says she studied day-night-day for this brick house in white suburbia. as she tries to enfold america into her chinese body, i remain speechless,

listening to the patchwork of ghosts’ voices in cacophony at each family dinner discourse, until one day, finally, my grandmother regains strength enough that she can sit and smile again, cured by grandchildrens’ smiles in glass. and the relatives are making jokes again, like we never feared the worst. still, time is no antiseptic for this new ache, for the ignited terror of the unspeakable, because all the jokes are sad: two weeks in the hospital, and she remembered none of it. and i am still the shadow of the infant on the cheap plum blossom mattress, pinned down by the knowledge that someday we will all become ghosts, like the crushed collective of those who died here before us, foreigners paying fealty to the american flag, away from those they loved and against the will of a diseased world, i know more than anything that i want to see her again, to enwrap her arms within mine to sing to the pacific shoreline a mile from her room so she doesn’t wisp away into another wraith of muddied history the way my father’s mother already did.

Old Old Haunts Old Haunts Haunts

Growing up as an Asian American in a predominantly White town, I felt an unspoken pressure to be perfect. I was too young and naive to know what it was at the time; I just knew that I needed to succeed in school and art and music and all my other endeavors, and I needed to make it look effortless. I have since learned the words to describe my experience: model minority myth, racism, stereotype threat. But the feeling I had then continues to linger; the expectations continue to persist. I am becoming increasingly afraid of my own willingness to produce until I am consumed. I am afraid of how easily I am willing to break. ingly afraid of my own willingness to produce until I am expectations continue to persist. I am becoming increasthreat. But the feeling I had then continues to linger; the my experience: model minority myth, racism, stereotype look effortless. I have since learned the words to describe sic and all my other endeavors, and I needed to make it knew that I needed to succeed in school and art and muyoung and naive to know what it was at the time; I just town, I felt an unspoken pressure to be perfect. I was too Growing up as an Asian American in a predominantly White

Lindsey Shi (she/her/hers)

content warning: references to trans death and transphobic violence

your mother wails away makes the scene & can’t stop touching you body under the shroud.

evening news laments with the wrong name, the dead one - so, too, does your mother.

your blood: her possession. your fluxes & phases: on her time. though she claims your very shape,

you and i, we know this is a kind of mourning that only reenacts. the violence here is

she who watched you grow up did not catch your death. your unfamilial.

not our own. she insists you were pushed. the world thinks you fell. but you leapt. from Grace,

specter & spectator are so similar, they could be the same person one the killer, both the crime.

you leapt. And look at you now.

you find it disingenuous to talk about death & being transgender without mentioning how the whole world watches us from across the street, across the sheets, & either sees a ghost or wants to make one. witnesses come eager, come forward: white candle, solidarity, assumption of innocence.

theo cai he/they

Jerry Wang he/him/his I couldn’t sleep last night. Mom’s sobbing made sure of that. Each muffled cry echoing, lingering in the walls of my childhood home. Waigong passed quietly, they told us over the phone. Quietly, but suddenly. His condition worsened almost overnight. Next morning, he was gone. As tired as I am today, I try to comfort Mom, I really do. It’s hard, though, when I barely knew my grandfather. While making her tea, I look at a faded black-and-white portrait stuck to the fridge. In it, a man sits at a desk in a dull-looking PLA uniform. My mind wanders back. … As she held my small fingers in her hand, Mama pointed to the man in the picture album open on the table. “This is your grandfather.” “Is he a soldier?” I asked, excited. “He was,” she nodded, handing me the photograph, “But he never had to fight anyone.” I examined the man in the picture, seeing little of myself reflected back. He sat rigid, upright. He carried the same stern gaze most people of that era tended to possess, a grimace holding back emotional burdens he could never fully realize. But, through that visage, in his eyes, I saw both a sadness, and a warmth. His hands lay on the table, partially concealing the long scar running along the left palm, what I later learned to be the legacy of a childhood bicycle accident.

In part Mandarin, part English, Mama continued, “Grandfather had problems. He saw things in his sleep. He never told us, but uncle and I would hear him tell grandma about them. ‘Gui’ he called them: Ghosts.” I barely looked up. I was abnormally hard to scare for my age, and she knew it. Mama smiled, “But he loved us, more than most men from that time would show. And he loves you as well. He always tells me when he calls, when his mind is still clear…” Baba called us down for dinner. … I prepare for night two, hoping it will be more restful than the first. I turn off the lights, and crawl into the twin-sized bed barely long enough to fit my length. Tonight, the house is quiet. … A cry jolts me from my sleep. Groggily, I come back to reality. “Not again,” I think to myself exasperatedly. This is getting out of hand. A second wail… but—my eyes shoot wide open—not my mother’s voice. I try to sit up. I can’t. Confused, I attempt to wiggle my hands and feet. They’re definitely awake. I know sleep paralysis. I’ve experienced it before. This is different. This is as if something is… someone is— A third wail. Howling. Angry. Inhuman. It sends a chill down my spine. I begin trembling. I’m now desperate to move, to understand my surroundings. I strain myself in another effort to rise until I remember the feeling, the realization before the third shriek. I am in full control of my body, but something holds me down. Like trapped prey, I am helpless. I struggle to lift my head, but even that is pinned by the unseen force. All I can see is the wide, empty ceiling above me. I try to call out, but no sound emerges, my voice simply fails to pierce the pure silence enveloping the space around me. Another screech shatters that silence, and with its ear-splitting entry, my vision begins to turn red. No, not my vision. The room itself saturates with a subtle, blood-red glow. A glow that grows brighter with every passing second.

Continued struggling eventually frees my head enough for me to tilt my eyes down towards my body. Hunched over my torso, sits a shadow, utterly dark despite the red light that has permeated the room. Its outline is seemingly human, but the proportions are all wrong. The emaciated limbs are far too long, with arms and spindly fingers each possessing too many joints. One hand pulls away from my forehead, apparently what had been holding me down. My face recoils in shock. However, that initial fear pales as I meet its gaze. A face, nestled within the shadow. A mouth wider than any human’s, teeth spread and shaped like needles. Its grin takes up more than half its head. And those eyes, sunken deep into the holes of some skull beneath all that darkness. Two, colorless orbs, with pinpoint pupils, focused directly on me. The moment our eyes lock, it opens its maw, a gaping hole, the same red as the light filling my room, and lets out another wail. My head is driven back down to the pillow. I hyperventilate as my mind races in search of a way to break free. I realize I may be about to die. The red glow now overpowers everything in sight. At the edge of my vision, I see those spider-like fingers creeping back up my face. I shut my eyes and prepare for it to be over. Suddenly, I hear another cry—this one is different. Not angry. Not bloodthirsty. It sounds… afraid? My eyes open and I see the hand has slipped away. A new presence is in the room. I can feel it coming over, towards the creature holding me down. The being shrieks again, but it sounds weaker. The red light begins to fade, and the cries become more frequent, more desperate, and more distant. Soon, the pressure lifts off my body. A new hand touches my forehead. It holds me gently, comfortingly. I no longer feel the urge to sit up. Somehow, I know I’m safe. As the hand passes over my eyes in the room, dark again, I can barely make out its features. Soft. Wrinkled. Human. Along its palm, a long faded line that can only be a scar. A new voice calls out, firm but kind. “Shui,” it says: Sleep. I oblige.

New Year’s Eve

Three years ago around New Year’s, I was crying upstairs, tears staining my “GENDER IS SELFIDENTIFIED” sweatshirt. 我覺得同性戀很噁心 wŏ jué dé tóng xìng liàn hěn ě xīn (I think same-sex relationships are disgusting) 沒有人想要跟你做朋友 méi yŏu rén xiăng yào gēn nǐ zuò péng yŏu (No one wants to be friends with you) 沒有人想要因為你生病 méi yŏu rén xiăng yào yīn wèi nǐ shēng bìng (No one wants to get sick because of you) 希望我下輩子沒有像你這樣的女兒 xī wàng wŏ xìa bèi zi méi yŏu xiàng nǐ zhè yàng de nǚ' ér (I hope I don’t have a daughter like you again in my next life)

My mother’s words still echoed in my ears, stabbing at my insecurities. I could feel my chest tightening, my breathing getting more and more uneven. My heart ached. My body was too small for me, and the world was too big. Stifling. I paced back and forth on the bathroom tiles, my reflection getting blurrier and blurrier as tears flooded my eyes. I imagined glass shattering, my knuckles tingling at the thought of hammering the mirror with my fists. I’ve been on the low, I been taking my time* I feel like I’m out of my mind It feel like my life ain’t mine

Tiff Wei (they/them/theirs)

Memories of paramedics and bright lights flashed in my mind’s eye. I thought of my grandmother lying on the bathroom floor 15 years ago, of how one slip was all it took to take the life out of her eyes. I thought of the bottles and bottles of pills downstairs, of holding my breath, of closing my hands around my throat until I could no longer think, no longer feel. Feeling was too much.

I want you to be alive, I want you to be alive You don’t gotta die today, you don’t gotta die

But then I thought of my sibling in our childhood bedroom next door, of all the times we’d talked late into the night about life and love until our words drifted off into sleepy sighs. I remembered her tight, warm embrace when I told her my sense of self was constantly in flux, and that I might not be so straight after all. I thought of my dad, of his unwavering patience on the car ride back to campus as I fumbled my way through the first of many conversations about sexuality and gender in Chinglish. I thought of his noodly arms as we danced in delight every time we greeted each other, goofy grins lighting up our faces. All of those I’d loved before, those I still love, and those I have yet to love– all those treasured memories and moments cradled in my heart. I had to snap out of it.

It’s holding on, though the road’s long, seeing light in the darkest things And when you stare at your reflection, finally knowing who it is

* Italicized lyrics are from the music video 1-800-273-8255 by Logic, featuring Alessia Cara and Khalid

m(other) Tiff Wei (they/them/theirs) content warning: homophobia, transphobia, suicidal ideation

I created this piece to capture a snapshot of one of the roughest times of my coming out journey. Each layer represents a different facet of that moment. The outline of a human overlaid on the 1999 Transgender Pride Flag embodies my struggle to express my genderfluidity across linguistic and physical barriers. The curved numbers in the background serve as a reminder that this is just one arc of my story, and the suicide hotline points to a music video by Logic featuring Alessia Cara and Khalid whose powerful imagery and music helped me see a future for myself beyond my lowest point. The ghosts surrounding me contain the traditional Chinese characters 「女兒」,「病」, and「噁心」, or nǚ' ér (daughter), bìng (sickness), and ě xīn (disgusting).「女兒」captures the lack of language surrounding my gender identity and my continued struggle to articulate who I am to my mother. 「病」points to stigma and misinformation in the Taiwanese community regarding HIV and AIDS transmission often associated with LGBTQIA+ identities.「噁心」expresses homophobic sentiments common in Taiwanese families in my parents’ generation and before. While her words haunted me initially, my mother and I have come a long way, with her embracing my partner after more than three years of strained conversations about our cultural and generational divides.

ov llo v o l e e v e e o lo vee e l v e o lo vee e l v e o e e o l v e e o l v e e o l v e e o l v e e o l v e e o l v eee e o l v e o l v e e e

content warning: anxiety, panic attacks

y o y o y yo o y o yo o y o y o y o y o y o y o y y o yo o

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Shailen Parmar (he/him/his) Shailen Parmar (he/him/his) Shailen Parmar (he/him/his) Sha

We Love You is about a rare conversation with yourself as a child. It is about discovering memories in search of self-understanding and self-love. Every passing moment leaves a ghost of our former selves behind us; this film attempts to pay homage to those ghosts.

W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W W

We Love You is about a rare conversation with yourself as a child. It is about discovering memories in search of self-understandng and self-love. Every passing moment leaves a ghost of our former selves behind us; this film attempts to pay homage to those hosts. 31

a tuoba si uoY evoL eW htiw noitasrevnoc erar tI .dlihc a sa flesruoy gnirevocsid tuoba si fo hcraes ni seiromem dna gnidnatsrednu-fles gnissap y revE .evol-fles tsohg a sevael tnemom sevles remrof ruo fo mlfi siht ;su dniheb yap ot stpmetta esoht ot egamoh .stsohg

I cannot hear my own voice in my head i don’t know what it sounds like my inner monologue has the voice of the person I last talked to or thought about

or is the last person that curled the ends of their sentences up or said their a’s like e’s and now they exist in my head and say my own thoughts to me and color my world with their cadence and commentary

Shailen Parmar (he/him/his) Shailen Parmar (he/him/his) Shailen Parmar (he/him/his) Sh

i like hearing them most times but it is not my own voice

i would like to hear my own voice

:0 by Elayna Lei (she/her/hers)

content warning: disordered eating, references to miscarriage, xenophobia, and sexual harrassment

christina w. she/her/hers

Your first breath of air was also mine. I shook with your tiny wails that filled the air as your voice grew. Emboldened, the liveliness of you swelled so large and so full that it engulfed me. I saw joy and relief ripple over our mother’s eyebrows, full of wonder and adoration as she drank you in, your voice, your being. She clung to you, perfect and beautiful, the squalling first child in her arms I wished I could be. You made her strong after the loss of me, the bloody loss of a baby that never was. All I could do was cling to you. I ran with you through the sprinklers on a soccer field, felt the cool wetness on your skin, grass scratching against your leg. Dug into mooncakes with you. Felt your heart quicken at the sight of a boy in your English class. Or maybe a girl. I grimaced when other children taunted your eyes. Felt your stomach clench when old white men catcalled you and our mother in the grocery store. Stung with embarrassment at every mispronounced word our parents strung together during playdates with white children. I felt the aching growing pains with you, the tension in your shoulders, the shudders at your reflection. Flitted with the nervousness in your hands as you pushed home-cooked meals around on your plate listlessly, anxiety about how you would fit into your gorgeous red prom dress in just four months filling the static. I felt your lungs crumble when our mother said, you are beautiful now, but imagine how much more beautiful you would be with larger eyes. It would be easier to get a job, a boyfriend, opportunities in life. I was bewildered, blindsided by the betrayal. Of you, and of me.

I tried to tell you, show you, hold you. Your eyes are a gift nobody else will ever know. They crinkle like crescent moons when you smile. The color and joy and life they are full of let you see the world in a way that I never could. Cherish that. No one has eyes like you. I lurched with terror as you almost let them go, almost succumbed to the knife for wider, more western-looking ones. I clung to you as your sobs shook the air, as the nurses chastised you, “Don’t cry, it’ll make your eyes too puffy for the surgery!” In and out, I crooned. And months later, when you still looked in mirrors half-heartedly, I whispered, they are you. And I love you. Love them the way I do you. I watched the leaves fall with you in wonder. Felt the touch of new people, of independence, the fire, the fear, the true friendship, belly laughs so loud they shook the whole library. Broken whispers and butterfly kisses. When I felt the old misery brewing inside of you again, I ached to bathe you in all the timeless love I could muster, quell the rising bile in your throat. But instead, we walked in cold silence together. Cold, hungry silence. I stayed chained to the scale with you that winter. Every night. Every day. Each pound, each thick strand of your black hair that fell, clinging to the cruel metal drain, sliced through me. As you thinned yourself out, I went hungry, too. I was losing pieces of you, the best pieces. Pieces tossed like uneaten meals. Lost in the misery of a reflection you resented. I broke every time I hunched over with you, empty. I grew fraught on those nights, screaming at you time and time again, stop this! I was met with tears, guilt, resignation. But, still, I felt your glow, sparse though it was, flickering inside you, steadfast as ever. I knew it was there, had cradled it since your birth. Sang to you as you slept, reminded you of who you are. Looking different, feeling different, being different, these are not reasons to hate yourself. They are reasons to love.

So love yourself, the way I love you. It was a crisp spring afternoon when you found your voice again. You found people who cherished you, people you cherished. They adored your spunk, your overflowing heart, your enthusiasm, and they reminded you why they stayed, again and again. And when you started to remember, started to believe, I must have gasped in relief. I must have thrown my arms up and cried what tears of joy a wisp of a soul could. I watched you bloom again. I watched you hungrily reach for more, more life, more love. I felt you cradle your soft body with an unfamiliar gentleness, gingerly dress her with acceptance, relief, hope. I watched you fall in love with a mouth that kissed your lovely eyelids, and you poured all the love you could muster back. I felt passion flow through your veins again, felt it brimming so full it overflowed into every beautiful moment. I soaked up every last drop of this love, your love and mine. Some days, I visit the dust and the skeletons in your closet. I keep them company to distract them, keep them far, far away from you. They grow impatient once in a while and ask if they can see you. I tell them no. With each day you breathe and each step you take, I feel you beginning to recognize me in your clothes, in your handwriting, in your sighs of relief, the corners of your home. I know you see me in stolen glances and brief enchantments, and I feel you embracing me, your legacy, your heritage, a past you know impossibly well. As you learn to live with it and learn to love it, I feel myself floating closer and closer to home, to the place where love is woven into you. Though your life is in your hands, I will always walk it with you—a guardian angel and a ghost.

Self-portrait as the ghost of ’s gallery Lucy Zheng (she/her/hers)

My grandmother is nearly blind. When we went to visit her, after nine years of telling her we’d come when we did not, I found a gallery of photos taped haphazardly to her bedroom wall. Some were faded from sunlight, some were blackened. Many featured me, a tiny doll of a human, wriggling around with a mushroom of a bowl cut, bouncing in my grandmother’s lap, presenting my proud childhood naivety to the camera. Now, my grandmother was seeing me in person for the first time in nine years. In a brightly lit room, with daylight streaming in through the windows, a giant lamp aimed at my face, I sat quietly while my grandmother struggled to make out my outline. Who did she see before her? Who had she seen in the photos, from so many years ago? Who had she imagined me to be, to become? I was as much a ghost to her as she was to me. A voice over the phone, a still life of a past life of a past child, apparitions from worlds neither of us could reach with our bodies, nor our minds.

To the highly vocal ghosts 魏新琳 (她) To No Name Woman who was thrown down the well name to be buried with her but still haunts our virtue

To Grandmother Wong who refused to assimilate spitting on the imperialists and bringing us home

To Beloved who was a baby ghost story never to be passed on held the only ways we know how

To Me who is a future ghost get ready to wrong some wrongs for haunting is the resolution.

To Cyclops who was blinded by Odysseus a black hole breathing revenge never settled

Ghosts Ghosts Reading Reading List List Curated by Celine Wei (she/her/hers) Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx Eve Tuck and C. Ree, Glossary of a Haunting Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is not a Metaphor Emilie Cameron, “Indigenous spectrality and the politics of postcolonial ghost stories” Jeff Barnaby, Blood Quantum (2019) Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, “Canadian Horror Story” Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Lose Your Mother, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Toni Morrison, Beloved Christina Sharpe, In the Wake Viviane Saleh-Hanna, “Black Feminist Hauntology” Kashif Jerome Powell, “Specters and Spooks: Developing a Hauntology of The Black Body” Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017) M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! Marilyn Chin, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, “The Ghost of Pig-Gas Illusions” Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior Trinh T. Minh-ha, Forgetting Vietnam (2015) Fariha Róisín, How to Cure a Ghost Diana Khoi Nguyen, “Triptych” // Ghost Of Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, “Ghosts of Public Sex” Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race