Asian American Students in Action Mount Holyoke College 1
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Table of Contents 05 American Dream Jessica Nguyen 06 "When I read..." Maya Delany
08 Are There Dreams Assigned to Asians? Leah Yun Keeffe 09 Minneapolis Daydream Jaemarie Solyst 10 sleep paralysis or,
queer asian thoughts on a restless night Denise Huang
12 American Dream Alishba Khalil 13 Rajdhani Aria Pahari 14 Legacy Kelly Weng
17 el lío after august is i only know english. Anisha Pai 18 The (asian) American Dream Sasha Braverman 23 Untitled Anonymous
24 All That We Have Fiona Yang 28 Thick Skin Emma Shooshan 30 Roots Angela Y. Law
31 How to become American in 5 steps Trang Hoang 32 a conversation with chris Ritti Singh
34 A Revisit to the Chinese Doctor Libby Kao 36 Why I Dream of Trees Jennifer Fergesen 38 Roots JinJin Xu
40 adoptee re-introductions;
Separation, again Meejin Richart
42 Dreaming Letter by Letter Loriya Thao
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Dear readers,
It is with great honor that we are able to compile and share this collection of introspective, retrospective, anticipative, contemplative dreams with you to document and celebrate Asian American experiences. This journal issue is the second to be released after AASIA’s revival in Fall 2015, and we thank all of our collaborators and artist/author contributors for making this possible. Sincerely, Jaemarie Solyst, Journal Chair and the board of AASIA
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American Dream Jessica Nguyen Ba, you dream of a land of safety as you risk your life baring oceans so when you came here your arms hugged the soil that so hesitantly gave out hers in return not knowing that after breaking vows with her, you would help give life to a child who has no such dream to stay on such artificial soil Ba, you yelled at me for wanting to leave afraid that your child will return to the land where your fears lie
No dream to stay here in this land of gold for gold is not what I seek but to return to what used to be our soil rich in the blood of our people Ba, Do you miss it? Our motherland, I mean. Because I do. Although I was never raised by her, I dream of our nhà everyday for she is calling me, “Về nhà đi con.”
Ba,
to come back to her.
unlike you
To come home.
I have no American dream
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When I read facts, it feels like fiction.
When I read fiction, I yearn for it to be fact.
Written by Maya Delany, as a transnational Chinese adoptee with a fluctuating Chinese/Asian American identity When I read facts, it feels like fiction: Last Thanksgiving Break, I went home with a friend, also a transnational adoptee from China, to New York City and I asked her to take me to Manhattan’s Chinatown. Once we got there, we walked the streets for what felt like hours. I desperately wanted to buy something traditional that I could wear to explain my fully Chinese complexion, to have someone in a restaurant talk to me in Mandarin assuming I would be able to respond, or to feel like I was finally with “my people”. My friend kept asking what I was looking for. I kept telling her that I didn’t know, but that I would recognize when it when I saw it. We continued on, but the myriad of Asian faces, the endless stores with the same waving cats and plastic jade bracelets, and the rows of food items that I had never heard of increased my sense of hopelessness. I told my friend that I was looking for something, anything, that would make me feel closer to the Chinese American community. My friend said something along the lines of maybe what I was looking for didn’t exist.
I asked my professor when he started learning his wealth of Asian American history. I had grown up in Alameda County, played against the San Leandro tennis team, attended a school that was visibly 30% Asian/Asian American, and yet, I had never heard about Korematsu v. United States or even the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 until this past year. My professor didn’t have to think very long. He told me that he started learning Asian American history so young that he didn’t have an age for me. I tuned out at this point, somewhat resentful, and a little bit disappointed because it wasn’t an answer that we could connect over. Mostly, I wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t the first time I had heard answers like his. My friend told me she just knew Chinese New Year traditions because it was just what her family did. My housemate last summer had a whole set of condiments and 6
Chinatown market ingredients that were completely foreign to me, but obvious necessities to her. It has always been clear to me that others’ nonfiction has, and might always, feel completely fictional to me. When I read fiction, I yearn for it to be fact. I’ve taken two classes that center Asian American narratives: Asian American Literature at Mount Holyoke College and Asian American Literature & Law at Amherst College. Both classes have had me reading narratives of imagined characters with imagined names and imagined families late at night, leaning on couch cushions in the library, or while listening to grinding coffee beans in nearby cafes. I’ve spent countless hours reading about transnational families and harsh immigration laws from Sui Sin Far, been immersed in the worlds of Vietnamese refugees and foster care children post Operation Babylift because of Aimee Phan, read about the fractured Japanese American community post-internment and loyalty questionnaires thanks to John Okada, and tried to understand race relations in LA from details written by Nina Revoyr. I unquestioningly consumed words, pages, short stories, and novels. I tried to get into the heads of the characters, wanting to understand their realities, accepting all this fiction as fact, not knowing any better, and just so I had some notion of concrete knowledge about the Asian American community that I often times feel I am asked to represent. Whenever I find myself in Asian American spaces, I tell myself that my Asian American identity is
a fact. And yet, being there, I sometimes feel like a fraud. I feel like my claim of belonging to this community is fictitious. An obsession with attaining an unattainable “authenticity”, born out of years of learned insecurity, perpetuates my interpretation of facts as fiction and internalization of fiction as fact.
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Are There Dreams Assigned to Asians? Leah Yun Keeffe Last summer, Mount Holyoke College decided on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s text, “Between the World and Me” as their Common Read. As a student a Mount Holyoke College, I was able to learn about this society’s expectations for black people. There is an American Dream, one that Coates defines as a “façade” (Coates, 2015, p. 36). Coates’s text focuses on the dream pertaining to black people. As an Asian student, I started to wonder if there is a specific dream for Asians. Let’s first consider some questions; What does it mean to be Asian though? Are there differences between Asian Adoptees, Asian Americans, and Asian immigrants and international students? What ties us all together? Our origins? What defines us? The media? Does the dream drive Asians together due to our race? Or do our personal experiences define how we perceive our dreams? C.N. Le, a professor at the University of Massachusetts1, states in his blog “The Model Minority Image” addresses prevalent assumptions about Asians living in America. Le introduces the “model minority” stereotype that continues to plague Asians2 (Le, 2016). Asians’ work ethic and disposition are said to be stellar according to this stereotype2 (Le, 2016). Le states “…. the image many have of Asian Americans is that we are the "model minority" -- a bright, shining example of hard work and patience whose example other minority groups should follow” (Le, 2016, p. 1)2. While this stereotype is positive, it can feel like an impossible and overwhelming standard to accomplish. Then there is a dream that many Asian adoptees are told and given. Many of us are firstgenerational college students, biologically speaking. For me, this is a huge deal. I am so fortunate to receive a college education. At the same time, I think that it is worth noting that not all adoptees have the same feelings about being adopted. For adoptees, many of us are raised by white parents. Our white parents heavily influence and add their weight to our dream. As an adoptee, I feel the “Dream” and its demands. What can we do? I think that it is important to address the dreams of Asians in addition to addressing the dreams of other minorities. I think it would be beneficial for Asians in America to discuss these stereotypes and their personal impacts. Footnotes: 1. C.N Le “About Me & FAQs” 2. C.N. Le “The Model Minority Image” Works Cited
“The Model Minority Image.” Asian Nation, www.asian-nation.org/model-minority.shtml. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the world and me. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2015, pp. 1-152. Le, C.N. “About Me & F.A.Q.s.” Asian-Nation, www.asian-nation.org/aboutme.shtml.
Citation Provided On C.N. Le’s Blog: Le, C.N. 2016. "About Me & FAQs" Asian-Nation: The Landscape of Asian America. <http://www.asian-nation.org/about.shtml> (November 5, 2016). Le, C.N. 2016. "The Model Minority Image" Asian-Nation: The Landscape of Asian America. <http://www.asian-nation.org/model- minority.shtml> (November 5, 2016).
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Minneapolis Daydream Jaemarie Solyst
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sleep paralysis or, queer asian thoughts on a restless night Denise Huang we had an argument at 3am
we stopped talking I couldn’t sleep but I had a dream last night. we were floating in a dead motor boat I left for land where they could help you silently followed me to shore but only thought to introduce at your departure ‘I can’t do this anymore’ and when you escaped through those big, grand doors the building collapsed, I woke up and I just couldn’t sleep again -- an actual dream, the most vivid up to this date
I’ve thought so much about "consciousness." Such a lofty term, consciousness, when it's a matter of being simply awake right?, eyes open, ready to take in all that's been and will be thrown at you. Though what I just quipped is layered: consciousness is not reaching an awakened state like it's an inevitable nirvana that fells any and all readers of say Butler. It's having that thing, that drive, that molten energy to sense your lack of wholeness, to identify discreet gaps in your sense of being... to brazenly confront just how hollow and amiss everything has been. ~ ~ ~ Back in the day, I gravitated toward white queers. Full admission. I was beginning to broach the mysteries of my own sexuality, and while I felt okay with this queerness, it couldn't just live in my head. I was young, seeking something to prove. Not just my queerness--I wasn't satisfied with just dating and closing the book there. I wanted to problematize. See, I wanted the struggle too, as if it was a sick initiation process for all queers of color. You know, that struggle that comes with trying
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to love someone who just won't get it? That. That was to be a notch on my belt. God damn it, it
would be my trial and I would prevail. They would want me more than I would ever, ever want them. And when I came out of it, battered, winded--but hell, powerful--I'd finally permit myself to love someone with my arms wide open.
And so, I cried. Often. Wept because I had no joy, because the chance of winning my own game
wasn't forthcoming. I was so haunted by fledging dream of queer confidence and capital that I went through the mouth of the beast to get it. As other parts of my identity found the sun, my queerness felt tainted and I kept it in the shadows. It meant that as I built up and found immense wholeness through Asian American consciousness, I had to neglect my understanding of queerness and milk it solely for its utility as a social conduit. In those split moments, I saw my paralysis growing like a tumor in the back of my mind, and I knew this little dream of mine-something that I had nurtured into mutation--had to go. Who wants to be vivisected and left to grow asymmetrically? Who wants to watch their own spine contort, give away their limbs, and fall lying down? When I woke, I was in a dream. My night terror broke, and here I am, kind of sweaty and with a spooked heart. A bit of morning breath (okay maybe a lot), and I feel plastered to the sheets. But she is there, lying right beside with her arms up. Defiant for sure, even at rest. But she's got an angelic trace around the lips and a steady breath that just. stills. time. She is a dream, a metaphor for virtue and bliss. I sit up and think about how I have dreamt of a companionship this complete. For all the days and nights that I stayed up, red eyed and wondering if it was even possible to be in love if I had scripted myself to play half a person... this girl, this woman, my lover and friend keeps my eyes open, attuned to my own consciousness. I think it's rare to find someone who not only plucked you out of a nightmare, but who also wants to grow with you, introducing love and care like it's caulking. Loving someone who resonates with your background, who knows what's between the lines of a stiff lipped answer to prying, ignorant questions... well that’s a dream. It is coming home. And falling asleep together.
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American Dream Alishba Khalil
Is the American dream what I thought it was? Was it a dream of success or a dream of assimilation in to a superior white society? Why is the promise so different from the reality? I left my land of comfort to embrace a culture of stress and hardship? Why is it that working until there is nothing left of your soul gloriďŹ ed and counted as hard-working? But why is it that I still chose to stay or am I forced to because I am told success is built here? Are my prospects happiness or are my prospects success? It is a place where I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel accepted but it is also a place where I feel free to share thoughts I could not elsewhere? Is this what I came for? Is this what I want?
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Rajdhani Aria Pahari A few days ago Ivanka Trump visited the mandir that houses the birthdays of my family. She was there to Celebrate Diwali with the Indian-American Community. But in order to properly celebrate Ivanka has to not celebrate at all. She must shiver and ache like a darkened house whose roof bears no candles. She must bandage an Indian-American librarian's wounded look with her own. She must wrestle open a plastic container of mithai when she comes home from school. Rajdhani mandir sprawls amidst trees in Loudoun County: Virginiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s richest haven. With her blond head bowed out of the need to conceal the thrill in her eyes Ivanka wields the Festival of Lights to overexpose shadows that only thicken.
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Legacy Kelly Weng “Legacy. What is a legacy? It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” – Hamilton: An American Musical My grandparents’ house sat at the end of their street, white and small, squat and modest. The grass in the front yard often grew too long. A large tree flourished near the middle of the lawn, its trunk wide and its roots unyielding. During many summers, the tree’s branches offered respite from the wrathful Los Angeles heat. My grandfather loved sitting under that tree, and I often joined him during my frequent visits to my grandparents’ house. He would tell me stories in Chinese, the only language he knew. It was one of those lazy Sunday afternoons, when homework didn’t exist just yet. I was free from responsibilities, and after my mother dropped me off at my grandparents’ house, I went off to find my grandfather. “Grandfather, why am I a rat?” I asked him, as we sat in the shade of the tree. Back then, I had a better grasp on Mandarin than I did with English, so speaking to my grandfather was fluid. Effortless. “You were born under that year. It is who you are.” He paused, peering curiously at me from over the wire rims of his large glasses. My grandfather was a rather tall man for his age, and I had to tilt my head back to meet his gaze. “Why?” I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that I hated my zodiac animal. Rats were nothing but ugly pests, small and insignificant. My younger siblings were luckier: my sister was a tiger, and my brother was a dragon. Powerful, majestic, wondrous creatures. I was the eldest; why was my animal so weak? My grandfather contemplated my question. “Do you know why the rat is the first in the zodiac?” “He won the race by riding on the ox.” My grandfather nodded approvingly. “He was smart. Like you. You are smart.” He pulled out a square sheet of paper from his pocket. “In America, you can be anything.” “What did you want to be, Grandfather?” Despite the gaps in between his crooked teeth, he smiled. “Nothing. I came to America for you.” He squinted at the paper and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. His hands were gnarled and twisted by labor, yet they seemed to understand the delicacies of folding paper. His fingers flowed, graceful and firm, sure of every movement they made. Intrigued, I watched the rest of this intricate dance in silence. Within a few minutes, my grandfather finished his work of art. In his palm, a paper rat stood on its hind legs, its head lifted up. He placed the rat into my hands. “You go to school and do well, you go to college. You have a good life.” Gingerly, I brought the rat up to my face. Every fold, every edge served an exact purpose. There was a quiet beauty and strength in its sharp form. Maybe I was wrong. *** It was years later when my grandfather suffered from a stroke. Once my mother had learned 14
about this, she promptly ushered my siblings and me into the car and drove us to the hospital. We found my grandfather conscious, lying on a bed in a small, plain-looking room with white walls. Ugly blue curtains hung from the ceiling, and the cool air smelled heavily of antiseptic. The TV hummed in the background, switched on to a Chinese news station. I could barely understand what the news anchor was saying, much less decipher the characters on screen. My siblings mumbled quick greetings in half-hearted Mandarin before scuttling off to the chairs in a distant corner. My mother spoke to him for a while in their own rapid-fire dialect from home, anxiety and relief coloring her speech all at once. I simply stood by the bed, unsure of what to do, and unwilling to join my siblings. One of the nurses briskly walked in. “Excuse me, ma’am,” she said, tapping my mother on the shoulder. “I need to discuss something with you. It concerns your father’s condition.” As they left the room, my grandfather’s hand pressed gently into my arm. His fingers were cold and stiff. “How have you been?” he asked. I had not seen him in maybe a month; school was picking up speed, and I didn’t spend much of my free time visiting my grandparents anymore. I struggled to find the Mandarin words I was looking for. “I’ve been very busy,” I finally said. “Have you been studying hard?” Eighth grade had introduced me to all-nighters, caffeine, and crushing anxiety about my future. I nodded, though I did not elaborate further. He could live without that knowledge. The corners of my grandfather’s mouth lifted slightly. “Keep going.” By the time my mother returned several minutes later, my grandfather’s eyelids were already drooping, heavy with fatigue. We left the room quietly and made our way back to the parking lot. My mother’s brow was creased with worry. Every hurried step carried a certain weight. She did not break the news to us until we had made our way back to the parking lot and climbed into the car. “Your grandfather has Alzheimer’s,” she said quickly, as if the truth would hurt less that way. We stared at her for a moment before I managed to form a sentence. “He’ll be okay though,” I said. The words felt hollow and flimsy. “Right?” My mother did not respond. *** Four years later, my grandparents had to tear down the tree on their front lawn. It was getting too hard to maintain. Instead of contacting a tree removal service, everyone in my extended family drove over to help. Most of my uncles knew how to cut trees, and brought their own supplies. My aunts brought food and drink; family gatherings of this size did not happen often. I sat motionless in the living room, surrounded by chattering relatives. The windows offered a view of the front lawn, but I had my back facing the windows. My hands and feet felt numb. My grandfather watched. He was dressed in faded pajamas, leaning heavily upon his walker. He mouthed inaudible words as my uncles sawed off the branches that had sheltered him on so many days. I heard a thud. I winced. Slowly, my grandfather turned away from the windows. Then he shuffled out of the living room, dragging his bare feet across the carpet. *** I almost did not recognize my grandfather anymore. He sat in a chair, his hands planted on his walker. His wire-rimmed glasses were missing. I stood before the doorway of his bedroom, with
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one foot already through. His wrinkled face split into a toothless grin when he saw me. “Shan,” he said. I froze. My mother’s Chinese name. “No, I’m not – ” I began. “How are your studies?” he asked. I stopped. Then: “Fine. They’re fine.” I managed a brief mask of a smile. “Good, good.” He grasped the walker with shaking hands. “You will have a bright future in America.” I swallowed hard. I could feel knives going down my throat. My grandfather was gone. He had been replaced by a pale and shriveled old stranger who was frailer than glass. *** Senior year was a blur of college applications, rejections and acceptances. I never made it to my dream college. Instead, I settled for second best. My mother passed on the news to my grandparents, but my grandfather didn’t know who my mother was talking about. I was used to that by now. The day before my flight, I was busy packing. My belongings were strewn all over my bed, courtesy of my haphazard attempt at organizing. My cellphone rang. I picked it up and eyed the caller ID. “Hey, Mom,” I said, cradling the phone between my shoulder and my ear. I pulled out one of my sweaters from the clothes pile and held it out in front of me. “You need to come to the hospital.” Her voice broke. “It’s your grandfather. He – he tripped and hit his head.” I dropped the sweater. It fell into a crumpled heap on the ground. I drove as fast as I could towards the hospital. It was a route I was familiar with by now, something I had ingrained into my brain. I ran through a few yellow lights. At the red lights, I gripped the steering wheel so hard my skin turned white. At the hospital, a nurse escorted me down the hall after I had registered as a visitor. “Your family is in the waiting room on the next right,” she said. “Thank you.” My voice sounded very far away. The nurse walked away. Instead of turning right, I turned left. I read the room numbers as I passed. I stopped before an open door at the end of the hall. Under the sterile white covers, my grandfather looked smaller than he ever had before. His eyes were closed. He had an oxygen mask affixed to the lower half of his face. Multiple tubes snaked out of him, hooked up to various machines and monitors. “Grandfather,” I said, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. The word felt foreign and heavy on my tongue. I didn’t know why, but I kept talking in Mandarin. “I’m going to college tomorrow.” I paused, fumbling for the words that hung in the air. “It’s not the school I dreamed of, but I think it’ll be okay.” The periodic beeping of the heart rate monitor filled the silence. I bit my lip, hoping that the tears that threatened to spill over would not betray me now. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a paper rat. Time had worn away its edges, but it still stood on its haunches. Its snout still pointed skywards. Carefully, carefully, I placed the rat on the nightstand. I left the room and didn’t look back.
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el lío after august is i only know english. Anisha Pai in 1 sem
and i still saw more on भारत in new england in 18 yrs
than i found about ﻗﻄﺮ
what a land to touch the soil of with my forehead land of immigrants land of freedom even the oxygen is foreign and i am no rihanna but still i sobbed on road trips that went straight-to-something down forest hill drive and when im here i am a caricature slipping on baHnaHnaH into drawling ugly white people: a novelty sah? and maybe my passport is lions and my accent is crown on top of checkered guthra and i am and upon and and next to of course allah i i cannot be here anymore gondi-kuttu, qtr ain't ur home child, what will u do in bengaluru & u thought u knew this dream of red autumns and 5inch snows "you are mistake"n
but juneau, on letter size, writes what i should know,
ightmare
awaken to 한글 with 한국어 in the blind spots drink español, vomit amchigele and you are shia and she is coveted, unattainable escape: "mafi malum inglés, naneun asa" 17
The (asian) American Dream Sasha Braverman
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Untitled Anonymous I envision a future where I’m able to get a job that gives me a lot of money. A career doing something I love. I think about how if I were to have a family, I would be able to provide without losing my life. The future I see is so different from yours. You, who left home because you wanted to go to the land of opportunity. I dream a different life for you. You still come to the United States. Your friends are still here to help you navigate a world so different from the one at home. The difference is that you go to college without worrying about whether you have to take semesters off. You graduate and get a job afterwards. You get married to someone who loves you so much and cares for you the way you deserve, who doesn’t leave because we all need someone to stay. You both are financially stable. You go to business school to get that MBA because you’ve always wanted to be your own boss, own your own business. And you get to, because the American Dream is real in this world. In this dream, I don’t exist to tie you down to the reality you’re living. I envision a future where I make a lot of money and am able to do what I love. When I see this future, all that fills my head is how much more successful I will be compared to you. This should have been you! You, who has sacrificed more than I ever will. What have I done to be able to profit off your struggles? I want to give you a good life. I want to give you everything. Is this filial piety or guilt?
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All That We Have Fiona Yang I was born to a red Boston sunrise on a frosty winter morning in 1998. Every day, I thank all the stars in the sky that I was born to my parents, to my mom who was born to three older siblings and my grandparents in a beautiful Chinese southeastern city right by the sea. My mom was born in Guangzhou, a place in her heart she will always call home. She was the baby in her family for a long time until my uncle was born nearly a decade later and she would learn what it was like to be a big sister. Because my grandparents were schoolteachers, my mom and her siblings took care of each other a lot. She tells me that when she had free time after school or on the weekends, she roamed around the city with her two best friends. She still visits them each time she goes back to Guangzhou. I always tag along with my mom whenever she has dinner with her friends and I see her face light up as they pull up old pictures on their iPhones of when they were teenagers. My mom met my dad after they had both graduated high school, found work, and took classes together at an English language learning school (they both never really reached fluency, though). They used to hang out with three other classmates, two of which got married to each other and spend their lives in between California and Guangzhou and the third who married and moved to New Hampshire. Like all my mom’s other friends, we still see them all the time when we go to visit or when they come to see us. I like to listen in the background, pretending to look at my phone while they reminisce about the late nights they spent on the Taigucang Wharf. I picture the five of them together with crazy haircuts and perms, wearing blazers with shoulder pads underneath (an eighties trademark). Whenever we go back to Guangzhou and take the 10 bus to visit one of our favorite noodle cafés, she points out the cáa cāan tēng, dim sum restaurant, where my parents and their friends spent hours after class with each other. Near that restaurant was also a small movie theatre my mom said my dad brought her on dates to (he confirmed saying he would treat her weekly to any film she wanted to see). The first time we walked past the theatre, my mom was really happy to see it still there despite her having lived in America for the past twenty years. Each time we’re close to it, I like to point it out to my mom even before it’s within our view so we anticipate seeing it again. My mom and dad came to America together in the early nineties and lived in San Francisco before moving to Boston. Like most Asian immigrants, my mom worked in (and still does) the beauty service industry. Her colleagues are all immigrants like her. They all speak the same language, cook the same dishes at home, know exactly which bakery back home my mom talks about that makes the best red bean bun in the world. When my mom and dad first came to Massachusetts, they lived in a federally funded housing community in South Boston. Once my sister and I were born, only my dad went to work because my mom had to look after us at home. My dad worked nights at a Chinese restaurant (and like my mom, still has the same job) spending
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long hours from the PM late into the AM taking orders and bussing tables. My mom cleaned up around the house, cooked dinner for us, and paid bills all by herself. Often times, I wonder how my mom was able to do this. It doesn’t seem like a lot; every parent has to take care of the house and look after their family but it was different for my mom. My mom raised a family in a country she didn’t grow up in and in a language she didn’t know. My parents don’t speak English well so when I learnt English at school, they used to ask me all the time to help them with applying for winter heating assistance or be an interpreter at parentteacher conferences. I hated doing it and I always complained to my mom about how other children didn’t have to translate for their parents but I had to. Since I was also the older sibling, my sister never did this as much as I did. I’m older now and I’ve been helping my parents out for a long time. I’ve been interpreting for them for so long, it’s not really a burden to me anymore (although I still don’t enjoy doing it). I have understood how difficult this type of logistical work can be, as simple as it may seem. I am a fluent English speaker and I have been helping my mom out with this work almost all my life but I still get jitters each time I dial the customer service line. My mom did all this when she first immigrated to America without knowing any English, in a country where she was a foreigner. She wouldn’t understand why our rent was so high that particular month and wouldn’t know how to acquire health insurance for our family but she still found a way to get us to where we are. She left behind the world as she knew it in Guangzhou and came to America with my dad where the two of them would work endlessly to have a happy life. I think we really are happy here. We still aren’t rich and time still seems like it goes by too fast, but we find happiness when my sister, dad and I ride our bikes along the Charles to look at geese before buying dollar ice cream cones at McDonald’s and we find happiness on Sunday afternoons when I snuggle next to my mom and watch our favorite Hong Kong crime dramas. When I ask my mom how she and my dad got to where we are, she says that they just did. She says like how any family finds their way, we did as well. My mom didn’t come over to America on a raft and she didn’t knock on every business in Boston looking for a job when she landed. She didn’t have to go through any of these obvious hardships but she put strength and dedication into everything she did, strength I don’t think I will ever have, to give my family a life we could be proud of. I know my mom isn’t the only out there who shares a similar resilience. However, we never learn about these women in our high school social studies courses or American history textbooks. We don’t see these women in movies or television and female leads in novels and comic books are never immigrants. We have discussed in class many times the representation, or lack thereof, of Asian American women in history. Information about them are not accessible and even if it is, it is rarely analyzed. The experiences of the Asian American women who walk the same streets as us every day cannot “tell their stories and have them heard and legitimated” when history is not concerned about their stories (Hune, 9). Their stories are often ignored and overlooked, even though it is their work that has helped so many of us children of immigrants to be able to have the lives we 25
have today. It is because of my parents making the decision to come to the United States and it is because my mom made sure my sister and I had a school to go to and a community that treated us like family that I am able to have a college education, something neither of my parents ever had the opportunity to have. Why, then, is history not concerned about people of color and, in particular, Asian American women? Much of history does not even care about the experiences of women in general. Shirley Hune’s introduction in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology describes the marginalization of women and the deeper discrimination of women of color. History has long preserved the “omission, invisibility, and misrepresentation of women and of racial and ethnic minority groups in all disciplines” (Hune, 2). The stories of Asian American women are viewed as unimportant to the bigger picture and therefore are often times silenced. The instances in which the stories of women are recognized, they focus on a particular population, mainly white, without regard to minority women who have just as important a story to tell. Recorded women’s history still maintains its “dominant paradigm of white leisured middle-class women’s aspirations, ideologies, and experiences” and has yet to shift to “fully [encompass] the complexity and differences that race, class, sexuality, religion, national origin, citizenship status, and other categories bring to women’s everyday lives” (Hune, 2). Like my mom’s story, similar experiences of Asian American women are left out of textbooks and classrooms because it is believed that it is not as significant as those of white men and women. We have discussed the particular invisibility of immigrant women in class before, especially with the Storrs piece, “Like a Bamboo: Representations of a Japanese War Bride.” Storrs examines her mother’s life transition from Japan in World War II to becoming a wife and mother in a country that used to be an enemy in her homeland. Storrs’ mother used the metaphor of a bamboo to describe her suffering but Storrs used the metaphor as a way to showcase her mother’s strength. The metaphor of stripping layers off the bamboo until there nothing is left was like how her mother felt that nothing was left in her soul actually captured “the duality of oppression and resilience in her” (Storrs, 93). Although each time a layer is taken away, the “bamboo and its sheaths are valuable and strong” and her mother’s “sense of self [was] strong and autonomous, even as the harsh realities of life test its resilience” (Storrs, 94). While my mom and Storrs’ mother did not go through any of the same hardships, they both had struggles to overcome to be able to make a life here in America. For both women, they quietly fought through difficulties only they understood and are not recognized for their endurance. Their personal stories are essential to the immigrant experience, but it is rarely taught in schools and people never usually seek to find its answers. When I was drawing connections from writing about my mom’s story immigrating to the United States, the Storrs piece, and the anthology, I found it surprising that there were so many similarities in facing struggles despite each experience had endured different personal hardships. We only know about these stories because they are shared to each other in a community; they would otherwise be unheard of. They are shared through diary entries, interviews with children, 26
photographs, and all sorts of diverse ways. In Jennifer Yee’s journal article about Asian American female epistemology, she describes how expressing personal experiences as an Asian American woman to others with similar stories “can make sense of their lives relative to broader social, political, and economic forces” (Yee, 53). The history of Asian American women exists because of communal hardships and successes that contribute to what we can identify as the female Asian American experience. The complex personal stories of individuals can always be connected back to a bigger picture, which is why it is necessary to have these stories be told. This was no different with my mom. It was awkward at first to write about her because I did not know whether to write as if she was not my mother but rather as a person I was interviewing for their personal experience as an immigrant. Her being my mom could have served as as bias to documenting her story but listening to and remembering her story made me realize, though, the importance of having an emotional attachment to these experiences. The emotions are what bring it together and what keep it alive so that they are not forgotten.
Works Cited Hune, Shirley and Nomura, Gail. Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology. (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 1-15. Storrs, Debbie. “Like a Bamboo: Representations of a Japanese War Bride.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1/2 (2000): 194-224. Yee, Jennifer. “Ways of Knowing, Feeling, Being, and Doing: Toward an Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminist Epistemology.” Amerasia Journal, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2009): 49-64.
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Thick Skin Emma Shooshan
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Roots Angela Y. Law I dream of running away
Returning to lands that say my name
Soil filled with the cries of generations past I was born yellow Hair and dreams
To a mama who wasn’t sure if baba would stay I spent 22 years trying to unlearn
Trying to revive my voice from the ashes scarring my arms and legs Running away was the best thing I could do
Battling white teachers and classmates fighting for spots at the ivy’s They didn’t know I was trying to survive Splintered knees and aching heart I wonder why I failed to start
Believing in most things other girls did Loving the wrong women Chasing bruises
I passed university Lying in my sheets
Now I avoid marrying into a family that disowns its mamas They want to eat the food and take the folded laundry But forget the female roots I did run away -
One leaf at a time I’ve chosen to sprout in places That are not barren -
One mouthful at a time
I’m learning to find my roots
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How to become American in 5 steps Trang Hoang 1. Buy all the whitening products and practice drowning yourself in the whiteness. 2. Dye your black hair blonde so that from afar you look just like any white American girl on the street. 3. Listen to all the right music, see all the right shows. They won’t be able to tell if you actually enjoyed the Asian dramas your mother used to watch before she went to bed or the foreign music your father played to chase your nightmares away. 4. Answer “where are you from?” with New York City, answer again with New York City when they ask you “No, where are you actually from?” Like there is supposed to be any other answer. 5. Shave all your pubic hair off so that the white guys won’t see the darkness of your body when they kiss you. Let them fill you up with American-ness until you’re so full you feel your Asian-ness slipping quietly away. 31
a conversation with chris Ritti Singh
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A Revisit to the Chinese Doctor Libby Kao If I could predict to you where these shelves lead, I might as well have figured out the universes within the human body. Even though this is a doctor and this is his office, I’m not talking about some medical grasp of the human body, some cringe-inducing names that sound like science and childproof bottles and the deduction of something until it isn’t anything anymore. I’m
talking about how a place can reek of musty, steady gentleness; of home and all its complications; of something like balance, or myth, or history. It’s less office than chamber, more potion than medicine, and it compels opening your clutched, senseless bravery to a consultation that just might unmask how deeply you’ve misunderstood some aspect of living life. It’s terrifying. Last time, although I’d assured myself that no one really cared to know, I hadn’t been able to stop insisting that I was here against my will. Six-months-ago-me had clung to that for as long as I possibly could. There are panels of dark wood with the Chinese paintings fitted closely across them. There are endless jars and boxes on endless and shelves. I suppose there is a ceaseless dizziness of being in a place that directly maps onto the mysterious workings of the human soul. I used to not believe in this entire business. I don’t know if I believe it now, per se, although my mother and two grandmothers and various relatives would like to think that I’ve been convinced. They would like to think that all of their bickering paid off, that this trip back meant I had changed. Last time I visited, it had seemed like my entire extended family was weighing in on which Chinese doctor was best to fix me. I ended up flying back to the US at the end of my twoweek stay, with suitcases half-filled with jars and packets, tablets and powders; no clear instructions. The first experience had been baffling—all the Chinese doctor had done to
determine what was wrong with me was lightly press the inside of my wrist with his two fingers; first at one angle, then with a little more pressure at another. Before I could fully wonder how he could feel out my every complication in a mere minute, he was done. This was 把脈 (bǎmài), and this was unexplainable. Now back in the same waiting room, I cannot help but wonder if this visit is simply an reengagement in a mutual fiction: one in which the doctor purports to feel out the deeper issues of my person in just that one minute, and I dutifully swallow unwieldy bitterness for weeks afterward. I am not sure if I am participating in a necessary illusion when I nod along and fold to
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his ability to discern whether all of my parts are at ease with one another, whether my health is
struggling in ways I hadn’t yet disclosed, whether my family really has reason to worry. I don’t know which one of us—me or him or the small army of relatives craning their necks in the waiting room—actually wants the reading to reveal something deeper than pulse.
I do remember last time he asked me questions about my sleep schedule, saying that by way of the qi in my liver, my body restores itself from top to bottom between the hours of 11 PM
and 2 AM, so I must be sleeping in order for it to do its job. I remember trying not to laugh in response to this. I kept my actual sleep schedule vague, thinking of how when junior year in college went from bad to worse, I’d actually congratulate myself for at least going to bed by 4am. The Chinese doctor also told me not to eat things that were too cold or too fried, so as to let my troubled skin heal. I remember he announced to me that I don’t exercise enough, and that I may be fighting frequently with my mother lately. I remember feeling less surprised at all of this than I thought I’d be. Maybe I’d just been preoccupied with the perplexity at being so relentlessly understood by someone whose entire face crinkled when his eyes smiled. Even though I loved my relatives and
my relatives loved me, I hadn’t seen a smile so complete, in nearly two weeks. Last time. Yes. Early June; balmy and resentfully unbroken and insensibly hopeful. Now it is December, and I’m back, and I still don’t know if I believe in this stuff. These things don’t fit very well in my world, all the strange-smelling herbs and the tables and graphs and swirling, beautiful Chinese characters. But my unbelief doesn’t unwrite the reality that life has in fact picked itself up somehow during the six months since I’d been here last. In the intervening months, I’ve grown accustomed to trying to see people the way this Chinese doctor had. When someone approaches me looking carefully undevastated, I don’t shy away from asking questions anymore. As I watch them answer, I find myself checking their faces and eyes for what’s bright, or uneven, or hollow; for verification whether they are losing weight or slipping away. I try to smile with my whole face, not caring if my eyes disappear into a crinkled curve. But could coming here this time be a mistake, an undoing of the last visit’s stroke of luck? What if there isn’t anything wrong with me anymore, now that I’ve faithfully eaten all my inscrutable prescriptions and my internal organs have made peace with each other and I have been set aright, rewired, adjusted for life? If no one on behalf of Chinese medicine and Chinese relatives and Chinese-ness can tell me what’s wrong with me anymore—does that make me whole?
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Why I Dream of Trees Jennifer Fergesen When I first saw Capiz, the scenery was at once wholly alien and familiar, like the halfremembered backdrop of a thousand childhood dreams. This was the landscape of my mother’s childhood, after all, the place she hated so much it invigorated her to struggle and claw and to earn scholarships and corporate visa sponsorships all the way to America. My mother escaped so thoroughly, in fact, that she could eventually afford to send her daughter to a prestigious liberal arts college, which could in turn afford to send that daughter to work with an NGO back in that very Capiz. Far below the rutted mountain roads I bumped across on motorbike rides between the NGO’s beneficiary villages, rivers crisscrossed a lush patchwork of rice fields, mango orchards, and palm-studded forest - bluer blues and greener greens than my suburban eyes had ever rendered. How, I wondered on every motorbike ride, could someone devote all the energy of her youth to leaving that world, only to raise a daughter who dreamed of returning to it? I tried to ask her on our laggy weekly calls, pressed into a corner of the village internet cafe. I described those mountain walks, hoping to spark idyllic visions of an out-of-doors childhood, the kind I read about in Heidi and Girl of the Limberlost. To my description of the fields and rivers, my mother offered stories of working until her back ached alongside her tenant-farmer grandparents, of scrubbing sheets as upstream as possible from the water buffalo. It was only after months in Capiz, learning the provincial dialect Ilonggo that my mother forgot, that I realized the foreignness of my view of the land. For all my preoccupation with “nature,” I could not find an Ilonggo translation for the word. On those mountain walks to remote farms, my guides called the scrubby land we macheted through not “nature” but “búkid.” Bukid, the analog in the dialect of capitalcity Manila, has the fairly straightforward translation “countryside,” but the Capizeños I asked gave a more nuanced and varying definition to búkid. Everyone agreed that búkid was distinct from katalunan (wilderness), but the consistency ended there. Some said búkid was any land that someone owned, specifically referring to the borders of the old haciendas that once dominated the country. Most narrowed their definitions. Depending on which Capizeño you ask, búkid could mean cultivated fields, the uncultivated land between the fields, the hilly land that belongs to a hacienda but is too steep to farm, or any land that you can walk through without a machete. Outside of búkid is the katalunan, the realm of unpleasant creatures such as kapre (tree-dwelling giants) and aswang (fetus-eating vampires). My determinedly Americanized mother never hinted that her nightmares included these creatures, but even now she maintains a distaste for anything resembling the “wild” and refuses to hike or fish or swim in lakes when my father drives us into the woods in the summer. My father drives us into the woods because his father drove him into the woods, and by his own recollection those trips are as close as he ever got to “nature.” Nature was something far away from his boyhood home in the sprawling new suburbs of the Midwest. It was something he saw on television, in programs like Tarzan and Disney’s True-Life Adventures. He might catch a glimpse of its power when a blizzard or heat wave blew into town, but then his mother would flick on the forced-air heating or the central AC so that the events outside the double-glazed windows felt as distant as the Technicolor ones on the screen. Nature seemed equally removed from the family’s dinner table. In those days my grandmother’s cooking adhered to mid-century Midwestern technique, which relies largely on white 36
bread, ground beef, and canned things poured over other things. Though today’s “locavores” might disagree with the terminology, my father’s family ate local - they lived primarily on beef, wheat, and corn, the products of Midwestern industrial agriculture. This industry had reached its zenith by the time my father was born, thanks in large part to the achievements of Monsanto, the homegrown Midwestern corporation that happens to be the source of my grandmother’s family’s wealth. By the time my father was born, the Monsanto-derived Munch wealth had mostly evaporated. One of the vestigial remains was Ralphie’s Knoll, the setting of my father’s summertime brushes with “nature.” Ralphie’s Knoll is a rambling, crumbling property on Lake Michigan outside of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, a sleepy town still coasting on the wealth it gained from the yacht and caviar industries in the nineteenth century. When the Edwardian Munches summered there, Ralphie’s Knoll was surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods, meadows, and cherry orchards. An industrial park has now consumed most of the land, but in the 1970s there was still enough left for my father and his two brothers to explore through all their boyhood summers. Photographs from those summers of the wildflower fields and the gnarled, long-barren cherry trees make it easy to see why the place fascinated my ancestors, who admired Johns Burroughs and Muir and published some mediocre volumes of Transcendentalist poetry. Burroughs, Muir, and the bad poetry appeared in my childhood library via a late-90s cleanout of the decaying Knoll, along with the kind of environmentalist propaganda more insidiously attractive to young girls: Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, Girl of the Limberlost. Anne of Green Gables was far from the only environmentalist propaganda to which I was subjected in my vulnerable youth. My father bought me field guides to birds and plants every time we went to the woods, and I hoarded them in my bookshelf alongside the colorful pamphlets environmental groups distribute to schools and libraries on Earth Day. My favorite cassette was by a man named “Rainforest Pete” who sang about the hole in the ozone layer and the dangers of plastic six-pack rings. Every Saturday we went to the recycling center to toss the milk bottles into the “2” bin and the water bottles into the “1” bin, saving a few to make into bird feeders and pencil holders. We went on “nature walks” along the undulating roads of our post-war suburbs on which we examined poison ivy and picked up trash with garden gloves. Despite these efforts, however, our lifestyle was almost identical to that of my father’s family in the 1970s Midwest, right down to the can-on-can cuisine my mother learned from my grandmother. We drove to the supermarket in a lumbering minivan and filled it with products whose contents and origins we did not care to question. Our slightly unusual ethnic makeup may have kept us from being served in certain restaurants, but it did nothing to keep us from being the corn-fed, gas-powered Americans who environmentalists bemoan. I was raised like my father, so I became like my father, always dreaming of the “nature” I glimpsed in fiction. The same suburban longing led him to the woods of Wisconsin and I to the mountains of Capiz. When I lay under Capiz’s unfamiliar constellations and wished aloud that I could stay forever, I heard the echo of my father saying the same by countless campfires. However, while my father was limited corporate vacations and furtively repurposed sick days, my only limits were the extent of my grant and the generosity of the Philippine bureaucracy. I extended my visa and stayed in Capiz the rest of the summer. I relayed that plan to my mother on another laggy call. There was more to write, I explained; I didn’t tell her how I dreaded the return to the sterile and the banal that comes at the end of every respite from suburbia. “You’re just like me,” she said anyway, “always dreaming of escaping where you come from.”
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Roots JinJin Xu
acrylic, ink, hair
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adoptee re-introductions Meejin Richart Oceans apart, we found each other
Nervous and anxious
Vessel container
For us
Crossing water in metal
Means crossing language and time 28 years apart
2 weeks together
Another year apart
And now the return It hurts.
Our story was different Rewritten
by hands not our own I choose
The return
You choose
To accept me We choose Love.
To return is to resist
To love each other through the pain is radical Digging deep To the root
And taking the circumstance in stride
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I cry
Tears well up as I sail through clouds Headed your way
And allow myself to feel
The agony of separation The hope of reunion Of knowing And loving
And not knowing
And things lost in translation. All there is to do Is be open One smile One story
One ride at a time.
Separation, again Meejin Richart Wheels on the tracks
Puts distance between us My heart grows a little It hurts to leave.
Laughter over little things
Gentle voice, kind gestures
많이모고 most important Side-by-side we dream. Time spent together Many meals shared
Were better in conscious life
Than In my most magical dreams. Alone a silent suffering 진짜 보고싶다
Tears flow into a bottomless well I can never touch them.
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Dreaming Letter by Letter Loriya Thao The English alphabet. One of the first things I learned as a child. A, B, C, D… all the way to Z. In total, 26 letters. Letters. Building blocks. Alphabet soup. Spelling Bee’s. Words. So much meaning is put into a single letter and we allow it to dictate our lives from the moment that we begin to learn. Especially for first generation students whose parents don’t speak English. And the only comprehension and understanding of the school system is that that an A is good and a C means more work is needed, which is therefore ingrained upon their children. What makes an A different from a C? They’re just letters; they hold no real weight. Context. Primary school. Sing your ABC’s. A B C D E F G, H I J K, L M N O P, Q R S, T U V, W X Y and Z. Now I know my ABC’s, next time won’t you sing with me? Secondary School. Grading begins. Letters. Something that used to be so fun to recite. 26 worthy letters. Now reduced to 5… A B C D and F. 5 letters. 5 mighty letters. that can change our lives that hold so much power that determines which path we take that can crush or make our dreams.
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Striving to make our parents’ proud they want us to go on and be doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers. But why couldn’t I be a writer, a dancer, an athlete, an actor? Regardless of the path taken it’s those letters those five letters that decide our future. A. B. C. D.
We are ambitious. brave. capable. determined. exuberant. fearless. generous. We are hard working. intelligent. just. kind. We are loving. millenniums. noteworthy. observant. passionate. We are qualified. remarkable. strong.
F.
We are tenacious. unique. valued.
What do the letters mean? What do the letters represent? It’s a measure of how one does in a class. How one does in comparison to others.
We are worthy. extravagant. youthful. zealous.
Let’s raise one question. Does the letter also measure the amount of effort? The hours spent? The all-nighters? The tears shed?
Most importantly,
No. We can’t let those 5 letters control us anymore. For we are more than those 5 letters. We are more than just an A, B, C, D, or F.
We are human. Don’t let 5 letters consume your dreams, dictate how you live, or control you. Think big. Work hard. Achieve. Create your own path. Dream away. 43