Rage Against the Monolith by rageagainstthemonolith

RAGE AGAINST THE MONOLITH

Table of Contents Foreword.............................................................................................1 “Untitled”............................................................................................6 Karbi Choudhury “becoming”..........................................................................................7 Nina Y. Hu “(when you say that i am fine and i do not correct you)”..................8 Nina Y. Hu “Can You Open Wide For Me?” Pt. 1.................................................9 Alyson Lee “Surrender”........................................................................................11 Olivia Rogo “Becoming”........................................................................................12 Olivia Rogo “What They Don’t Want You to Talk About in a Korean Church”...15 Nancy Chong “nostalgia”..........................................................................................17 Nina Y. Hu “the cherry blossoms”.......................................................................18 Nina Y. Hu “(Il)legitimate”..................................................................................20 Nancy Chong “Reorienting the South Asian Female Body”..................................24 Karbi Choudhury “Where You From”...........................................................................25 Karbi Choudhury The Tidal Flats.................................................................................26 Liú Méi z.b. Chen

“Asian Enough?”..............................................................................40 Olivia Rogo Blackout Poem..................................................................................41 Nina Y. Hu “Unhomeliness for South Asian Americans”...................................43 Karbi Choudhury Model Minority Infographic.............................................................44 Sharmin Sultana-Sattar Interview Excerpt.............................................................................45 Sharmin Sultana-Sattar “No Signal”.......................................................................................46 Sharmin Sultana-Sattar “legacy”..............................................................................................47 Nina Y. Hu “and when the world”.......................................................................48 Nina Y. Hu Wealth Disparity Infographic..........................................................49 Sharmin Sultana-Sattar “Crazy Rich Asians”..........................................................................50 Sharmin Sultana-Sattar “Myths About the Hijab”...................................................................51 Karbi Choudhury “there was no rest here”...................................................................52 Nina Y. Hu “a poem for the other”......................................................................53 Nina Y. Hu “South Asian American Dating as Thirdspace”...............................54 Karbi Choudhury

“Can You Open Wide For Me?” Pt. 2...............................................55 Alyson Lee “Family History (A Conversation)”..................................................57 Olivia Rogo “it comes in waves”...........................................................................59 Nina Y. Hu “& when spring returns”..................................................................60 Nina Y. Hu “Can You Open Wide For Me?” Pt. 3...............................................61 Alyson Lee “trigger”............................................................................................62 Nancy Chong “an undoing”.....................................................................................63 Nina Y. Hu Afterword..........................................................................................66

References..............................................................................80

“Combining the real and the imagined, things and thought on equal terms, or at least not privileging one over the other a priori, these lived spaces of representation are thus the terrain for the generation of ‘counterspaces,’ spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning.” Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places

Foreword Rage Against the Monolith comes from a place that has no place. That is to say, it comes from a grieving – and yes, of a rage – that demands to be expressed where it has only been silenced before. This zine has been developed with deep care, and a grave sense of urgency amidst the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic that has amplified the longstanding violence against Asian American communities. Though this pandemic did not singlehandedly instigate or cause such violence, it has increased its frequency and attention within the media. The pandemic, the Uprisings of 2020, and the March 2021 Atlanta shooting has led to greater visibility and participation of Asian Americans in coalition spaces, and to a richer understanding of our communities’ histories—of our survival through white supremacy, as well as our own perpetuations of it. In this epoch that has sought bolder and bolder attempts to define, alienate, and bring harm to Black, Indigenous, and other bodies of color, we must grapple with what being Asian means. What it means not only to the “them”s—the State, the white supremacists, the casual racists—but also to ourselves. What does it mean to be Asian American, straddling an identity that is as diverse as it is fractured by our very attempts to belong? Once these questions of identity and belonging begin, they don’t stop. What is projected and expected when we talk about “Asian American” identity? Who does it overemphasize, and who does it leave out? What has been erased and silenced among Asian American narratives? What does being “Asian enough” mean? How are Asian bodies read in institutional spaces? What are we most proud of, regarding our Asian identities and cultures? If we don’t see ourselves represented in the world, are we real? Are we valid?

Our collective embodies this very tension between diversity and fragmentation. The lived experiences of Asian American identity that we represent are mirrored in the form of the zine, a format that originates in counter culture and encourages creative expression that defies the conventions of traditional publishing. In our zine about heterogeneity and fractured manifestations of identity, we resist established norms about “flow” or narrative and instead create something that is syncopated and variable by design. The collage-like nature of this zine empowers us to portray both the similarities and differences between our experiences, pushing back against categorization. For instance, we recognize that an East Asian American experience can be vastly different from a South Asian American or West Asian American one. Furthermore, there is no homogenous “East Asian American experience,” “South Asian American experience,” or “West Asian American experience.” Rather than rely on these sorts of categorizations, we leaned into Edward Soja’s notion of Thirdspace when conceptualizing Asian American identity and this zine, creating a “chosen space for struggle, liberation, [and] emancipation” within these pages (68). We seek to embody “the spaces of the peripheries, the margins and the marginalized,” with a breadth of work that reflects how deeply pervasive the experiences of erasure are among Asian American communities, while also accepting the “subliminal mystery and limited knowability” of this larger reflection on identity (Soja 68). After all there are still voices missing from these pages, including West Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander perspectives. This zine is the starting point, not the finish line.

In all, through this collage of artwork, histories, personal narratives, grief, celebration, and anger, we seek to address our Asian American lived experiences as works in progress, enveloped in a Thirdspace in which both meaningful and violent realities collide. We aim to represent these realities, and also to envision a more liberatory future. With this zine, we reclaim our agency by contributing to a reimagining of Asia America, by us and for us. We hope you take in the following pages with the same sensitivity, rage, and passion with which they were created. Let our anger fuel your consumption of the content. Listen to what we have to say. Perhaps then, through the medium and power of artistic expression, untethered by academia, we might begin to combat the hatred. Sincerely, Liú Méi z.b. Chen (Oral History M.A., 2021) Nancy Chong (Narrative Medicine M.S., 2022) Karbi Choudhury (Narrative Medicine M.S., 2021) Nina Y. Hu (Narrative Medicine M.S., 2023) Alyson Lee (Narrative Medicine M.S., 2022) Olivia Rogo (Narrative Medicine M.S., 2022) Sharmin Sultana-Sattar (Narrative Medicine M.S., 2022) Columbia University, New York, NY

My anger seared into me a charcoal red melting in buttery streaks of brown rage. Streaks of concealer across my ethnic face, concealing. I stare into the mirror, smudges of black encasing almond eyes, hair tousled from where you pulled without Consent Tears in streaks of race, rage When your PhD. in physics fooled me into letting you in, you raped, pushed in as if that land were yours. Abandoned by what I knew, still knowing of your fetish. The hate I witness about me, for my Asian sisters and brothers, reminds me of your stupid face clenched in orgasmic unholy white. Excavating those holes, choking me like George without Consent Promising, lying My beautiful body of color broken open by those lies Broken open in quiet violence.

becoming i left the year wishing to return to my old self (she saw march for its springshine autumn for its gold) but her hopes sat strangely for their lightness & so i left her, too for i could not & i would not hold her back from her undoing

(when you say that i am fine and i do not correct you) i keep my mourning in the stars soft and open in the gloaming and in the night where stars will stay pulsing pulsing pulsing on never to be seen by morning

What They Don’t Want You to Talk About in a Korean Church 1. Before Friday night service our mothers rush around the church kitchen, serving rice cake soup and wheat flour noodles, seasoned bean sprouts and kimchi too. In a low voice Emma’s mother asks our mothers if they heard the rumor, our youth group teachers, Samantha and Silas, are expecting a baby girl in August. They gasp and say an unwed pregnancy will taint the church image, but my mother looks at me through the kitchen window and her gaze murmurs, Don’t listen to them. I look away and shove a spoonful of rice cake soup in my mouth. 2. I watch the pastor’s wife decorate the old building sanctuary with poinsettias, red and green foliage blazing gaudy Christmas spirit throughout the dimly lit space. Mary tells us to get up and rehearse the fan dance routine for the eleventh time, fixing the posture of our fingers so the feathers on the fans flow gracefully as we twirl. When it is my turn to lower the large fan painted with pink peony blossoms, I see my father stumble into the sanctuary waving the divorce papers in his hands, Who’s that? Pretending not to hear I jump off the stage and lead my father back outside. 3. My alarm clock does not ring in the morning like it usually does, instead I wake up to my mother’s boyfriend fondling my left breast. Laying frozen still on the spliced apart bunk bed I shut my eyes tighter, unfeeling his sweaty hands on my body as he pulls down my pants and penetrates. My small group teacher tells my pastor I was late to church today, I failed to catch the worship and sermon and offering so my pastor approaches me, Is everything okay? I lie and tell him I dozed off on the 7 Train and missed my stop.

nostalgia we found an old box in the attic where the softer side of our hearts had been kept held together with cobweb regrets that we brushed aside we tried those days back on slowly nostalgic for futures of some other time meanwhile, the sunbeams were gathering dust

the cherry blossoms your wish for cherry blossoms was granted by the passing rain— to you, a prelude to blooming memories sweet in their fleeting ambrosia —on its way down to the low gardens where it sat heavy taking the breath from the soil and i thought, how differently we remembered the rain

(Il)legitimate I was conceived out of wedlock. My mother never told me. Neither did my dad. But my grandmother did. But she also didn’t. She always had a framed picture of my mother from her wedding day on her vanity—in the apartments we lived in at 88 Greenwich Street, 4 Manhattan Avenue, and 265 Riverside Drive. But now this framed picture of my mother sits on my grandmother’s vanity in my uncle’s large apartment in Incheon, where she currently resides. She carried this picture with her when she left to take care of my newborn cousins after living with us for eight years in our tiny apartments. When I visited her in 2017, she pointed at this picture of my mother on a new vanity, in a new frame. My mother still looked angelic and divine in her pure white, A-line scoop neck, chiffon lace wedding dress. Her hair was pulled up into an exquisite bun, with a few teensy curls dangling by her earlobes. My grandmother lent my mother her prized pearl earrings and elegant emerald necklace to wear that day. My mother’s hands were folded on top of one another and instead of the classic French manicure most brides get, her nails were painted a deep burgundy red, just like the color on her tensed lips. Her gaze pierced through the frame glass towards me but her veiled smile softened the obscure look in her dark brown eyes. “Look how pretty she sits,” my grandmother said, grabbing the framed picture from her vanity. I touched the gold reliefs on the frame as she drew it closer between us. “You’re in this too,” she added. I giggled nervously. “Right in there,” my grandmother said as she pointed to my mother’s abdomen, “She was four months pregnant! We had to plan this wedding in three weeks. So little time. That’s why only your grandpa, uncle, and I came to her wedding. We couldn’t afford anyone else’s plane tickets, let alone the wedding ceremony itself.” I looked up at my grandmother’s vanity mirror and saw my smile slowly melt away. My grandmother looked up at me. “I was…there?” I asked her. “Oh. Oh, oh, oh my! OH,” she whispered to herself. I stared again at the photograph of my mother in her wedding dress. I noticed how cramped and dingy the yellow-lit wedding hall in Woodside, Queens suddenly appeared. I peered closer and saw stains at the end of my mother’s train veil. The emerald necklace on her neck didn’t shine as bright as before. Behind my mother’s soft smile was panic and in her eyes, a frozen trance. I had finally unlocked and opened my Pandora’s box. The one that stared at me from my grandmother’s vanity for all those years. My grandmother placed her gentle hand on my left shoulder. I didn’t feel it.

My thoughts had already spiraled me back to my seven-year-old self in the dimly lit apartment that my mother, father, and I lived in before their divorce. It is the only apartment in New York that we lived in that I can’t remember which borough it was in, what street it was on, and which unit we lived in. But what torments me most is that I can still remember every corner, room, and curve of the apartment. I had to know. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had anywhere to hide. “I’m not a bad guy,” my father told me as he headed off to work one morning, “I’ll come back in time for bedtime to read you The Rainbow Fish.” He promised me this every morning for six days now, so I only half believed him. That night, I grabbed my copy of The Rainbow Fish and lay down on my bed. I pulled my blue comforter with yellow stars up to my chin. I wrapped my arms around Rainbow Fish and turned over to look at my digital clock. 11:34 pm. He was late. My mother came into my room at 11:49 pm. “It looks like Daddy will be late again,” my mother said. “I’m not surprised,” I breathed out. I unraveled The Rainbow Fish from my arms. “Let me read for you tonight,” my mother insisted. I shrugged at this. The idea had not been a sincere one. My mother’s tired eyes betrayed the offer. But I was still in ESL classes and knew I couldn’t read the book by myself. I didn’t want to wait any longer. “Okay,” I said. My mother read with forced enthusiasm. As she read aloud, I pictured Rainbow Fish not sharing his shiny blue, green, purple, pink, and silver scales. I thought about how selfish he was. He had so many scales. I guess there’s no need to share when you’re the most beautiful fish in the ocean. But then the story took a turn. Rainbow Fish discovered that to be happy, he had to share his scales to see the other fishes’ joy. “The Rainbow Fish shared his scales left and right. And the more he gave away, the more delighted he became. When the water around him filled with glimmering scales, he at last felt at home among the other fish.” What a cop out. I thought. “Alright, well I want to show you something I got for you,” my mother said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a spherical container. When she opened the lid, I caught sight of the glossy, gleaming, and glamorous decorative hair clips. I pulled out the hair clip with a plastic eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly on it. It was as if I been given my very own shiny scale to flaunt. I smiled. Then we heard a loud banging at the door. 12:41 am. “IT”S ME!!” My father shouted.

My mother hurried to the door and peeped out the door viewer. She looked at me and nodded. I knew what the look meant. I rushed to the kitchen to grab our go bag. I checked to see if we had everything we needed: passports, insurance cards, emergency numbers written out on a tea stained napkin, a contact list of our neighbors and my mother’s friends in the city, cereal bars, MetroCards, and two twenty dollar bills. I ran back into my room. I sat down in the dark bedroom and hugged the go bag tightly against my chest. I held the butterfly clip tightly in my palm. I heard glass being shattered, cabinets being opened, and words being jumbled like alphabet soup in the midst of all the shouting. Then I heard the footsteps. Thump, thump, thump. Stop. The footsteps came closer and I felt the staggering body shift its weight downwards to my level. It was my father. “Hello, honey,” he said. His breath was filled with the thick smell of whiskey. “What have you got there?” My father said as he snatched the go bag and butterfly hair clip from me. I started to cry, my father took away the one shiny scale I had left. He threw the items to the floor. The contents in the go bag spilled out and my butterfly hair clip split in half. He grabbed the two twenty dollar bills from the go bag. “This isn’t enough,” my father said. He searched all over the house for more cash. He had the habit of swimming in whiskey then drowning in debt from gambling with his friends after work. When he lost too much, he took it out on us. My mother went up to him. “That’s not yours!” She yelled. Then, silence. I got up and walked out from my dark bedroom corner into the kitchen. My eyes locked in with my mother’s eyes. Her left eye was clouded with blood. Her tank top was distressed and bloodied too. Her left eyelid started to swell and turn blue. I ran to the red Cortelco 2500 phone sitting by the front door. I dialed 3 and 1, then stopped. “I’m not a bad guy,” I heard my dad say. “What are you doing?” My mother asked me. “If you’re not going to call, go out and get your neighbors!” My father grabbed my mother’s right wrist, dragged her and pushed her towards the black bookshelf by the kitchen. The bookshelf tipped over when her back hit the shelves. All my picture books collapsed on her. I heard knocking on the front door. When I opened it, it was my neighbor, Leo, who lived in the apartment right across from ours. “What the hell is going on?” Leo asked. When he realized what was happening, he grabbed the telephone and called the police. My father tried to rush out of the apartment, but Leo caught the cuff of his black

blazer. Leo got both of my dad’s arms and twisted them behind his back. “I’M NOT THE BAD GUY!” My father shouted. Our front door was still wide open. The other neighbors peered out of their doors and looked into the spectacle in our apartment. My grandmother placed her gentle hand on my left shoulder and squeezed it this time. I was sitting in her large bedroom in Incheon again. I looked into her eyes. Deep, plunging guilt swallowed me whole—was I the reason my mother vowed to a union that brought an apocalyptic epilogue to her freedom?

"Where You From" By Riz Ahmed They ever ask you "Where you from?" Like, yeah, but "Where you really from?" The question seems simple but the answer's kinda long I could tell 'em Wembley but I don't think that's what they want But I don't wanna tell 'em more 'cause anything I say is wrong Britain's where I'm born and I love a cup of tea and that But tea ain't from Britain, it's from where my DNA is at And where my genes are from That's where they make my jeans and that Then send them over to NYC, that's where they stack the P's and that Skinheads meant I never really liked the British flag And I only got the shits when I went back to Pak And my ancestors' Indian but India was not for us My people built the West, we even gave the skinheads swastikas Now everybody everywhere want their country back If you want me back to where I'm from then bruv I need a map Or if everyone just gets their shit back then that's bless for us You only built a piece of this place bruv, the rest was us Maybe I'm from everywhere and nowhere No man's land, between the trenches Nothing grows there But it's fertilised by the brown bodies Fought for you in the war So when I spit a poppy grows there Yeah I make my own space in this business of Britishness Your question's just limiting, it's based on appearances Stop trying to make a box for us I'll make my own and bruck your poxy concept of us Very few fit these labels so I'm repping for the rest of us Who know that there's no place like home and that stretches us Who code switch so don't piss me off for a cricket test for us Or question us about our loyalty, our blood and sweat's enough Born under a sun you made too hot for us Kidnapped by empire and diaspora fostered us Raised by bhangra garage and halal southern fried chicken shops A junglist and jungly I'm Mowgli from the Jungle Book, I'm John Barnes in the box I blaze hard after mosque I bend words like brown and west until they just spell what My tribe is a quest to a land that was lost to us And its name is dignity So where I'm from is not your problem bruv

Asian Enough? No offense but, Do you speak another language? The home cooked meals must be good, right? Wait is your last name even Asian? Being adopted is cool, are you Chinese? Can I try to guess what you are, I think I’m pretty good at it? Wait you were born there? Have you been back, do you have family there? What is your other name? How old were you when you left? Were you an orphan? How did you get here? Do you know anything about your real family? Why did they give you up? Do you still talk to them? When did you know you were adopted? Who told you? Am I being insensitive, I’m just curious?

Nina Hu Applied Writing 22 October, 2018 On Ramen Growing up in one of those Spring�elds in the Midwest, where my parents had ended up almost by accident, I formulated a lot of opinions on what being Chinese didn’t mean. I knew, for example, that cashew chicken – which, incidentally, was invented in my Spring�eld – was not real Chinese food. I knew that, in fact, most things on those menus were nothing like what my mom cooked at home. And I knew that whenever my friends came over, it was best to just order pizza. Birthday parties were a particularly hazardous time, which I discovered the hard way one year when a friend of mine got adventurous in the kitchen. My mom liked to repurpose old jars for storing a variety of things, which is how we ended up with pickled turnips labeled “peanut butter” and sesame paste as “spaghetti sauce.” My friend was especially intrigued by a tub my mom kept on the countertop, which was labeled mysteriously in bright red Chinese and contained some thick, white substance that my friend put a glob of on her �nger before running into the living room to demand what it was she’d just eaten. (It was, in fact, a tub of lard, which my mom occasionally used to add a bit of extra �avor to her dishes.) On free weekends, my family would make the four hour drive to St. Louis and spend long hours in the Asian grocery store, with its never-ending aisles of things that I only pretended to recognize half the time. When my sister and I got bored of trailing after our mom, we’d go explore the seafood section, poking at the sad little crabs and watching these snail-like things suck their weird eyeballs back into their shells whenever we tried to snip them o�. The best part of these trips was the ride home, on the rare event that we’d somehow convince our dad into letting us stay in a hotel for the night. I can’t explain why the concept of a hotel was so enticing to me, except that hotels meant prolonging that feeling of don’t-have-to-be-back-yet, and hotels also meant eating ramen. Those ten-cent bags of ramen were a particular treat for me, for several reasons. It was not remotely nutritious, for one, and for another, it was not something we often stocked in the house; after my parents had gotten fully settled in this country, �nancially speaking, I think it was a point of pride that we could a�ord better food. But I loved eating ramen – “hotel mian tiao” (meaning: noodles), as I called it – and on days when my dad wound up in charge of feeding me and my sister, we even got to eat it at home, with a soft-boiled egg in each of our bowls. When I went o� to college, and became aware of the fact that I didn’t know how to cook either, I ended up eating a lot of ramen this way. One time, I bought the wrong brand (they tended to all look the same, at the time), which was a terrible mistake to learn after buying a two-dozen pack. College was also when I realized I wasn’t the only Asian anymore. I was, in fact, not even very Asian at all in comparison. The international students stuck out like a sore thumb to me, always clumping together and loudly, obnoxiously, never speaking in English to one another. I’d never properly learned Chinese; my mom used to

berate my dad for only speaking English with us growing up (we were all learning, after all), but no one really minded enough until it felt too late to do something about it. Apart from not knowing Chinese the way the other students did, I certainly didn’t dress like they did either, or draw attention to myself the way they did, or refuse to speak the language that they were supposed to be speaking. It also seemed very obvious to me that other people would know that they didn’t belong, and I could never quite �gure out why they were so unbothered by it, or why it bothered me as much as it did. I do remember that I went out of my way to not walk too closely to them, so that people would know I wasn’t that kind of Asian. I lived for the fried chicken and the four di�erent ways of eating potato (fried, mashed, baked, hashed) at our freshman cafeteria, and of course ramen when I was feeling fancy enough to boil my own water. When my mom sent me food from home, I ate about half before letting it all go bad in the fridge. The only thing partway redeeming about this was that I couldn’t seem to lie about it whenever my parents inquired. I did, at some point, get very good at not answering their calls. Despite my reservations on being labeled the wrong kind of Asian, I still ended up befriending a Korean girl – not on purpose, I said to myself at the time, not because she was “like me,” as if that were something to be defensive about, but because we happened to be brushing our teeth in the dorm bathroom at the same time and got to talking one night. Once, when I was bemoaning the fact that white people pronounced “dofu” wrong because they were white and didn’t know any better, she said to me, “You know that other cultures eat tofu too, right?” I remember that it took way too long for me to understand what she meant: that there was more than one way to say something, and that it’s not anyone’s place to claim which ones are wrong. I remember when I learned that ramen didn’t just come in a bag. I remember the �rst time I couldn’t bear to throw my mom’s food away anymore, because it made me cry. I remember when others began to look at me exactly the way I’d always feared that they would. Medical school was a world that forced you into survival mode, where you learned hard truths about yourself, and where you found your ride-or-die’s: the ones who made late-night dates with cadavers with you when you were about to fail anatomy class. Whose hair you held while they puked in a glass after one-too-many on a getaway trip to D.C. “Why do your people only like to hang out with each other?” they kept wanting to know. I remember looking around at my closest friends – Korean. Hawaiian. Korean. Indian. Somali. Indian. – and instead of embarrassment, I could only wonder what kind of question that was. My…people? You mean the people who are my friends, who I like to hang out with, because they are my friends? I knew what explanation they wanted to hear. And I knew I could either be bothered by it, or decide to let it go.

Unhomeliness for South Asian Americans Post- 9/11

Hasan Minhaj performing his 2017 Peabody Award-winning stand-up "Homecoming King"

"The unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence" (144). -Homi Bhabha, "The World and the Home" Dad: (Sweeping glass after his car windows are smashed as if he works at a hate crime barbershop) Lo kya kahenge? [What will people think?] Hasan: Dad! Why aren't you saying something? I'm asking you, say something! Dad: Hasan, ye cheejen hongee, aur ye cheejen hotee rahangee. [These things happen, and these things will continue to happen.] That's the price we pay for being here. Hasan: [To audience] We really are from two different generations, BMX bikes aside. Like my Dad's from that generation like a lot of immigrants where he feels like if you come to this country, you pay the American dream tax. You're gonna endure some racism, and if it doesn't cost you your life, you lucked out, pay it. Here you go Uncle Sam. But for me, like a lot of people, I was born here. So I actually have the audacity of equality.

Can you give us a quick overview of yourself and associated work? “I’m Maneesh Sasikumar. I was an entertainer my whole life. I went to Hollywood when I was 20… I worked with producers like Zachery Quinto, Chris Moore who produced Good Will Hunting, YouTube celebrities like Shane Dawson, music sensations like Avril Lavigne and few others, couple commercials, off broadway plays. I’m a recording artist. I’m also a producer of short films. I have a film I am very proud of called, Rise of the Green Ranger on Youtube. It’s ranking up about 1 million views…” How have you marketed yourself to get roles in Hollywood in the past? In the present? “When I first started out, it was in the traditional manner. Where, you know, you get an agent, the whole nine yards, your résumé, acting classes and then you hopefully get an agent or manager that can push you and get you an audition for a role and that’s a lot of hoping and praying that all the right things happen… What I found was the traditional way wasn’t as fruitful… I was like nothing would happen after you get through the door and there weren’t many roles that I was excited to play- something that represented me or really who I was. It started veering towards, “hey, let’s look towards what you look like. You’re Indian and there’s this role you can play that they are looking for. They were typically like comedy, kinda like slapstick roles. For example, characters like The Big Bang Theory actor, Raj. More of those kinds of roles… Not who I am… I changed my method to show people who I am. I’m not going to sit around to let somebody give me an opportunity to show who I am. I started to create my own content and produce my own material which I can use as my resume… They see one thing in their head, not knowing who you are. So to show them who we are, we had to rebrand and resculpt that image for them... Only way to do that is to create your own work and show.” “In the present time, I started marketing myself as mixed ethnicity because I wanted to stay away from that type of casting of the traditional Indian slapstick comedy type. What can I do to try and get more roles that are more towards my liking of what I represent and who I am? Those roles were labeled as mixed ethnicity, or caucasian or black… Mixed ethnicity will be a blank slate which was kind of a way in. They weren’t looking for an Asian or Indian in a lot of the breakdowns… A breakdown is a list of what characters are being looked for, what tv shows and what movies are gonna be casting… ‘This is what we’re looking for for this movie’. ‘We’re looking for this character ‘a’ and this character ‘a’ needs to look this way’…”

Do you feel Hollywood accurately depicts Asian or south Asian identity? “ I do not think Hollywood depicts Asian identity. I think there’s a lot of change going on currently. It’s happening like a snail it feels like because this should’ve happened a long time ago.” We now have more Asian leading roles in Hollywood such as Fresh off the Boat, Master of None, Mindy Kaling Show, Crazy Rich Asians, Harold and Kumar. The list is not that exhaustive, unfortunately. What do you think has led to the success of these Asians shows? “...I guess they felt the same way I did. They didn’t see the roles they were looking for. They weren’t offered those things. They were being told “we don’t see you in that light. Maybe that was their story and they ended up writing themselves into the fabric of their story instead of what other people thought of them… That helped open up a lot of doors.” For More Questions and Full Audio of Interview: https://tinyurl.com/Maneesh-Sashikumar

legacy i picked up this anger from some somewhere like a thing that i could borrow but with each returning the heavier thing was to try letting go until i could no longer know the end of what is always beginning or the difference between my blood & my burning

and when the world and when the world would turn us away let us cradle each storm with all our thorns showing let us share with the moon our own hollows where the sea breaks & breaks let us shake with it too let us sink to the earth and bury ourselves back and back to belonging

Myths About The Hijab "He r prob husban d ably forc her es to w ear it"

"Poor thing. Too ba she do d esn't h a v e same the freedo ms we have "

"She could ha so m uch m ve ore. Some one s hould tell h er th at."

e st b u " em "Sh essed r opp

s way l a e t 't sh "Isn t in tha o h g?" thin

ly nite i f e 's d as "She in or w g rg a vi e gettin r befo rried." ma

there was no rest here i buried my body beneath the old birch tree & grew roots of my own in the dark of its warm soil there i could have rested there i could have stayed but too soon my own hands would disinter me to find some start of a poem in bits of dirt, bits of stripped down soil

a poem for the other she knew words, once as dewdrops on a bud of green before rosy new meanings began to bloom & before the thistling, too oh how they prickled their glamour, their glisten & how tired she grew of their growing so she wilted down to her thorniest silent & slept

Family History (A Conversation) Nurse: What is your family medical history? I don’t know, I’m adopted. Nurse: Okay I guess I will just put N/A. Alright

Doctor: No family medical history? No Doctor: Are you sure? No, I’m lying Doctor: ? ? Doctor: So when did you find out you were adopted? Excuse me? Doctor: When did your parents tell you? I’m always curious about that. I’m Asian, my family is white, it’s pretty obvious.

Doctor: Iguessthatmakessenselikeifthere’sanadoptedblackkidwith awhitefamilyIguessyoudon’treallyhavetohavethatconversa tionbutIalwaysaskpatientswhoareadoptedbecauseI’mjust curiousabouthowthatworksintermsofwhenistherighttime totellachildthatthey’readoptedordoyoueventellthematallbu tyou’vecomeinwithyourmombeforeandIknowshe’swhitebu tIguessthatcouldalsomeanyourdadisAsianbutthenagainyourlast nameisn’tAsianIdon’tknowIjustfinditsointerestingbutany wayyoudon’tknowanythingaboutyourfamilymedicalhistory?

it comes in waves sorrow building over and over the length of an ocean

& when spring returns i am not words today but the way trees strip down to their bark before winter & when spring returns, tell it i am not to rebloom like the others nearby though i’ll save a branch for the lone sparrow, to sit with me from time to time

trigger the hospital dispatcher repeats Pia. Sexual Assault. East Asian. Eight years old. Elmhurst Hospital. on the car ride there I call my sister and whisper I don’t think I can take on this case she says I’ve responded to many rape cases in the past but I tell her it’s my first one with a child survivor I focus on the wallpaper with the hot air balloons which smothers every corner of the pediatric triage distracting me from looking at the waiting faces I open the heavy door into the room where Pia lies her small body coiled at the center of the bed crinkling the medical examination table paper her parents sit on the other side their stares numb with disbelief that this could happen to their own daughter reminds me of how my mom reacted when she found out the truth after I waited eight years to tell I pull up a chair to sit next to Pia re-collecting the fragments of me to quiet the crippling reminder this case unleashes of my own disjointed trajectory towards healing unlike Pia I had no courage unlike Pia there was no emergency room unlike Pia there was no advocate by my side unlike Pia there was no father

an undoing i am made of patchwork blues of half-sung things & broken moods i am fragments of a wandering at some edge of here and there i am & i am waiting for the day that i’m made whole when the earth in her seamless her boundless belonging will open her arms & welcome me home

Afterword “It is never one story, but only one story is allowed...This is why I write” (Shah 4). When coming together for this project as Asian Americans, we grappled with what story we wanted to tell. How do we form a “cohesive” narrative of the Asian American experience? What is the “Asian American story”? Amidst the alarming rise in violence against Asian Americans, how do we bring representation that is so desperately needed? In grappling with these questions, we ultimately realized these questions were not the questions we needed to answer—for there is no singular story of the Asian American experience. We thus chose to embrace the ways in which our individual experiences of Asian identity do not align and do not form one narrative. We chose to rage against the monolith. Through this, we hoped to form a new kind of representation of the Asian American experience—one in which the very diversity of our Asian-ness and the multiplicity of our stories could be realized. The lived experiences of Asian American identity are reflected through our zine in the form of a collective collage, to dissect erasure, belonging, invisibility, and perpetual violence of Asian bodies in an unhomely America. This is for Asians, made by Asians in order to produce more space for Asians—we belong. Erasure of Asian American Identity Representation encircles an innate desire for acceptance and community. Where does one go if that representation is fragmented, invisible, or surrounded by violence? Asian Americans have long struggled to find an identifying space in our neighborhoods, institutions, movies, literature, etc. Sharmin brought our attention to the ways in which the media erases the Asian American experience. Over 17 million people identify as Asian American, yet, Asian Americans hold only 1% of leading roles according to USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism (44). In her graphic (46), Sharmin maps out Soja’s principles of spatiality as they relate to the media. Soja’s first principle highlights an “objective space” that is real and mapped.

Soja explains, “This materialized, socially produced, empirical space is described as perceived space directly, sensible and open, within limits, to accurate measurement and description” (66). The physical space of Hollywood plays a huge part in creating roles for Asians. Where are we on this map? Representations of Asian America are scarce and quite invisible. In the rare times we are given that space, we are often boxed into a monolithic stereotype, ignoring a multifaceted culture varying in language, food, art, music, stories, etc. For aspiring Asian American actors and actresses, such stereotypical images impact career choices. In Sharmin’s interview with Asian American entertainer, Maneesh Sashikumar (45-46), he notes, “... there weren’t many roles that I was excited to play- something that represented me or really who I was. It started veering towards, ‘hey, let’s look towards what you look like. You’re Indian and there’s this role you can play that they are looking for.’ They were typically like comedy, kinda like slapstick roles” (45). Sashikumar highlights the ways in which Asian Americans are often reduced to stock images or the butt of jokes (heavy accents, geeky students, cab drivers, nail salon workers, etc.). Indeed, the bulk of Asian American representation in Hollywood seems to be in comedy (Fresh Off the Boat, The Mindy Project, Master of None, Jo Koy, Ali Wong, Hasan Minhaj, Harold and Kumar, etc.). Are we not to be taken seriously? Soja discusses the second space as being, “imagined”, where there is “representation of space,” and of “‘dominating’ spaces of regulatory and ‘ruly’ discourse” (67). The second space is analogous to screens, televisions, and social media forums where we see Asian faces but they are inaccurately personified. Whether through stereotypes or other means, Hollywood often contributes to this “imagined” space, regulating the scope of Asian identity. Any Asian is cast for another Asian role (i.e, Taiwanese take on the roles of Chinese as seen in Crazy Rich Asians played by Constance Wu). This ethnicity-blind role exchange amplifies the monolithic narrative and validates microaggressions of grouping us together into an interchangeable, homogenous culture. Furthermore, when representation is so limited, the stories that do get told inevitably leave out large portions of the Asian American population. On pages 49 and 50, Sharmin paired an infographic on wealth distribution amongst Asian Americans against the movie Crazy Rich Asians. This juxtaposition succinctly

shows the ways media narrows depictions of Asian America. As Sashikumar says frankly, “I do not think Hollywood depicts Asian identity” (46). With such limitations, Asian American entertainers must often carve their own spaces and develop their own content. Sashikumar says, “I’m not going to sit around to let somebody give me an opportunity to show who I am. I started to create my own content...we had to rebrand and resculpt that image for them” (45). Here, Sashikumar forges his own third-space of representation. Beyond the first space of objective barriers in Hollywood and the second space of limiting stereotypes, he chooses to “[write himself] into the fabric of their story” (46). Expanding Asian America Identity What does such invisibility do to our sense of belonging? Often, it can leave us with a profound sense of displacement and disillusionment from our very selves. As Sonu and Moon write, “if only the world was a mirror and I could see my own reflection, down Broadway, down Amsterdam, at the pub, in the restaurant, am I the forever foreigner? My self-image, it’s as if I have forgotten what I look like” (151 emphasis added). The poems Nina contributed were originally written for a Twitter platform as an act of processing grief, fear, anger, and a fractured sense of self and belonging. In their posting, they also became an act of displacement, accentuating the liminality of selfexpression as it exists within a very public (and very impersonal) sphere. In looking back on this work, which was born out of the pandemic and thus out of a space-time that gave new depth to the meaning of isolation, Nina found much of the world in her little poems, but not much of herself in the world. She writes, “and when the world/would turn us away...let us sink to the earth/ and bury ourselves back...to belonging” (48). Belonging comes from the collective reminder that we all originate from the same earth, but at the same time it can only be found in a burying of the self. Nina did not have a word for this strange sense of not-quitebelonging at the time (a vexing position for a would-be poet to find herself in), until Bhabha gave shape to these “stirrings of the unhomely” (141). These moments, Bhabha writes, “represent the outsideness of the inside that is too painful to remember” (152), and too overlooked to be known in a world that defines certain

individuals through an act of negation. In a similar fashion, the template for Nina’s blackout poem on ramen (41-42) originated from a paper for a graduate-level writing class. In the paper, she wrote about trying to navigate what it means to be Asian American in relation to food as a standin for cultural identity, and what it means to never feel “Asian enough” or “American enough” to really exist as either. One of her (white) evaluators confidently misread Nina throwing away her mom’s food as a flex of her “college independence” rather than as a rejection of her Asian identity, both of which haunt her to this day. To push back against this invisibilization—or even a willful misrecognition?—within an academic space that Nina had always thought to be safe, she chose to reclaim her paper through her own act of erasure in this blackout poem. Returning to a question posed in our foreword, if we don’t see ourselves represented, are we even real? These poems are meant to subvert the model minority myth—the idea that an Asian woman, for example, does not know anger, seek confrontation, or have the language to vocalize her grief, loss, and sense of (not) belonging. They are an act of negating our very negation, of resisting displacement by finding instead, in this zine, “a house where the unhomely can live” at last (Bhabha 142). Invisibility in the public sphere can also confine what it means to “be Asian.” As Aly depicts in her third comic panel (61), “Asian” stories rarely include stories of illness and “illness” stories rarely include Asian faces. The Asian female figure thus feels “cheated.” That is, her lived experience feels illegitimate as it fails to align with notions of Illness or Asian-ness. As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha notes, “ ...there are barely any popular books out there on disability, and the vast majority of them are written by white, disabled people...Like every disabled Black and brown writer I know, I have fought to get anyone to give a shit or not just throw up their hands at how way too complicated my story is” (19). In another way, Sejal A. Shah writes, “I can’t be bipolar— I’m Indian. (How does that make sense? There is no logic)” (4). Indeed, when Aly first became ill, she too could not comprehend her Asian-ness and illness together. Questions of “Am I Asian enough?” morphed into, “Am I still Asian if I am sick?” Aly often found herself segmenting her story into separate parts with her illness story in one segment and her ethnic story in another. Surely it is “too complicated” to live both simultaneously.

Invisibility of Asian experience often pressures us into segmenting parts of our identity and erasing race from questions of medicine, illness, and disability. Somewhat ironically, much of Aly’s experience with illness has forced her to confront the interface of these seemingly disparate identities as she’s faced a number of ophthalmological issues. Her eyes— the symbolic center of her Asian-ness and the source of her illness— serve as a site of negotiation and struggle over what it means to be seen in both her illness and her Asian identity. On her many trips to ophthalmology over the years, Aly has always felt acutely aware of the ways her “small, Asian eyes” do not cooperate with the medical devices. Legibility could only be granted by opening her eyes wider and often subjecting herself to an external— usually male, usually white— hand to open her eyes for her. These devices, in many ways, embody the social world which declares the (ill) Asian body “unreal” (Butler 33). It is only by opening the eyes wider, shifting the body away from symbolic Asian-ness, that she can be seen. This experience, though relatively harmless, serves as a microcosm of the Asian experience where the social world so often renders the Asian body illegible. In her comic, Aly intentionally colored the panels solely in black and white. The effect is that the Asian female figure is obscured in this binary landscape, signifying how Asian bodies often become invisible in the figurative— and literal—“black and white” American landscape. As Korean American scholars, Sonu and Moon, write, “the binary concepts of English/non-English, native/immigrant, and first generation/ second generation. It is within these labels we find ourselves silenced” (144). So too within the binary of sick or Asian, many (ill) Asian bodies may find themselves obscured. Furthermore, Aly chose to foreground the male doctor and exaggerate the size of the ophthalmological device so that the Asian female is largely hidden behind these symbols of institutional power and privilege. It is these structures of power that often get to determine what is real and whose lives are counted as real (Butler 33). As such, in the comic, the Asian female can only be seen via the centering of these sites of power. Similarly, Liú’s piece explores the ways in which Asian identity so often becomes divorced from gender, queerness, and sexuality. They write, “I ached for an example, a sense, an understanding of what it could look like and feel like to be a

Taiwanese woman, femme, or other marginalized gender” (28). The absence of other Asian queer and trans people often left Liú wondering about their identity and their place in history—both societally and familially. They wondered “whether other queer and trans Asian Americans had trouble finding stories of elders and ancestors they could relate to.” Liú, who is not in the Narrative Medicine program, originally decided to take Embodied Borderlands because they were working on their master’s thesis for the Oral History program, an audio documentary about Asian American diasporic identity. The class ended up being everything that Liú hoped it would be, providing them with guiding theory related to diaspora that proved central to their final product, as well as the opportunity to think through central questions about identity with their peers. So, it felt fitting to use an excerpt from their thesis script—which turned out to be a creative non-fiction ‘documentary collage’—for their zine contribution. The biggest theoretical touchstone for Liú as a whole was the diasporic theory that we read from Theorizing Diaspora, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Stuart Hall has long been one of their favorite theorists, and they found Gayatri Gopinath’s writing on queer diaspora absolutely essential in formulating their thesis around the idea of queer kinship and queer diaspora. In the last page of their script (38), Liú begins to tease out the ways in which queer kinship is at the very heart of their project. Another theoretician who became surprisingly important to Liú’s piece was Michel Foucault, in his conception of heterotopia. Heterotopia proved to be the theoretical scaffolding for the main conceit/allegory of the piece: The Tidal Flats, which “juxtapos[e] in a single real space, several spaces.” (Foucault 6). That is, the physical topography of the Pacific Northwest, an emotional landscape connected to memories of their grandparents, the physical and metaphysical space of the oral history interview (a construct that has changed in the last year, given the pandemic), and their diasporic homeland of Taiwan. Liú explains a “system of opening and closing” and the importance of temporality in their zine pages (Foucault 7). The importance of space and place is emphasized in Liú’s piece—in its visual zine form, and its aural form—and also taps into Edward Soja’s Trialectics of Being (Historicality, Spatiality, and Sociality). These lenses offered Liu a new way of understanding their narrative and

family history—a collage of Asian-ness, trans-ness, silence, and intimacy rather than “any sort of cohesive narrative.” Indeed, Soja’s writing on Trialectics and Thirdspace became a grounding theory for all of our works, giving body to Asian American experiences that are not seen or otherwise cannot be adequately captured. Olivia considered Soja to give space to Asian-American identity through the lens of transracial adoption. She centered her poems around the quote, “The critique is not meant to stop at three, to construct a holy trinity, but to build further, to move on, to continuously expand the production of knowledge beyond what is presently known” (Soja 61). With this understanding, Olivia’s works suggest that AsianAmerican adoptees may exist in a further consideration of space, “Fourthspace” or beyond. She suggests that outside of the trialectic of space, there is even less representation and perhaps even more marginalization for transracial adoptees as they grapple with being Asian while also existing under the veiled perception of “whiteness.” Two of Olivia’s works, “Family History (A Conversation)” (57-58) and “Asian Enough?” (40) display voices of the “other,” and how that other works to further fracture the internalized conflict of identity that comes with being an Asian-American adoptee. The pieces illustrate interactions that not only exist in general social settings, but also in medical spaces, highlighting how insensitive comments are often veiled as “curiosity” by the other. But rather, the questioning of identity in “Asian-Enough?” or the fact-checking in “Family History (A Conversation)” contributes to the othering, the thirding or more, of AsianAmerican adoptees. The poem “Surrender” (11) and the blackout poem of that work, “Becoming” (12) can be understood as a pairing which examines the oscillating perception of the self through the othering of identity. The former is representative of a darker side of the dualistic identities in which the speaker is acknowledging the existence of a “between” or “forgotten” space. The line “I am nothing like the shadow I cast” is reference to Homi Bhabha’s The World and the Home,” when he writes, “The unhomely moment creeps up on your stealthily like a shadow,” and meditates on the notion of what it means to “belong” and what it means to “be” (Bhabha 141). The function of the blackout form in “Becoming” suggests what it would mean to erase the questioning of a

conflicting identity and, in the end, to only have the self. The blacking out of words is representative of blacking out the noise of the othering that is constantly projected onto and internalized by Asian-Americans. Lastly, Karbi’s pieces examine a simple yet oftentimes overlooked fact: that South Asians are Asian too. In America, Karbi has faced this erasure time and again. “You’re not really Asian,” a friend once told her. “You’re Indian. I feel like that’s different.” Why? Within the oftentimes white mental schema of “Asian-ness” why does South Asian fail to count? Because our skin color is brown instead of pale? Because our cuisine is different or we don’t look like Sandra Oh from Grey’s Anatomy? Because on the world map of Asia India is relegated to the bottom of the page as an irrelevant subcontinent? The ease with which South Asians are physically as well as mentally distanced from the rest of Asia not only fragments and limits our self identifiers—it also fragments our world. No one needs to elaborate for us that the term “Asian” automatically brings to mind the image of an Eastern/ Southeastern Asian—a paler individual with straight, black hair and distinct features. It is true that on the basis of sheer numbers, East and Southeast Asian Americans outnumber South Asian Americans by the millions. We even know that some arrived in this country nearly a century before us. This doesn’t, however, make the exclusion, the marginalization, and frankly, the racism hurt any less. All this we accept and understand, without fight, without complaint, often without voice. But the internal question still stands. If we are not Asian enough for you, then who truly are we? Throughout this collection, then, we see the ways in which our bodies and the legibility of our bodies is socially determined. Judith Butler writes that “the body has its invariably public dimension…Given over from the start of the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life” (26). Butler contends that our bodies, and their ability to be recognized as “human,” is socially formed and determined. Such social construction of our bodies often leaves out critical aspects of our identity, contributing to this sense of “unhomeliness.” Thus, our very ontology as human beings is precarious, so often dependent on the social world around us.

Violence Against Asian American Bodies What is the consequence of placing “reality” in the hands of public life? Oftentimes, it means we must continually justify our very existence and place in society. In Karbi’s pieces, she explores the ways in which microaggressions invalidate the Asian American’s sense of belonging. Life for South-Asian Americans frequently consists of learning to dodge such microaggressions, linguistic and behavioral. And during times of uncertainty and fear, these microaggressions may escalate into bodily violence. Loyalty and patriotism, the two things that drew many South Asian Americans to this country’s shores in the first place as we salivated for opportunity, are suddenly called into question. Who we are and what we stand for is never clear enough for our nosy counterparts, both white and non-white Others. Rude and incorrect stereotypes formulate without our consent. Brownness, rather than being celebrated, is instead a source of confusion, and the never-ending questions arise from Caucasian parents and Uber drivers alike. One of these most salient questions regards origin. Karbi’s first piece includes a transcript of the song “Where You From” written by actor and rapper-artist Riz Ahmed (25). A Britishborn of Pakistani descent, Ahmed displays a powerfully beautiful, poetic understanding of the epistemic violence that is enacted upon asking the simple question, “Where are you from?” to a South Asian descendant. The true answer is complicated, and somehow never satisfactory to the questioner. The real intent behind the question is to identify and delineate us as Other, as belonging to a faraway land whose borders we have traversed without permission. As Mariam Ghani writes, “Around the border, any border, the fears and hopes, friends and enemies, corruptions and crises of a nation-state and its imagined community are clearly marked and understood. But no matter how many fences are erected or walls built up, the architecture of the border is inherently porous; it always maintains some measure of transparency” (2). When Karbi is asked this question in America (which is too often to count), she replies California, and that answer has been met with derision. She cannot fathom the audacity implicit in this reaction. Who are they to tell me where I’m from? How can they possibly think they know better than me about my own self concept?

As for the South-Asian American experience, this violence commonly arises in the form of stereotype, prejudice, and even fetishization. Karbi’s fifth piece (54) on South Asian American dating takes on a unique perspective. Karbi notes the significant number of people who have explicitly asked her if she plans on having an arranged marriage someday. This assumption is gravely detrimental to the complexity of Brown identity in America, because it presumes that all South Asian Americans lack the freedom to choose their own partner. In reality, even in an arranged marriage the cultural tradition does not limit an individual’s choice, but rather incorporates and embeds it within the practice. Yes, one can say no to their parent’s choice within an arranged marriage. The practice is more fluid than it is presumed to be. Nonetheless, shows like Indian Matchmaking perpetuate the monolithic stereotype of anti-dating and pro-marriage in South Asian American culture, when really generational dynamics define these interactions. In Shamita Das DasGupta’s critical paper, “Gender Roles and Cultural Continuity in the Asian Indian Immigrant Community,” dating for first generation South Asian Americans can be viewed as an instance of “judicious biculturalism,” in which they themselves regulate their own acculturation using personal wisdom and judgment. For second generation South Asian Americans and beyond, however, dating is less clearly defined and comes to occupy a kind of Thirdspace. There is increasing pressure on these individuals to balance the desires of their immigrant parents with their own freedom of choice to date and select a partner. The illusory constraints of the arranged marriage though, seen as the fate of all South Asian Americans, still persists. Edward Soja writes, “Without this recognition of the constraints and illusions of conventional spatial discourses, the meanings of Thirdspace cannot be comprehended” (163). Butler proposes further that those who are deemed “unreal” often become vulnerable to violence. She asks, “What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives considered as “unreal”? Does violence affect that unreality? Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality?” (33). In Karbi’s second piece (43), she highlights the ways in which linguistic microaggressions merely set the platform for macroaggressions: the violence many South Asian Americans faced after 9/11, for instance. Here, Karbi quotes a small excerpt from comedian Hasan

Minhaj’s 2017 stand-up Netflix special, Homecoming King. In this powerful and rare moment of somber reflection, Minhaj addresses the camera as he discusses the prejudice and racism—the unhomeliness—he faced immediately after 9/11. The responses to that racism varied between his father, a first generation immigrant, and himself, an American-born secondgeneration citizen. And yet, no matter his citizenship status or unwavering loyalty to his birth country, Hasan explicates how his body precedes him, carrying negative stereotypes about Muslims and Brown men in general. His beard and skin color speak more for him than his own words. As Mohsin Hamid reveals in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, “I could not entirely escape the growing importance of tribe” (54). The same goes for Muslim women of South Asian descent. Should they choose to wear a hijab, their style of dress precedes all identity formation and assumption thrust upon them. Karbi’s third piece points to many of these assumptions that violate the female body in hijab, a reductive take on Muslim lifestyle and how women phenomenologically experience it. The history of such violence against South Asians can be more broadly traced back to British colonial India, when an alternative two-level caste system was instilled: British vs. nonBritish. Even after India’s independence in 1947, the vestiges of a racist colonial past remained. Karbi’s fourth piece speaks to the bodily violence in the form of unjustified gynecological examinations, conducted decades after Indian independence, faced by South Asian women at airports prior to emigration. The choice of a blackout poem of this textbook chapter lends itself to a more creative form of capturing the outrage on behalf of South Asian women, as opposed to the more academic tone the textbook chooses to take. Too often does South Asian expression and pathos become lost in neutrality. Keep your head down and don’t question the status quo, many of us learn from an early age. Don’t be controversial. Fuck that. Similarly, Aly’s comic depicts the quick progression from invisibility to violence. In the second panel (10), we narrow in only on the Asian female’s eyes. As the doctor demands her to “open wide,” the style of drawing gradually progresses from simple, “anime” style eyes to more hyper-realistic eyes complete with shading, hair, and wrinkle lines. This was meant to evoke a progression towards visibility that can only be granted by erasing

Asian identity. However, such grabs for visibility are often futile. The demand to “open wide” becomes increasingly aggressive, taking up more space on the page. The efforts of the Asian body alone are not enough. In order for the doctor to truly see the Asian female, he must literally cut through the space and force the eyes open. Only then can he declare, “I can see you now.” Thus, even within the micro-society of the medical office, the “unreality” of the Asian body requires a violent act—the physical prying open of the eyes—in order to be made visible. At the end of panel 2, the Asian female is visible, but at what cost? The eyes in the ending image are wide with fear. She is visible but perhaps too much so - we see the bloodshot veins of her eyes, the stray hairs of her brows, the freckles of her skin. Thus, on the one hand Asian bodies are invisible. At other times, we are hyper-visible, inviting scrutiny and exposing us “to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence....at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well” (Butler 26). It was not lost on Aly when drawing her comic that the language, “Can you open wide for me?” and the unwanted hands on the body held haunting parallels to sexual violence. The Asian female in the ending page stands silent, signifying the deep ways in which violence and silence are intertwined. As Karbi points us to, fetishization and socially constructed stereotypes of Asian American sexuality further constrain and violate. In a deeply sensitive poem that discusses a personal experience of nonconsensual aggressive sex (6), Karbi draws parallels to her own experiences with fetishization of the South Asian female body alongside the East Asian body. This violence, though not the same, is similar. Juxtaposed beside her piece is the artwork of Chanel Miller, the victim of Brock Turner’s Stanford sexual assault case in 2015. By embedding these works of art together, Karbi aims for the South Asian American experience of bodily violation, racism, prejudice, identity fragmentation, and stereotype to be held in equal weight alongside the violence and marginalization committed against Eastern and Southeastern Asian Americans, to inclusively partake in the collective rage felt by Asia America and have all pertinent voices be heard. In line with Karbi’s plea to be heard, Nancy brings us to the critical notion that silence enforced upon Asian Americans sometimes manifests in silence within Asian American spaces themselves. At the core of Nancy’s poetry and personal essay, her

experiences of sexual trauma, domestic abuse, and loss of a nuclear family shed light on the stories often quieted in KoreanAmerican households. As illuminated in her poem, “What They Don’t Want You to Talk About in a Korean Church” (15), we see how culture, especially one as strong as that of a Korean church, shuns away any deviant narrative that falls outside of what a “good Korean Christian” should behave like and could talk about. The Korean church disturbs, mirrors, and uncloaks what upsets and falls outside of its walls, thus becoming a space oriented as a heterotopia, “presuppos[ing] a system of opening and closing that both isolates [it] and makes [it] penetrable…[but] not freely accessible like a public place…[and in order to enter] the individual has to submit to rites and purifications” (Foucault 7). Rape, divorce, incarceration, being conceived out of wedlock, and revisiting trauma in order to heal—these are experiences most Asian cultures psychically hush and stifle, especially in heterotopic spaces such as the Korean church, resulting in a process that challenges Nancy’s identity and agency to renegotiate her narrative towards healing. We then witness how shunning the narratives that fall outside of the categories of normalcy within Korean-American culture can revisit and haunt bodies in Nancy’s essay, “(Il) legitimate” (20-23), and her poem, “trigger” (62), where her relationship to her past self to her present self isn’t one that speaks to her the same way after the revelation of her finding out she was conceived out of wedlock or when she is called into a pediatric sexual assault case that resembles her own from years past. Instead, this changed knowledge reforms her narrative of self, personal identity, and family history. We come to understand how her trauma determines the direction of her story and disputes the coherence of her narrative, subverting the reality she knew before finding out she was conceived out of wedlock or before she has to report to a case that starkly reminds her of her own. With the shock she experiences taking on the guilt of her parents’ inevitable split or her regret not reporting her own rape when she was a child, and wrestle with trying to let go of that blame, we witness Nancy’s past, present, and future narratives blend, which ultimately further displace and disorient her and “unhome” her body. “The unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence” (Bhabha 144), and Nancy attempts to break this cycle

by confronting her pain and coming “face-to-face” with what has been hidden and kept out for so long. Nancy’s collection thus illuminates what Butler means when she writes, “when we think about who we “are” and seek to represent ourselves as merely bounded beings, for the primary others who are past for me not only live on in the fiber of the boundary that contains me (one meaning of “incorporation”), but they also haunt the way I am” (28). As we have collectively explored, the social vulnerability of our bodies and the violence it invites can fragment our very sense of being and reminds us of the ways trauma lives on in the body. In addressing that which haunts, Nancy’s works reveal the particular challenges of this retrospective narration. Yet they also reveal the need to share its specificities because they point to a more universal truth of the experience of trauma, especially in the way they are held captive and are silenced in many Korean-American families. As Melissa Febos writes in her essay, “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma as a Subversive Act,” it’s through essays like Nancy’s that “[w]e are writing the history that we could not find in any other book [and w]e are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another” (2016). Conclusion Through writing our own narratives or literally reclaiming the words others have placed upon us, we forged this zine as a space of liberation where our different stories can stand in solidarity alongside one another. Of course, “the sequentiality of language and writing, of the narrative form and history-telling, can never do more than scratch the surface” of the extraordinary diversity and simultaneity of the Asian American experience (Soja 57). However, in presenting our individual experiences, we hope that at least some of the monolith is shattered and an emerging sense of the Asian self can rise because “we are not simply one or the other, but there is always another, and another, and an-Other to the dimensions and possibilities of our spatial being” (Sonu and Moon 157). It is our hope that this collection, in its disparateness and irresolution, offers Asian Americans permission to resist monolithic narratives and embrace their Asian-ness in all its beautiful manifestations.

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