The Interview

unnameable are the feelings that childhood sweeps into view whisk me away no school on Sunday to teach me what I have lost

Where are you from? learning to count with tally marks bundle popsicle sticks like kindling because to be able to quantify and speak existence to numerical law and order is to set fire to all the days hours seconds ephemeral infinities

Where are your parents? Rolling words like dice on my Tongue I am tired of calculating considering any way to say that I don’t take kindly to interrogation but I am the only one here able to stand trial

Where’s your father? When we play pretend Count tally marks with Yan Yan and Pocky smear my hollowness with Tiger Balm and call it culture seasoned in Kikkoman finery Can I be the dad? Hope it’s mine If you mistake me for Asian-raised is that my cue to bow?

Which is your real mother?

Angry Asian Girls Angry Asian Girls Angry Asian Girls Angry Asian Girls Angry Asian Girls Maybe I am angry because I do not feel Asian. But maybe it feels easier to say I am angry as opposed to saying I am devastated To saying I am steeped in grief my anger is my sorrow is my Asianness is my shame is equally prelingual, inchoate

prone to commit poised to strike and strip me when I expect nothing less from a hurricane

To offer a concluding postface in different language, this poem was birthed out of processing my initial reactions and associations with themes of childhood and nostalgia as they relate to “playground.” Childhood was integral to forming my sense of self as an adoptee. On playgrounds, I was molded through questions asked in these spaces of distinct interpersonal relation and conversation between children. Playgrounds are where worldbuilding happens, forming and cementing realms of possibility, certainty, and also notions of illegibility or impossibility. My sense of self was shaped by learning to expect and prepare to respond to casually asked and intimately invasive questions. Seemingly innocent inquiries became statements, convictions. I cannot see or recognize you as the legible child of your guardians; it is impossible that you do not have a father; in your excess of mothers, it follows that one must be the person who carried and birthed you, but you very clearly are not white like they are; so what is your story.

Childhood was constituted by far more than these less enchanting experiences, but these are the ones that positioned me to seek a solution to some perceived lack, an absence of belonging and security in the communities I am a part of. Having resolved and resigned to my irreconcilable non-whiteness, I have moved through my growing into adulthood searching for a feeling of belonging to Asianness. In a culture that is steeped in colonial tradition, tempered by capitalism, white supremacy, and US imperialism, we emerge into a world where belonging is predicated on ownership. Citizenship and democracy, liberty, are all concepts that are affirmed through consumption and possession. The aesthetics of nostalgia are condensed into marketable icons, childhood becomes reduced to the afterschool snack that saw you through formative years. The glory and fondness with which you regard those days can be forever remembered in the commercial enterprise that you participated in.

It is popular to perform belonging and identification with these memories that supposedly constitute a collective identity. Stick a logo on it and call it remembrance, call it yours. Having gone through waves of gravitating towards this advertised feeling of belonging, I’ve also crashed onto shore with the recognition that no amount of consumption will grant me an Asian American childhood I did not have. As much as I have longed to be included in this flashback, in this communal identification, culture is not reducible to the commercial symbols that capitalism has wrung out of nations’ peoples, and belonging cannot be built through possession of such icons. I cannot change the truth that I do not relate to these recollections in the way that other Asians and Asian Americans do. For both my own healing and efforts to embody an anti-capitalist, decolonial praxis, I am working in community with others to reorient to and affirm a sense of belonging based in something freer than ownership.

I have no set theory of what this model of belonging is, but to close, I would like to offer words from Ocean Vuong that have lit the way in these imaginings of alternative forms of belonging. In elaborating upon his process of writing the novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Vuong expressed in an author’s talk that he sought to employ narrative styles that do not rely upon linear plot. He explained, “we’re not here because of a linear plot, we are here because of proximity, because we choose to put our bodies in proximity to one another.” As in chemistry, he said, meaning and significance can be derived from all that happens in the spaces between us. From this we are offered a sense of belonging figured through proximities; we are rooted by all the connections and distances that position us in relation to one another. Instead of subscribing to purchased assimilation, belonging as a claim to ownership, entry, or authenticity, it is the distances and solidarities, the choices we make that locate us in these vast interdependent networks. The culmination of our circumstantial connections, partnered with intentional choices, more than possession as liberty, are what make us free to build community, to love.

This creation has been inspired by a multitude of moments and conversations with wise people in my life, particularly Alex 40 van Biema, Kanako Kawabe, Tamika Whitenack, Dr. Jasmine Syedullah, Professor Hiram Perez, and my mothers; not to mention the ancestors who have lived and danced these praxises and carried them to us. Much love to all the adoptees and folks who find themselves in the waves, too.