“I’ll handle the paperwork! I love paperwork!”
“I can’t be your therapist.”
“Why not?”
“We’re not right for each other.”
I was shocked. Every pore in my skin sang with hurt. I had no idea that therapists could reject patients like this.
“Can you tell me why?” I asked feebly.
“I’m sorry, I cannot.”
“You’re not going to give me a reason?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not allowed to reveal that information.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Is it because I left too many voicemails?”
“No,” she said.
“Are you seeing someone I know?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Then it’s because I’m too fucked up for you, isn’t it?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Well, that’s how I’m going to feel if you don’t tell me why. You’re making me feel like I should never open up and never share my feelings because I’m going to scare everyone away with my problems! Isn’t this the opposite of what a therapist is supposed to do?”
“I understand how you feel,” she said blandly.
“If I do anything drastic after this phone call, it will be all your fault.”
“This is your depression talking.”
“It’s me talking,” I said.
“I have another patient waiting,” she said.
“Don’t fuck her up too,” I said.
“Good-bye.”
* * *
—
For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence. I, the modern-day scrivener, working five times as hard as others and still I saw my hand dissolve, then my arm. Often at night, I flinched awake and berated myself until dawn’s shiv of light pierced my eyes. My confidence was impoverished from a lifelong diet of conditional love and a society who thinks I’m as interchangeable as lint.
In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world. We are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right “face” for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I am frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.
There’s a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort, to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.
I like to think that the self-hating Asian is on its way out with my generation, but this also depends on where I am. At Sarah Lawrence, where I taught, I had students who were fierce—empowered and politically engaged and brilliant—and I thought, Thank God, this is the Asian 2.0 we need, Asian women ready to holler. And then I visited a classroom at some other university, and it was the Asian women who didn’t talk, who sat there meekly like mice with nice hair, making me want to urge: You need to talk! Or they’ll walk all over you!
* * *
—
In 2002, I was a graduate student in poetry at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. My friend and I were at the Coral Ridge Mall for a pedicure and found a family-owned place where the Vietnamese owner put on his immigrant patter by repeating everything twice: “Pedicure pedicure? Sit sit.” I waited for that man’s wife or daughter to serve me but they had customers. The only pedicurist left was his son, who looked about fourteen and wore an oversized black hoodie and cargo shorts. Behind the counter, he scowled, hands shoved into his pockets. He didn’t look like a trained nail technician. He looked like he should be playing Halo on Xbox. When the boy didn’t respond the first time, his father snapped at him to hurry up and fill the basin with water.
The boy walked over to where I was sitting. He squatted down until his scabbed knees reached his ears. I told him I wanted my toenails cut round, not square. He began filling the basin with water. “It’s too hot!” I said when I dipped my foot in. He slowly adjusted the temperature. I noticed he cut my toenails square, not round. I noticed he refused to look me in the eye. When he did, I detected a flicker of hostility. Did he feel aggrieved at spending all his after-school hours massaging the calves of Iowan soccer moms? Or did it just annoy him to serve someone who looked too much like him, someone who was young and Asian? Although I was twenty-four, I could pass for seventeen, and I looked boyish with my short choppy haircut. Still, I thought at the time, I am much older than you and you should respect me like you’re forced to respect those Iowan blond moms who come in here. Then he used the toenail nippers and pinched hard into the flesh of my big toe, hard enough to make me flinch.
“Can you please be softer?” I asked tartly. He mumbled an apology but pinched his nipper even harder into my skin.
“Can you be softer?”
He tore a cuticle off.
“Hey!”
He dug his nipper in harder.
“I said—”
He tore a cuticle off.
“softer—”
He dug his nipper in harder.
“That hurts!”
To be competent at this line of service, you have to be so good you are invisible, and this boy was incapable of making himself invisible! Maybe I was hallucinating this pain to justify my own rising irritation that his physical boy presence was distracting me from relaxing. He was so ungainly in that supplicant’s crouch, making me feel ungainly in my vibrating massage chair. It wasn’t fair.