The boy dug his nipper into my toe so hard I yelped out again. His father shouted at him in Vietnamese and the boy’s sharp ministrations finally softened by a smidge. I had had enough. I stood up, my two feet still in the basin’s soapy scum, and I refused to pay. My friend watched me, troubled by my behavior. I hoped the father would later punish him by withholding his paycheck. But the boy probably didn’t even get a paycheck.
* * *
—
We were like two negative ions repelling each other. He treated me badly because he hated himself. I treated him badly because I hated myself. But what evidence do I have that he hated himself? Why did I think his shame skunked the salon? I am an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid, imposing all my own insecurities onto him. I can’t even recall if I actually felt that pain or imagined it, since I have rewritten this memory so many times I have mauled it down to nothing, erasing him down until he was a smudge of resentment while I was a smudge of entitlement until we both smudged into me. But he was nothing like me. I was so privileged I was acquiring the most useless graduate degree imaginable. What did I know about being a Vietnamese teenage boy who spent all his free hours working at a nail salon? I knew nothing.
* * *
—
When my father was growing up in the rural outskirts of Seoul, he was dirt poor. Everyone was poor after the war. My grandfather was a bootlegger of rice wine who couldn’t afford to feed his ten children, so my father supplemented his meager diet with sparrows he caught himself and smoked in a sand pit. My father was smart, enterprising. He won a nationwide essay contest at the age of ten and studied hard enough to be admitted into the second-best university in Korea. It took him nine years to graduate college because of mandatory military service and because he kept running out of money.
When the 1965 immigration ban was lifted by the United States, my father saw an opportunity. Back then, only select professionals from Asia were granted visas to the United States: doctors, engineers, and mechanics. This screening process, by the way, is how the whole model minority quackery began: the U.S. government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took all the credit for their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they’d say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor.
My father lied. He wrote down he had training as a mechanic. He, along with my young mother, was sent to the hinterlands of Erie, Pennsylvania, where he worked as an assistant mechanic for Ryder trucks. Despite lack of training, he got by, until a cracked stone in an air grinder came loose and shattered his leg so badly he was in a cast for six months. Ryder fired him instead of giving him workman’s comp because they knew he couldn’t do anything about it.
Then they moved to L.A., where my father found a job selling life insurance in Koreatown. He worked more than ten hours a day and was eventually promoted to manager. But years of selling life insurance were taking their toll. No matter how much he worked, he could never save enough. He drank heavily during those years and fought with my mother, who beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father. Later, with bank loans, my father bought a warehouse that distributed dry-cleaning supplies in a desolate industrial section of L.A. With this business, my father became successful enough to fund my private high school and college educations.
* * *
—
On paper, my father is the so-called model immigrant. Upon meeting him, strangers have called my father a gentleman for his quiet charisma and kindness, a personality he cultivated from years of selling life insurance and dry-cleaning supplies to Americans of all manner of race and class. But like many model immigrants, he can be angry.
The question of racial identity can bedevil the children of Asian immigrants. But it’s assumed that immigrant parents themselves are unfazed by the race question because they are either working too hard to care or they identify with the country they hail from and there’s nothing more to say on the subject. But the experiences my father acquired as a mechanic in blue-collar white Pennsylvania and as a life insurance salesman trawling through neighborhoods ranging from Brentwood to South Central had made him highly sensitive about his own racial identity to the point where everything came down to race. If we were waiting for a table, and someone was seated before us, he pointed out that it was because we were Asian. If he was seated way in the back of the plane, he said it was because he was Asian. When my parents moved me into my dorm room during the first week at Oberlin in Ohio, my father shook my roommate’s father’s hand, who then asked him where he was from. When my father said South Korea, my roommate’s father eagerly replied that he fought in the Korean War.
My father smiled tightly and said nothing.
* * *
—
“There are many Caucasians here,” my father said quietly when he visited me in graduate school in Iowa.
“Where are all the black people?” he asked, as we drove into a Walmart parking lot and found a parking spot.
“Always smile and say hello,” my father said. “You have to be very polite here.”
“My daughter,” my father told the Walmart cashier, “is a poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop!”
“Really,” the Walmart cashier said.
“Don’t ever make an illegal U-turn here,” my father advised after I made an illegal U-turn, “because they will see that you are an Asian driving badly.”
* * *
—
By the time I was at Iowa, I had already decided that writing about my Asian identity was juvenile. As a good student of modernism, I was tirelessly committed to the New and was confident that despite my identity, I would be recognized for my formal innovations. I believed this even after I later discovered a blog post called “Po-Ethnic Cleansing” (italics mine) written by a former classmate from Iowa who used the coward pseudonym “Poetry Snark.” He ripped on my first collection by describing it as hack identity politics poems. Then he compared me to Li-Young Lee (not only do we look alike, we write alike!) and declared that the poetry world would be better off if all mediocre minority poets, like myself, were exterminated.
I immediately scrolled down to the comments section. Out of the dozen, there was not one comment that came to my defense, not even a weak-willed, half-hearted, “Hey, man, promoting genocide is not cool.”
Instead of being outraged, I was hurt and ashamed. A part of me even believed him. I’d tried so hard to prove that I was not just another identity politics poet, and he had exposed me for the unintellectual identitarian that I was. My shame was compounded by the fact that I didn’t know who “Poetry Snark” was. It could be anyone. Then the post became so popular it was the second link that came up when you googled me. Who were all these people who clicked onto the site and agreed with him? Did they all want me exterminated? Eventually when someone outed my classmate, I was actually relieved. That smarmy asshole? Of course it would be him!