My classmate’s repellent post was almost easier to handle than my graduate school experience, because the slow drip of racism at Iowa was underhanded. I always second-guessed myself, questioning why I was being paranoid. I remember the wall of condescension whenever I brought up racial politics in workshop. Eventually, I internalized their condescension, mocked other ethnic poetry as too ethnicky. It was made clear to me that the subject of Asian identity itself was insufficient and inadequate unless it was paired with a meatier subject, like capitalism. I knew other writers of color at Iowa who scrubbed ethnic markers from their poetry and fiction because they didn’t want to be branded as identitarians. Looking back, I realized all of them were, curiously, Asian American.
Back when I was a graduate student, whether you were a formalist or an avant-gardist, there was a piety about poetic form that was stifling. Any autobiographical reveal, especially if it was racial or sexual, was a sign of weakness. I remember going to the university’s main library, one of my favorite refuges, and perusing the recent archive of graduate student theses. I saw a few Asian names. Not one of them, from what I could tell, had published after graduation. I was afraid I would disappear like them.
It was at Iowa that I was diagnosed with hemifacial spasm disorder. My tic, which I attributed to caffeine, grew worse, enough so that I believed people noticed, though no one said anything. I remember rising up early in the morning for my CAT scan appointment. I lay on the motorized gurney that slid into the machine. The interior was smooth, white, and cylindrical. I felt like I was inside a gigantic hollowed-out dildo. I am the body electric, I thought, and my brain is going haywire.
* * *
—
A year ago, I read from this book at a small gallery in Crown Heights, New York. Afterwards, while I was smoking a cigarette outside with the curator of the event, the gallery manager, a white man with a beard and tattoos, sauntered up to me and volunteered that he was taking a racial awareness seminar, which was a requirement for his other job.
“My racial awareness mediator is smart,” he said. “I’m learning a lot.”
“Good,” I said.
“He told me how minorities can’t be racist against each other.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said with a sharp laugh.
“Are you calling my racial awareness mediator a liar?”
“No,” I said, “he could just be misinformed.”
“He also said Asians are next in line to be white,” he said, crossing his arms. “What do you think about that?”
“I think you need a new racial awareness mediator.”
“It’s not true?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said, turning away from him.
“Why should I believe you?”
“What?”
“My racial awareness mediator teaches this race stuff all the time—why should I believe you?”
Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.
In other words, I didn’t know whether to tell this guy to fuck off or give him a history lesson. “We were here since 1587!” I could have said. “So what’s the hold up? Where’s our white Groupon?” Most Americans know nothing about Asian Americans. They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues. They don’t understand that we’re this tenuous alliance of many nationalities. There are so many qualifications weighing the “we” in Asian America. Do I mean Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian, and Pacific Islander, queer and straight, Muslim and non-Muslim, rich and poor? Are all Asians self-hating? What if my cannibalizing ego is not a racial phenomenon but my own damn problem? “Koreans are self-hating,” a Filipino friend corrected me over drinks. “Filipinos, not so much.”
It’s a unique condition that’s distinctly Asian, in that some of us are economically doing better than any other minority group but we barely exist anywhere in the public eye. Although it’s now slowly changing, we have been mostly nonexistent in politics, entertainment, and the media, and barely represented in the arts. Hollywood is still so racist against Asians that when there’s a rare Asian extra in a film, I tense up for the chinky joke and relax when there isn’t one. Asians also have the highest income disparity out of any racial group. Among the working class, Asians are the invisible serfs of the garment and service industries, exposed to third-world work conditions and subminimum wages, but it’s assumed that the only group beleaguered by the shrinking welfare state is working-class whites. But when we complain, Americans suddenly know everything about us. Why are you pissed! You’re next in line to be white! As if we’re iPads queued up in an assembly line.
* * *
—
I suppose, then, a history lesson is called for, a quick rundown of how the Chinese were first brought in as coolies to replace slaves in the plantation fields after the Civil War or how they drilled dynamite and laid out the tracks for the transcontinental railroad until they were blown up by dynamite or buried by snowstorms. Three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track built to make Manifest Destiny a reality, but when the celebratory photo of the Golden Spike was taken, not a single Chinese man was welcome to pose with the other—white—railway workers.
I have to confess, though, that I have a hard time embracing the nineteenth-century history of Chinese America as my history, because my ancestors were still in Korea, doing what, I don’t know; those records are gone too. I suppose I look like these Chinese men, but when I gaze upon those old photos, I see those Chinamen the way white settlers must have seen them, real funny-looking in their padded pajamas and long weird braids, like aliens photoshopped into a Western. I reason it’s because there are so few surviving firsthand accounts of their daily lives. Their meal plans, their exhaustion, their homesickness—most of that went unrecorded. The first Chinese women in this country had it even worse. I cannot even fathom being a fifteen-year-old girl from China abducted and smuggled to this wild barbaric country, locked in a boardinghouse to be raped ten times a day until her body was hollowed out by syphilis. After that, she was dumped out on the streets to die alone.
Bare life, writes Giorgio Agamben, is the sheer biology of life as opposed to the way life is lived within the protections of society; where the person is “stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight.” I cannot imagine a body reduced to biological fact, like a plant or a hog. If a prostitute died alone without anyone as witness, did she ever exist?