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“We had failures, heaps of failures in our hands,” Sharma wrote in “A Situation for Mrs. Biswas,” a poem about her father’s career arc, which remarkably mirrored her own. Her father immigrated to America as a poor academic who then worked his way up to become the first South Asian president at a small college. Like Sharma, once he had power, her father was humiliated. But unlike Sharma, her father was forced to resign, chased out by unfounded rumors of mismanagement.
“A Situation for Mrs. Biswas” is a painful and moving morality tale that appraises the illusion of assimilation. The privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone. But assimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible. Sharma writes that her father, who always “aspired to be rewarded for his good work by white people,” is called “a greedy brown man,” an “Indian who was a con,” and a “snake-oil man.”
What to make of the fact that father and daughter both rose to leadership roles and were then disgraced concurrently? I can feel a reader’s incredulity prickling the back of my neck, where that reader might overlook the structural racism that connects the events to conclude it must be a problem with the family—a venality, an unruliness—that runs in the blood. I can tell you I have attracted all kinds of wild, vituperative behavior from white people because I never play the role of compliant Asian woman. Sharma’s experiences enrage me but they don’t surprise me. But because we know we won’t be believed, we don’t quite believe it ourselves. So we blame ourselves for being too outspoken or too proud or too ambitious. In the poem, Sharma compares her family’s pride to Icarus: “Imagine, we were so close to the soaring sky and imagine how we fell. How we knew falling wouldn’t end us, fall right here, fall right there, cry out, oh blustering self, it can’t be as bad as you think.”
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For years, I was under the impression that my father was a heroin dealer. When I was nine, I saw a Mary Tyler Moore special about drugs. Afterwards, I dug through my parents’ closet and discovered a small box that contained tinfoiled balls of a black gummy substance that resembled the opiates in her show. I was scandalized. My father sold drugs! That’s why he was gone so much.
It turned out to be Korean herbal medicine.
As a child, I picked up whatever distrust there was around Asians and animated my father’s absence with it. He often complained that I never took his side. Now, as an adult, I feel protective of him, which is why I was so moved when I read Sharma’s poem about her father. Whatever dignity our fathers have painstakingly built throughout the years is so fragile. I know this because I used to see my father the way other Americans saw him: with suspicion.
After my father met my roommate’s father at Oberlin, I scolded him. “Why were you so rude,” I asked, “why didn’t you say anything back?” We were in the car, with my mother, driving to Cleveland. They wanted to go to a Korean restaurant. Since this was before Yelp, my father searched for a “Kim” in the Yellow Pages and called that random person up and asked for restaurant suggestions. The person was excited to hear from another Korean and offered to show us around.
“Should I have thanked your roommate’s father for that war?” my father finally snapped. “Is that what you wanted?”
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The Korean word jeong is untranslatable but the closest definition is “an instantaneous deep connection,” often felt between Koreans. Did I imagine jeong with this therapist? Why did I think she’d understand me, as if our shared heritage would be a shortcut to intimacy? Or more accurately, a shortcut to knowing myself? Maybe I looked for a Korean American therapist because I didn’t want to do the long, slow work of psychotherapy. Maybe I didn’t really want to explain my life. A Jewish friend told me he never went to a Jewish therapist because it’s too easy to assume everything dysfunctional about your family is cultural. Sometimes you need to explain your experiences in order to understand them yourself.
I found a therapist who happens to be Jewish. For the first session, I talked all about my feelings of rejection from the first therapist. I felt vindicated when my second therapist agreed with me that the way she’d handled it was unprofessional. She then wondered if my personal history was somehow too close to the first therapist’s, issues that she herself had not fully processed, and that was why she felt that she wasn’t the right fit for me.
I had unresolved feelings that extended beyond her. Maybe I was undergoing a kind of transference, to use the psychoanalytic parlance, but was she supposed to be my mother, my lover, or—what? After that phone call, I wrote an angry evaluation on RateMyTherapist to get back at her. In my long screed, I started taking my resentment out not only on her, but on Koreans as a whole. “Koreans are repressed! Rigid! Cold! They should not be allowed to work in the mental health care profession!” I banged out. I clicked submit, but for some reason my long unsaved rant never posted. It dissolved into the ether.
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The writer Jeff Chang writes that “I want to love us” but he says that he can’t bring himself to do that because he doesn’t know who “us” is. I share that uncertainty. Who is us? What is us? Is there even such a concept as an Asian American consciousness? Is it anything like the double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois established over a century ago? The paint on the Asian American label has not dried. The term is unwieldy, cumbersome, perched awkwardly upon my being. Since the late sixties, when Asian American activists protested with the Black Panthers, there hasn’t been a mass movement we can call our own. Will “we,” a pronoun I use cautiously, solidify into a common collective, or will we remain splintered, so that some of us remain “foreign” or “brown” while others, through wealth or intermarriage, “pass” into whiteness?
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A week after Trump’s election, I had to fly out to Kalamazoo, Michigan, for a reading. I sat next to a young South Asian man who was exceedingly polite to the flight attendant, enunciating his “ma’am” and “please” and “thank you.” Was he always like this or was he being cautious? After the plane landed, while I was struggling to extract my rollaboard from the overhead, a bull-necked white guy in a Michigan football jersey growled “Excuse me” and shoved past me. Was he just being rude or was he acting like this because I was Asian?
I’ve been living in Brooklyn way too long.
As my car ride sped past bleak concrete stretches of strip malls—an Outback Steakhouse, a Costco-sized Family Christian Store—I saw a handwritten cardboard “4 Trump” sign whipping ominously on a streetlight against the blustery November sky. I’d held no strong opinions about Michigan before, but after the state went to Trump, clear lines were drawn. I was in enemy territory.