Mamiyaroid 31
It’s been more than a week since the Atlanta, Georgia shootings at various spas where 8 women were killed, 6 of them Asian. I have warring emotions: feeling I should say something and not wanting to say anything at all.
Part of this is because I feel like I’ve been talking all along. Not about this specifically, but about Asian America. It’s in my work and in my body, but I’ve never liked writing prompts. And I co-hosted a presentation and forum about anti-Asian racism for work, am expected to continue to address this issue at work, and in a lot of ways talking about it in front of students is much harder than writing about it for an audience that has chosen to receive my newsletters.
But I also don’t want to make it about me. The Time to Say Goodbye Podcast talks about the differences in experiences between middle class, educated Asian Americans and immigrant working class Asian (Americans) like the women in Atlanta, and I agree that it’s probably not useful to flatten everything and pretend that everyone shares the same risks, or that a rally cry of #stopasianhate is going to improve the material conditions of working class Asian immigrants. Yet, the rash of beatings of Asian elders has me concerned and I warned my mother to take care when she’s out. She thought I meant covid, but then she said, “Oh, yes, those crazy people beating Chinese people.” She told me she heard about the older woman who fought back with her cane. I heard the admiration in her voice, but she also said, “I’m old, not strong like I used to be.”
I’ve been reading Pop Song, by Larissa Pham, in preparation for an interview we are doing for Believer Magazine. You can pre-order it. In one essay she writes about being racialized in her sexual/romantic relationships, and her ambivalence toward the pain she experiences within these relationships and these dynamics.
And yet I was never repelled enough to stop trying for love. Never repelled enough to turn away from desire, which was pain’s arbiter. It was something new, and something to write about. I wanted to be known even in my abjection, to be witnessed by an audience in order to be certain that what I felt was real. Then—how easy is it to fall headlong—it became a way to be. The self I’d been architecting through my writing took the story of pain— now racialized, now gendered—as its scaffold. If I was to be wounded, then let me be a wounded woman. I would wear it.
and later
My pain was pain, but my pain made me interesting. It offered a way to become.
Pham is writing about herself from ages 19-22 but re-visiting these pages helped me articulate why this time I don’t want to publicly share stories about racist things men have done or said to me, because I don’t want it to be the most interesting thing about me, because it’s not. I refuse. I’m not in denial that these things happen, and I think it’s important that other people speak up if it helps them, but it doesn’t help me. I’m angry, sad and bored, and can’t believe this is still happening. I also don’t want those experiences to consume me or to shape how I’m perceived.
Of the 15 or so writers and or artists I have interviewed for publication, 8 of them were Asian American women (and one trans man). I’ve been engaging them. Have you?
The last thing I’ll share is this wonderful essay, “Baby Yeah,” by Anthony Veasna So, a Khmer American writer who died last year. His debut short story collection, Afterparties, is forthcoming.
This essay is about the writer’s friend who died by suicide, and their relationship to the music of Pavement, something I relate to so so much.
This was why we idolized Pavement, with its albums distorted by lo-fi static. The band’s reckless chords resisted the gloss of conventional rhythms. Its lyrics captured the chaotic feelings of being jaded yet big-hearted, doubtful yet sentimental—feelings my friend and I thought were missing from literature, culture, perhaps even the world.
Until next time…
Adalena
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-Adalena Kavanagh