THE INDEBTED
\nNURSING MY DAUGHTER AT THE late blue hour when streetlights begin to pale, I
\nsaw a plane blinking across the sky. I wanted to be inside that plane, inside the
\nwhite hush of a dimly lit cabin, white buds sunk into my ears, New York\u2019s skyline
\nfading from view until it was a baby\u2019s breath of lights.
\nWhen I first became a mother, I resented how locked in I was to my local
\nenvirons. No more traveling alone. No more taking off when I felt like it.
\nLandlocked, I stole away to the Red Hook municipal pool as much as I could to
\nswim a few laps by myself, because being underwater was freedom. I tried to
\nwrite an essay about the pool, beginning with the Red Hook public pool as a
\ngenuine commons, massive as a football field, with space for every kind of kid,
\nand gloriously free, with free sunblock that comes out of a dispenser.
\nAnd yet historically, the public pool was one of the most hotly contested
\nspaces for desegregation. On the East Coast, urban planner Robert Moses built
\nthe WPA pools mostly on the white side of New York so they would be out of
\nreach for black people. Southern towns filled their town pools in with concrete
\nbecause they\u2019d rather deprive everyone of the pool than share it with black
\npeople. I saw a photograph of one such concrete-filled pool, now part of a
\nparking lot for a bus depot. The only evidence of it is a forlorn 4\u00bd\u02b9 depth marker
\ndelineating the perimeters of where swimmers once splashed; it now looks like a
\ngrave marker. In Pittsburgh, when black swimmers entered a newly integrated
\npool, a mob of white swimmers threw rocks and tried to drown them. When
\ndesegregation was unavoidable, white Americans fled to the suburbs to build their
\nown private pools.
\nThe public pool is such a stark example of how much this country has been
\nhell-bent on keeping black and white bodies apart that I became unsure if it was
\nmy history to retell. My interest was sparked by a childhood incident but it
\ndiscomfited me to attach my experience to a history that, next to the black and
\nwhite apartheid that has carved itself into the American infrastructure, felt
\nanecdotal. I was thirteen. Deep in the pool I swam like a bottom feeder until I
\ncould no longer hold my breath. As I surfaced, I heard a grown-up voice boom
\n\u201cGet out!\u201d Treading water, I squinted toward the source of that voice to a backlit
\nman who sternly said the pool was for residents only. This was at my aunt\u2019s
\napartment complex in Orange County. I told the man that my aunt and my little
\ncousin, who was at the shallow end with my sister, lived here and I was
\nbabysitting. He didn\u2019t let me finish and ordered us to leave. As I clicked the gate
\nbehind us, I heard him say, \u201cThey\u2019re everywhere now.\u201d
\n\u2014
\nWe\u2019re everywhere now. We have taken over Orange County. Some of us are even
\nrich housewives in Orange County. The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing
\nopening scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: if you
\ndiscriminate against us, we\u2019ll make more money than you and buy your fancy
\nhotel that wouldn\u2019t let us in. Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn\u2019t that
\nhow whiteness recruits us? Whether it\u2019s through retribution or indebtedness, who
\nare we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?
\n\u2014
\nI began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about
\nmy racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to
\nsee what throbbed beneath it. This was harder than I thought, like butterflying my
\nbrain out onto a dissection table to tweeze out the nerves that are my inhibitions.
\nMoreover, I had to contend with this we. I wished I had the confidence to
\nbludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them. But I feared
\nthe weight of my experiences\u2014as East Asian, professional class, cis female,
\natheist, contrarian\u2014tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so
\nnonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so,
\nlike a snail\u2019s antenna that\u2019s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.
\n\u2014
\nI never finished my father\u2019s story about the war. After the interpreter recognized
\nmy uncle as an old friend from school, the interpreter turned to the American
\nsoldiers and spoke to them in their strange language. Like magic, the GIs eased
\ntheir guns. My father was astonished by the power of the English language. After
\nthey tried to shoot my grandfather in his own home, these giants dug into their
\nrucksack to give my father a round blue tin of Charms Sour Balls. My father
\npopped a sugar-crusted molecule of cherry, lemon, and lime balls into his mouth
\nand was stunned by the firework of flavors.
\nThe wretched of the earth know this candy. Hershey\u2019s doled out after a
\nfirefight, M&Ms handed out before a raid. Americans sprayed Dum Dums lollies
\nfrom a fighter helicopter and the children of Afghanistan ran after the chopper
\nwith their arms raised. Sometimes candy was used as a trick. In Vietnam, bored
\nguards planted candy under barbed wire so they could watch street kids lacerate
\nthemselves trying to grab it. More recently, two U.S. marines were handing out
\nsweets to four Iraqi kids when they were all killed, ambushed by a suicide
\nbomber. In 2003, during the Iraq invasion, the U.S. marines threw out the Charms
\nthat came with their MREs because they believed they were a curse. A lemon
\nCharm meant a vehicle breakdown; a raspberry Charm meant death. Abandoned
\npackets of Charms scattered the roads of southern Iraq. No one would touch
\nthem.
\nBut the hearts of South Koreans were won.
\nSow the cratered lands with candy and from its wrappers will rise Capitalism
\nand Christianity. About her homeland, the poet Emily Jungmin Yoon writes, \u201cOur
\ncities today glow with crosses like graveyards.\u201d
\n\u2014
\nThroughout my life, I had felt the weight of indebtedness. I was born into a
\ndeficit because I was a daughter rather than the son to replace my parents\u2019 dead
\nson. I continued to depreciate in value with each life decision I made that did not
\nfollow my parents\u2019 expectations. Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and
\nto never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never
\nyour own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner
\nparty will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that
\nno one will interject while they\u2019re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be
\ninvited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in
\nbefore I\u2019m interrupted.
\nIf the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the
\nchild thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The
\nindebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that
\nthe burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it\u2019s up to me to earn back
\nreparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without
\ncomplaint, prove myself in the workforce.
\n\u2014
\nIndebtedness is not the same thing as gratitude. In his poetry, Ross Gay gives
\nthanks to small moments in his life: tasting the \u201cvelvety heart\u201d of a fig, drinking
\ncold water cranked from a rusty red pump; he even gives thanks to his ugly feet,
\nthough when they\u2019re bare, his feet make him so self-conscious he digs \u201chis toes
\nlike twenty tiny ostriches into the sand.\u201d To truly feel gratitude is to sprawl out
\ninto the light of the present. It is happiness, I think.
\nTo be indebted is to fixate on the future. I tense up after good fortune has
\nlanded on my lap like a bag of tiny excitable lapdogs. But whose are these? Not
\nmine, surely! I treat good fortune not as a gift but a loan that I will have to pay
\nback in weekly installments of bad luck. I bet I\u2019m like this because I was raised
\nwrong\u2014browbeaten to perform compulsory gratitude. Thank you for sacrificing
\nyour life for me! In return, I will sacrifice my life for you!
\nI have rebelled against all that. As a result, I have developed the worst human
\ntrait: I am ungrateful. This book too is ungrateful. In my defense, a writer who
\nfeels indebted often writes ingratiating stories. Indebted, that is, to this country\u2014
\nto whom I, on the other hand, will always be ungrateful.
\n\u2014
\nThe first time I saw the famous photograph of Yuri Kochiyama was only a few
\nyears ago. The black-and-white photograph was snapped right after Malcolm X
\nwas shot at Manhattan\u2019s Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965. He is splayed
\nout on the floor, surrounded by a crowd trying to revive him. She is the only
\nperson tending to him whose face isn\u2019t cropped out. She is kneeling in her black
\ncoat, cradling Malcolm X\u2019s head on her lap. Upon closer inspection, I notice that
\nshe is propping his head up with her two hands while another woman is undoing
\nhis tie to better see to his bullet wounds. She looks like she is in her forties,
\nwearing cat-eye glasses that frame her thin angular features. Who is this Asian
\nwoman? And why am I surprised to see an Asian woman in this photograph?
\n\u2014
\nKochiyama was born in San Pedro, California, in 1921 to a middle-class Japanese
\nAmerican family. She was a happy and devoutly Christian teenager who grew up
\non the white side of town, and her life there was uneventful\u2014until Japan bombed
\nPearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Soon afterwards, her father, whose health
\nwas already frail, was falsely accused of espionage and taken to prison, where he
\nwas detained and questioned for five weeks. He died in a hospital right after his
\nrelease, hallucinating that Kochiyama\u2019s brother was his interrogator because her
\nbrother, who had enlisted in the war, was wearing a U.S. army uniform at his
\nbedside. When her ailing father turned his attention to Kochiyama, he asked in a
\npanic, \u201cWho beat you up?\u201d But no one had touched her.
\nThe rest of the family was evacuated to Jerome, a concentration camp that
\nimprisoned 8,500 Japanese internees in the swamplands of Arkansas. Forced to
\ngive up all their property and life savings, which is now estimated at $6 billion,
\nJapanese families were crowded into drafty barracks that were built like the
\nliving quarters of prisoner-of-war camps. Each person was issued a straw mattress
\nand an army blanket. There was no heat during the harsh winters and no indoor
\nplumbing, so that if someone had to go at night, they had to trudge out in the mud
\nto the latrines while a guard tower\u2019s search light was trained on them the whole
\nway. And yet, even while interned, Kochiyama was almost delusionally upbeat,
\norganizing letter-writing campaigns to fellow Nisei soldiers who had enlisted to
\nprove they were American patriots, until letters began pouring back with the word
\n\u201cdeceased.\u201d According to her biographer Diane Fujino, Japanese American
\nsoldiers helped liberate thirty thousand survivors in Dachau, which was fairly
\nironic considering that their own families were still behind barbed wire in
\nAmerica.
\n\u2014
\nUpon release, Kochiyama returned to San Pedro. She couldn\u2019t find a waitressing
\njob anywhere because no one wanted to hire a Jap. It wasn\u2019t until she and her
\nhusband moved to Harlem that she began to understand what had happened to
\nher. Until then, nothing deterred her patriotism, not the FBI whisking her father
\naway to prison without reason, not his death, nor even her family\u2019s internment.
\nShe still clung to the myth she learned in her white church and school: that the
\nUnited States was a land of liberty. What lay beyond the fault lines of her belief
\nsystem was only fear. When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York,
\nher black coworkers were the first to educate her about America\u2019s racist history.
\nFinally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to
\nher wasn\u2019t a nightmarish aberration but the norm.
\nKochiyama\u2019s optimism was also what made her an extraordinary activist.
\nSince she was young, she\u2019d had a preternatural gift for bringing people together.
\nAfter befriending her black neighbors and coworkers, she became an ardent civil
\nrights activist. She later met Malcolm X at a demonstration protesting the
\ndiscriminatory hiring practices of a construction company. He was mobbed by
\nfans but when he saw the lone Asian woman standing back, he reached out his
\narm to shake her hand. To his surprise, Kochiyama challenged him, asking him
\nwhy he wasn\u2019t an integrationist. Struck by her gumption, X invited her to the
\nweekly Organization of Afro-American Unity meeting, where she became further
\nradicalized, turning not only anti-racist but also anti-capitalist.
\n\u2014
\nKochiyama had a compulsion to help others, and was adamant that she not be the
\ncenter of attention, which was admirable but also gave me pause; made me
\nquestion if there was something inherently Asian and female about her
\nselflessness, which probably betrays my own internalized chauvinism and my own
\nrather predictable preference for the melancholic poet or the messianic hero
\nrather than organizers, like Kochiyama, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes.
\nIn fact, at a time when identities can be walled off, it\u2019s essential to lift up the life
\nof Kochiyama, whose sense of we was porous and large, whose mission was to
\namplify the voices of others while amplifying hers. She fought tirelessly for
\nprison rights reform; her home was known as \u201cGrand Central\u201d for black civil
\nrights activists; and she was one of seven activists who occupied the Statue of
\nLiberty in support of Puerto Rican independence in 1977. Later, in 1988, she
\nhelped lead the Japanese American activist movement that demanded and
\nreceived a formal apology and reparations for the internment camps.
\n\u2014
\nIn 1968, students at UC Berkeley invented the term Asian American to inaugurate
\na new political identity. Radicalized by the black power movement and anticolonial movement, the students invented that name as a refusal to apologize for
\nbeing who they were. It\u2019s hard to imagine that the origin of Asian America came
\nfrom a radical place, because the moniker is now flattened and emptied of any
\nblazing political rhetoric. But there was nothing before it. Asians either identified
\nby their nationality or were called Oriental. The activist Chris Iijima said, \u201cIt was
\nless a marker for what one was and more for what one believed.\u201d Some activists
\nwere so inspired by the Black Panthers that groups such as I Wor Kuen in New
\nYork City and the Red Guard Party in San Francisco downright copied the Black
\nPanther signature style\u2014their armbands, their berets\u2014while initiating their own
\nten-point program where they gave out free breakfast to poor Chinese American
\nchildren.
\nThey were from Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese working-class backgrounds,
\nfrom migrant farmers to restaurant waiters, fighting not just domestic racism but
\nU.S. imperialism abroad. Many were disenchanted with the mainstream white
\nanti-war movement because they cared not just about \u201cbringing the troops home\u201d
\nbut about the tens of thousands of Southeast Asians abroad who were being killed
\ndaily. That period of time, writes the historian Karen Ishizuka, was \u201can unholy
\nalliance of racism and imperialism, like nothing before or since\u2014the war united
\nAsians in America who, regardless of our various ethnicities, looked more enemy
\nthan American.\u201d According to the scholar Daryl J. Maeda, Asian American
\nveterans reported being humiliated and dehumanized by their fellow GIs as
\n\u201cgooks\u201d while their supposed enemies, the Vietnamese, often identified them as
\ntheir own. In the 1977 play Honey Bucket by Melvyn Escueta, an old Vietnamese
\nwoman touches the black hair of an American soldier named Andy. She asks,
\n\u201cSame-same Viet-me?\u201d
\n\u201cFilipino. Uh, Philippines,\u201d Andy says.
\n\u201cSame-same, Viet-me,\u201d the peasant repeats confidently.
\n\u2014
\nIn college, I was more interested in art than activism, so I discovered our radical
\nhistory rather late. My only exposure to it in school was scanning the row of
\nfaded books on Asian American social movements in the library, its death
\nentombed in those dull dry textbooks that were never checked out. But I also
\nrecall how the anti-racist movements in the sixties and seventies were dismissed
\nas failures. Marxists wrote off the fight for Chicano, Asian American, and Native
\nAmerican rights as extravagantly specialized, atomizing the Left from thinking
\nabout the core issue of class, whereas the mainstream center dismissed it as
\novertly militant, an opinion shared not only by whites but by minorities as well.
\nIn a 1996 New York Times interview, Yuri Kochiyama declared, \u201cPeople
\nhave a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back. And given what the United States
\nand Western powers have done to the third world\u2026these countries should fight
\nback.\u201d Right afterwards, the interviewer, Norimitsu Onishi, deflated her quote by
\nsaying that Kochiyama \u201cclings to views now consigned to the political fringe.\u201d
\nI embraced all these half-baked opinions without doing my homework.
\nWhatever their politics were, I thought, they were now outdated. It concerns me
\nhow fast I dismissed the hard work of my activist predecessors after hearing
\nenough \u201cexperts\u201d spout off on the frivolity of identity politics when the
\ninternational and interracial politics of Kochiyama was anything but frivolous. It
\nmakes me worried about the future, about this nation\u2019s inborn capacity to forget,
\nabout the powers that be who always win and take over the narrative. Already,
\n\u201cwoke\u201d is a hashtag that\u2019s now mocked, when being awake is not a singular
\nrevelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reAssessment. Ending
\nthis book, I think about what prognosis I can offer among the crowded field of
\nexperts who warn of our end times. What I can say is look back to that lost blade
\nof history when activists like Kochiyama offered an alternate model of mutual
\naid and alliance. They offered an alternate model of us.
\n\u2014
\nA thought experiment: what if every time white people yell at nonwhites to go
\nback to [insert nation or continent], they are immediately granted their wish?
\nConfusion will abound. Ecuadorians will find themselves in Mexico, or I could
\nfind myself in China. But what if they get it right and I find myself zapped to
\nSeoul?
\nI haven\u2019t returned since 2008, when I went to visit my grandmother who, at
\nthe age of one hundred, was slowly dying in an appalling nursing home that I still
\ncan\u2019t think about without being upset at my family. That home was like some
\ndaycare from hell, with pink walls and a creepy recording of church songs sung
\nby children playing all hours of the day. Elderly people, packed ten to a room,
\nwhimpered for their kids to come visit them. My sister was there for a year,
\ncaring for our grandmother, because the rest of my relatives were too old to
\nmanage her severe dementia. \u201cI want to die before my family abandons me in old
\nage,\u201d my grandmother used to say.
\nI can\u2019t live in Seoul. It is not a good place for women. Through cosmetic
\nsurgery, many women shrink down their naturally wide Mongolian faces to
\nwhitened inverted teardrops. The education system is merciless. In 1997, the
\nInternational Monetary Fund bailed out South Korea\u2019s crippling financial crisis
\nwith a $58 billion loan upon the agreement that the nation open up its markets to
\nforeign investors and relax labor market reforms, making it easier to hire and fire
\nworkers and loosen carbon emission standards so that American cars can be
\nimported. Now real wages have stagnated. Unemployment is dire. College
\ngraduates call their country \u201cHell Chosun\u201d after an oppressive dynasty with a
\nfeudal class system. A murky haze of micro-dust has settled over Seoul, dust
\nwhich can\u2019t be seen but is felt at the back of your throat, and which will cause
\nlong-term health problems, like cancer. During certain months, if Koreans have
\nto go outside at all, they wear surgical masks, but even that isn\u2019t enough to protect
\nthem.
\n\u2014
\nThen be grateful that you live here.
\n\u2014
\nTheresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, \u201cArrest the machine that purports to employ
\ndemocracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her.\u201d The most
\ndamaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are,
\nturning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but
\nturning me against myself.
\n\u2014
\nI had my twenty-eighth birthday party in Seoul, and celebrated it at my sister\u2019s
\nlittle apartment with four of our new Korean friends, who were noise musicians.
\nMy sister and I went to their shows in tiny back-alley clubs where onstage one of
\nthem would sit on a folding chair and click on their laptop while an ongoing
\nbuzzing sound, with occasional blips and screeches and snares, would emit from
\nthe stereo system. At my sister\u2019s, when we were already drunk, they proposed a
\ndrinking game and I suggested we play \u201cNever Have I Ever.\u201d This is a game
\nwhere people take turns declaring an act they\u2019ve never done before, and anyone
\nwho has done it has to drink. It\u2019s a game that often starts with the mildly
\nembarrassing (\u201cNever have I ever peed in the shower,\u201d for instance) before it
\ndrops off the precipice into the frank and sexual. I thought I would begin with a
\nsilly question so they would get the hang of it, before one of the musicians, the
\none who called himself Fish, with a hipster mid-aughts mullet and black plugs in
\nhis earlobes, announced that he\u2019d start. He raised his shot glass of soju.
\n\u201cI have never tried to kill myself,\u201d he declared, and downed his glass.
\nThe other musicians clinked their glasses and also downed their drinks.
\nThere was nowhere to go after that, so we stopped playing.
\n\u2014
\nI bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists
\nused to say, \u201cI am here because you were there.\u201d
\nI am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two
\nfumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country
\nused a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make
\nNorth and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families,
\nincluding my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of
\nliberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country
\nthan during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A
\nfascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon,
\nDavid Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a doubleeyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up
\ntesting on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it\u2019s
\nthe most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral
\ncountry is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have
\nsucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan,
\nNigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars
\nand transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States.
\nDon\u2019t talk to me about gratitude.
\n\u2014
\nI was never satisfied with those immigrant talking points about \u201cnot belonging\u201d
\nand \u201cthe sense of in-betweenness.\u201d It seemed rigid and rudimentary, like I just
\nneed the right GPS coordinates to find myself. But I also understand the impulse
\nto search for some origin myth of the self, even if it\u2019s shaped by the stories told to
\nus, which is why I keep returning to Seoul in my memories, to historical facts that
\nare obscure to most and obvious to few, to try to find better vantage points to
\njustify my feelings here. In Seoul, I still found myself cleaved, but at least it
\nwasn\u2019t reduced to broad American talking points. At least the \u201carsenal of
\ncomplexes\u201d that Frantz Fanon talks about was laid bare.
\n\u2014
\nUpon my return to the United States, the air thinned; my breath shallowed. As the
\nscholar Seo-Young Chu puts it, I was exiled back to the uncanny valley, where I
\nwas returned to my silicon mold and looked out of monolid eyes. To be a writer,
\nthen, is to fill myself in with content. To make myself, and by proxy other Asian
\nAmericans, more human and a little more relevant to American culture. But that\u2019s
\nnot enough for me.
\nPoetry is a forgiving medium for anyone who\u2019s had a strained relationship
\nwith English. Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through
\nsong, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry. The poet
\nLouise Gl\u00fcck called the lyric a ruin. The lyric as ruin is an optimal form to
\nexplore the racial condition, because our unspeakable losses can be captured
\nthrough the silences built into the lyric fragment. I have relied on those silences,
\nmaybe too much, leaving a blank space for the sorrows that would otherwise be
\nreduced by words. \u201cIt is horrible to be tangible inside capital,\u201d said the poet Jos
\nCharles. I used to think I\u2019d rather leave a blank space for my pain than have it be
\neasily summed up for consumption. But by turning to prose, I am cluttering that
\nsilence to try to anatomize my feelings about a racial identity that I still can\u2019t
\nexamine as a writer without fretting that I have caved to my containment.
\n\u2014
\nOur respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our
\nthoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except
\nothers in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asian
\nAmericans, more human is not enough for me. I want to destroy the universal. I
\nwant to rip it down. It is not whiteness but our contained condition that is
\nuniversal, because we are the global majority. By we I mean nonwhites, the
\nformerly colonized; survivors, such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have
\nalready lived through end times; migrants and refugees living through end times
\ncurrently, fleeing the droughts and floods and gang violence reaped by climate
\nchange that\u2019s been brought on by Western empire.
\nIn Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining
\nthemselves as slaves and refugees in the future. In Blade Runner 2049, the sequel,
\nneon billboards flicker interchangeably in Japanese and Korean, villains wear
\ndeconstructed kimonos, but with the exception of a manicurist, there is no Asian
\nsoul in sight. We have finally vanished. The slaves, like Ryan Gosling, are all
\nbeautiful white replicants. The orphanage is full of young white boys who
\ndismantle junked circuit boards, a scene taken straight out of present-day Delhi,
\nwhere Indian child laborers break down mountains of electronic waste while
\nbeing poisoned by mercury toxins. Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science
\nfiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against
\nblack and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their
\nown fall as a preventative measure to ensure that the white race will never fall.
\n\u2014
\nIn Ken Burns and Lynn Novick\u2019s eighteen-hour documentary The Vietnam War,
\nthey interviewed a Japanese American veteran, Vincent H. Okamoto, who served
\nas a platoon leader. Like Kochiyama, Okamoto was imprisoned at a Japanese
\ninternment camp, in his case in his early youth. Since all six of his brothers
\nserved in the military, two during World War II and one during the Korean War,
\nhe followed his family\u2019s footsteps by enlisting to go to Vietnam.
\nOkamoto\u2019s first assignment was searching for Viet Cong soldiers supposedly
\nhiding out in the countryside fourteen miles outside of Saigon. After hours of
\nfruitless searching, he gave orders for his men to take a break for lunch at a
\nnearby village. He found a hut where he smelled the familiar scent of steaming
\nrice. He suddenly felt homesick for his mother\u2019s cooking. He hadn\u2019t had rice for
\nmonths. Okamoto told his interpreter to ask the elderly woman who was cooking
\nif he could have a bowl of rice in exchange for cigarettes and C-rations of canned
\nturkey. She made a meal for him of rice and fish and vegetables. He wolfed it
\ndown. He asked for seconds.
\n\u201cAin\u2019t they poor enough without you eating all their food?\u201d a soldier chided
\nhim.
\n\u201cThey\u2019ve got enough rice to feed a dozen men,\u201d Okamoto responded.
\nThen he stopped himself. Why was there all this rice for one elderly woman
\nand her grandchildren? He asked the woman, \u201cWho\u2019s all this rice for?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t
\nknow,\u201d she kept repeating through the interpreter. He ordered his group to
\nconduct a search around her home. Under a thatch of straw, they found a secret
\ntunnel. Okamoto threw a phosphorescent grenade into the tunnel. After the
\nexplosion, they dragged out seven or eight dead bodies that were so charred they
\ncouldn\u2019t be identified. \u201cAtta boy,\u201d the company commander said to him. The
\nwoman who fed him the rice crumpled to the ground and started wailing.
\n\u2014
\nTraitor, I thought.
\nThat word kept ringing in my mind. I was disgusted with him, especially by
\nhis flat neutral affectlessness as he told the story. But I was wrong. He wasn\u2019t a
\ntraitor. He was fighting for the United States. He was doing his job. In fact, he
\nwas probably showing his remorse by telling that story for a documentary series
\nthat he knew would be seen by millions of viewers.
\nUltimately, I was left dissatisfied with the documentary. The directors
\nclaimed that their series was going to show both sides of the war, but it still
\ncentralized the trauma of American veterans. No stories of loss by Vietnamese
\ncivilians. None by the Viet Cong female soldiers whom I was dying to know
\nabout. I had read that feminist Asian American activists in the sixties and
\nseventies looked up to these female soldiers as models of resistance. The series
\nalso didn\u2019t have much of anything on the foreign allies who helped the United
\nStates, not that I expected it would. I\u2019m thinking specifically of South Korea, who
\ndeployed more than three hundred thousand soldiers to Vietnam during the nine
\nyears of the war. At the time, South Korea was one of the poorest nations in the
\nworld and they wanted aid money to boost their economy. They were also
\nindebted to America for rescuing them from their Communist enemy during the
\nKorean War. At the time, the dictator Park Chung-Hee said, \u201cWe are making a
\nmoral repayment of our historical debt to the Free World.\u201d
\n\u2014
\nI could begin writing about buying flowers from the corner deli, but give me
\nenough pages\u2014two, twenty, or one hundred\u2014and no matter what, violence will
\nsaturate my imagination. I have tried to write poems and prose that remain in the
\nquotidian, turning an uneventful day over and over, like a polished pebble that
\nglints in the light into a silvery metaphysical inquiry about time. It is late spring. I
\npick up my daughter from preschool and on our walk home, we admire the
\nperfect purple orbs of onion flowers in bloom. My husband makes dinner that we
\nsometimes take upstairs to our roof with the view of the train and the sun that
\nmelts its blood orange into the clouds.
\nI write down my daily routine that is so routine it allows me the freedom to
\nruminate. At what cost do I have this life? At what toll have I been granted this
\nsafety? The Japanese occupation; the Korean War; the dictators who tortured
\ndissidents with tactics learned from the Japanese and the war. I didn\u2019t live through
\nany of it, but I\u2019m still a descendant of those who had no time to recover; who had
\nno time, nor permission, to reflect. Barely recovered from the Korean War,
\nyoung South Korean soldiers arrived in Vietnam to pay back their debt to
\nAmerica. They were ground troops assigned \u201cto pacify the countryside\u201d and they
\nraped and murdered civilians indiscriminately. Their zeal for retribution was
\nmonomaniacal, where if one of the soldiers died from an unknown sniper\u2019s fire
\nfrom a village, they went back and burned that village down. In H\u00e0 My village,
\nSouth Korean troops killed 135 civilians, including babies and the elderly. In B\u00ecnh
\nH\u00f2a, there were 430 deaths. In Binh An, more than 1,000 civilian deaths. There
\nwere 8,000 civilian deaths at the hands of South Koreans but that number, like all
\ncivilian casualties during war, is inexact.
\n\u2014
\nI can\u2019t entirely renounce the condition of indebtedness. I am indebted to the
\nactivists who struggled before me. I am indebted to Cha. I\u2019d rather be indebted
\nthan be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an
\nethical life is to be held accountable to history. I\u2019m also indebted to my parents.
\nBut I cannot repay them by keeping my life private, or by following that
\nprivatized dream of taking what\u2019s mine. Almost daily, my mother demanded
\ngratitude from me. Almost weekly, my mother said we moved here so I wouldn\u2019t
\nhave to suffer. Then she asked, \u201cWhy do you make yourself suffer?\u201d
\n\u2014
\n\u201cIn the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,\u201d the artist
\nLorraine O\u2019Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to
\ncounter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that \u201cthe white man\u2019s
\nsun has set.\u201d Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American,
\nI felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O\u2019Grady. I heard the
\nring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book.
\nWhiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal
\nwars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head,
\ncorporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is
\nevery day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who
\nlive in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise.
\nUnless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to
\nlive under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that
\nit\u2019s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional
\nexistence. Even if we\u2019ve been here for four generations, our status here remains
\nconditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave,
\nwhether it\u2019s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a
\npeace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian
\nAmerican consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our
\nconditional existence.
\nBut what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep
\nthe struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only
\nanswer that through the actions of others. As of now, I\u2019m writing when history is
\nbeing devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The
\nadministration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to
\nfill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp
\nsurvivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever
\nhappened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why
\ndidn\u2019t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, \u201cWe
\nneed to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans
\ndidn\u2019t have in 1942.\u201d
\nWe were always here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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