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WILD GRAMMARS

by

Muriel Leung

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOTUHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Muriel Leung
i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………………. ii

CRITICAL DISSERTATION

Hybrid Affinities: The Embodied Genre Defiance
of Asian American Women and Femmes ………………………………………………………. 1

CREATIVE DISSERTATION

Opening :: A Mouth …………………………………………………………………………… 62

Obsessed, Unbound …………………………………………………………………………..... 79

Of Other Genres I Move to Feel ……………………………………………………………….. 94

Between the Ghost and Her Grammar …………………………………………...………..….. 117

Once Upon a Fish in Virtual Waters ………………………………...…………………..…..... 143

REFERENCES …………………………………………………………………………...…... 172

ii

ABSTRACT
“Wild Grammars” is a hybrid essay collection that utilizes a blended form of essay,
poetry, memoir and critical theory to explore the literary and artistic “grammar” practices that
have helped shape the construction of Asian American identity. By blending critical and creative
writing, this project hopes to examine the different affective gestures of Asian American cultural
production in late 21
st
century capitalism and its resulting effects in our current understanding of
Asian American identity by drawing attention to the process of artmaking itself. By emphasizing
grammar, the project looks to the construction of language and meaning through text and how it
is performed, enacted, and circulated. If grammar, particularly the grammatical systems of
English, organizes the way we understand and move through the world, then it also necessitates
an examination of how it manages power as well as the creative and critical possibilities of
challenging this system. The interest in grammar is particularly vital in the political and
economic circumstances of late 21
st
century capitalism in which Asian American cultural
production is constantly responding to through the obfuscations of power that characterize this
current time.
The critical component of this project, “Hybrid Affinities: The Embodied Genre Defiance
of Asian American Women and Femmes,” examines the relationship between Asian American
women and femmes and the propensity towards hybrid genre experimentation. The essay argues
that this inclination towards hybridity is determined by the desire to transcend racial and gender
boundaries experienced by Asian American women and femmes. Examining hybrid works by
Asian American women and femmes from the nineteenth century to present—Siu Sin Far’s
memoir as well as her short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman,
Native, Other, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal, and Kai Cheng
iii

Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Fabulous Liars—I posit that hybrid genre experimentation has the
immense potential to illustrate our affinities to one another, permitting an imagination of a new
type of collective experience that does not eschew necessary differences. The affinity explored in
this essay is the shared relationship between the body and writing practice, and how the quality
of this relationship comes to determine each author’s final interpretation of blended genres,
media, and forms.
The creative component of this project features six essays that explore various aspects of
English grammatical construction that speak to pertinent issues of Asian American identity
making and cultural production. The first essay, “Opening :: A Mouth” provides historical and
social context for the complicated legacy of the term “hybridity,” which is situated in coloniality
and has since been reappropriated to reflect the enmeshed course of state and individual actions.
In the following essay, “Obsessed, Unbound,” the account of a doomed queer Asian American
relationship introduces the notion of queer Asian American affect, what it means to be caught in
the liminal space between projections of unfeeling and feeling too much. “Of Other Genres I
Move to Feel,” which follows after, applies this notion of queer Asian American affect to
making art after surviving racial and gender violence. The essay forges a connection between
experiences with marginality and hybrid genre experimentation, arguing that blurring the lines
between genres, media, and forms is a way of transgressing one’s social limitations, especially
following brutal encounters with violence. In the next essay, “Between the Ghost and Her
Grammar,” the exploration of parataxis in prose poetry as a haunted space becomes a way of
recognizing how the grammar of hybrid works can illuminate what is rarely seen. In the
concluding essay, “Once Upon a Fish on Virtual Waters,” memoir and fiction collide in accounts
of a father’s traumatic history of survival during China’s Cultural Revolution. The essay
iv

examines the lines between truth and myth, fact and memory, illustrating the irreconcilability of
these categorizations, offering the unknown in its conclusion. This unknown becomes a lesson
for thinking about Asian American futures, one which is at once carved by the present and
speculative.
1

HYBRID AFFINITIES: THE EMBODIED GENRE DEFIANCE
OF ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND FEMMES

For a while, having lived in a land of befores. Before a white man killed eight people
across several salons in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women, in an event that media still
speculates as randomized violence. Before another man followed Christina Yuna Lee up the
stairs to her New York City apartment and stabbed her to death. Before Annie Le’s body was
found inside the wall of a Yale University research laboratory after being reported missing by
her housemates. Before Quin-Rong Wu was taken by an unknown man outside of my elementary
school in New York City Chinatown, her body discovered floating in the East River just one
block away from my grandmother’s apartment. Before any of these events took place—their
tragedies like an undulating wave that coursed through the heavy regions of time and space—I
was the secret holder of an inexplicable sadness.
As a child, I cried often. My mother said that when I cried, I wailed with the grief of a
widow mourning the sudden death of her husband at a funeral. And when I was not crying, I was
silent, staring out the window, unresponsive to any snap of the finger, non-plussed by the fan of
waving fingers in front of my eyes.
“You were such a strange child,” my mother once expressed. “We gave you such a good
life. You had no reason to be unhappy and yet…” Her voice would trail off.
Despite this recollection, I remember too that once, before I left the house, she pulled me
aside to say, “Be careful. The papers say a man has been going through the Union Turnpike
station, targeting Asian girls. I want you to come straight home after school, do you hear?”
Being Asian, woman, femme, and queer, the dissonance of being alive one constantly
besieged by racial and gendered violence had profound echoes throughout my life, such that I
2

could only conclude that this sadness was the early weight of knowing, even before the words
could have their place. If my mother’s dual responses were any indication, the threat of racial
and gendered violence would always be imminent but because the legibility of Asian American
women and femmes’ experiences had little place in the social limelight, the violence laid low,
percolating through slow and seemingly minute injuries and erasure, until it became so explosive
and uncontainable, it would seem almost incomprehensible to the greater majority.
The project of writing about violence towards Asian American women and femmes as a
unifying force of shared collective experience is a morbid one, and yet, where I find possibility is
in locating one mechanism in which violence would not be the only term through which we
could articulate our experiences. In fact, the goal perhaps is not to make the experiences legible,
but to appeal to the parts that are not socially legible and yet have profound ripples in our lives.
This is where the intervention of hybridity or hybrid experimentation comes in. Literary
hybrid experimentation as an artistic practice refers to the blending of genres, media, and forms
to create original works of literature. It is a practice that has gained prevalence in recent years
among Asian American women and femme writers, though arguably it has been a literary
strategy that seems to be especially utilized during socially and politically charged times,
especially by marginalized people.
Conceptually, however, hybridity has a complex history, originating from nineteenth-
century colonial discourses of scientific racism through which Western forces utilizes racial and
cultural categorization to delineate different groups of people in colonized regions of the world.
Hybridity as a form of cultural or racial “mixing” was considered transgressive by colonial
terms, and thus, the concept came to be a stand-in for the disruption of a social code. Since its
early usages as a mechanism of power, however, postcolonial and literary scholars such as Homi
3

Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin have intervened to reclaim the term as a critique of the hierarchies
of racial and cultural identities imposed by colonial subjugation, emphasizing hybridity’s radical
social and linguistic potential. Understandably, other scholars that include Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak and Robert Young have reservations about the reappropriative qualities of the term,
cautioning the casual usage of the concept to mean a dissolution of all identity differences, and
that the essentialist history behind the term is too loaded to elide.
The cautionary nature of this discourse will always be the underbelly of hybridity, even
as we apply it to the blending of multiple genres, media, and forms. Literary hybridization may
not always be historically situated or limited to a specific community, but its practice is as
dispersive and webbed as its historical grounding. For Asian American women and femmes
experimenting with hybrid genre, media, and forms, the drive to write in these modes is as
complicated as any other marginalized set of identities that has felt moved to do so. Yet, the
impetus to ascribe shared experiences to a group as diverse as Asian American women and
femmes—through ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, dis/ability, and so on—is as much an
aesthetic inquiry as it is a political one. To consider what it means to turn our attention to Asian
American women and femme writers experimenting with moving across genres, media, and
forms would mean to recognize that identifying with this collective is an act of strategic
essentialism, harkening back to Spivak and Young’s concerns about hybridity’s lingering ties to
power. It means that this collective identification matters at this political juncture because there
is something of our shared experiences to unpack, whether we have our fingers fully on the pulse
of what precisely ails us or needs to be brought to the light. Hybrid genre, media, and form is one
such way in which we begin to unravel ourselves.
4

I am less concerned with the question of whether Asian American women and femme
writers utilize hybrid experimentation in their writing more than any other racial and gender
group and more so with what continues to propel us to this artistic practice. As varied as the
reasons may be, the discourse inevitably returns to concerns about the body, the ways in which
embodiment that takes place through assorted genre, media, and form in their mixing, and the
work of assemblage that happens—the piecing together of fragmented parts, the multiplicity of
selves, the desire not for wholeness but for momentary integration of different aspects of the
ways in which we move through the world. In fact, this work of assemblage has become a way
for Asian American women and femmes to revise the notion of hybridity so that rather than
emphasizing its colonial positioning, it is conceptually reframed as an artistic practice that draws
from modes of embodiment by marginalized people. That is, that hybridity is a construct created
by people from the political margins rather than dictated by those in power.
In a roundtable discussion entitled “The Lyric Essay’s Ghosts and Shadows: A
Conversation” between hybrid genre writers Jennifer S. Cheng, April Freely, Shamala Gallagher,
Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and Addie Tsai about the lyric essay, nonbinary and mixed Taiwanese
writer Tsai notes how this reframing of hybridity is a necessity for marginalized people. In
response to a question about how she views the whitewashing of hybrid genre and form of the
lyric essay as a queer nonbinary Asian person of a mixed-race background, she notes:

I contend with both the whitewashing of the genre and with my marginalized identity by
placing that within the form and content itself. In other words, I am not only always
already informing the body of the lyric essay via a hybrid form, a form I feel that I
embody myself as a biracial queer twin, but I am also seeking to interrogate issues of
fragmentation and multiplicity in order to particularly contend with all these warring
selves that live in my own body. I can’t see myself ever working again in a more
5

cohesive (and less hybridized) form because I myself do not relate to that kind of
experience, that kind of embodiment.
1

The “warring selves” that Tsai references is the multiple parts of herself that are made illegible in
a world that forces her to separate the various aspects of her identity from one another. The
contention is not self-chosen but one that has become product of the world in which she lives,
and thus, the language of embodiment becomes vital for discussing an artistic practice that
requires a compilation of different parts. For her, the objective is not cohesion—and in fact, to
adhere to standards of cohesion is the same violence of separation of her parts—but to lean into
the making of hybrid genres, media, and forms as they offer her the ability to speak to her
multiplicity within the container of her body. And while she is neither woman nor (fully
identified with) femme, her interpretation of hybrid experimental writing and her relationship to
her racial, gender, sexual, and even familial identity is one that expresses close adjacency to the
ways in which Asian American women and femme writers have taken up the issue of hybridity,
the body, and the identity.
This reconstitution of hybridity as a practice that is steered by writers operating from the
political margins is a provocative turn from past discourse, which is mired in the tension of how
much hybridity emphasizes its colonial and racist origins. Hybridity, through the lens of Asian

1
This conversation between Jennifer S. Cheng, April Freely, Shamala Gallagher, Aisha Sabatini
Sloan, and Addie Tsai originally took place as a panel that shares the same title during the 2017
Thinking Its Presence conference in Tucson, Arizona. In publishing this conversation as part of
Essay Daily’s feature, Gallagher includes a thought-provoking note that hopes to reframe the
lyric essay as a genre and form that marginalized writers have claim to. She writes, “What if we
saw the lyric essay—with its fractures, its unevenness, its silences—as belonging to those whose
experience of personal being—and, therefore, of knowledge—was itself fractured, uneven,
silenced? In that case, what would the lyric essay be? And which writers and artists—of color,
queer—would we understand to be its new founders, or would it have founders at all?”
6

American women and femme writers, does not elide this past but does reinterpret power and
agency, much as Tsai has done, in ways that move beyond the binary terms of subjugation or
liberation. In fact, it seems to challenge us to stay with the residues of past and present—not to
rectify historical violence or repurpose the matter into an act of resistance, but to take up the
arduous task of making sense of the body in real time.
In my artistic practice, hybridity has offered this very distillation of present time such that
the weight of racial and gender violence has a place to rest. If hybrid experimentation can blur
the lines of where genre, media, and form begin and end, then the boundaries through which we
have grown accustomed to navigating—this attempt to narrate our experiences in socially
prescribed ways—inevitably erode too. That is, if my life demands the porousness of my being
as an Asian American woman, then the forms that my writing takes will reflect that too. The
hybridity of it is no accident but a mirror of the way in which I move through the world and
where my disparate parts too may live when it is hard to inhabit life elsewhere.
Finally, hybridity has another useful function as a unifying tool that gathers the voices of
Asian American women and femmes as a collective, joined not by uniformity of experiences but
as a temporary container for the ways in which their experiences may deviate from one another.
It mimics what strategic essentialism does for collective identification by offering an aesthetic
vehicle for Asian American women and femmes to momentarily speak on the relationship
between our propensity towards hybrid experimentation and developments of ideas of race and
gender over time.
In the interest of exploring what the collective of Asian American women and femme
hybrid writing can mean, I have decided to look specifically at the following works: Siu Sin
Far’s (pen name of Edith Maude Eaton) nonfiction writing and short story collection Mrs. Spring
7

Fragrance, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Bhanu
Kapil’s Humanimal, and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Fabulous Liars. From the
nineteenth century to present, each of these writers and their mentioned works exemplify some
form of hybrid experimentation in which hybridity is a core part of their investigatory practice as
much as the content of their writing, which spans accounts of war, racial and gender violence,
the pains of one’s familial history, and personal survival. In their respective interpretation of
hybridity, the swirl of this assorted content does not impose a topical primacy but rather asserts
their intertwinement. Each discussion as equally vital, pertinent to constructing a larger picture
of a life. While their respective objectives may differ across the centuries, there is a profound
link that seems to span through time, of how the boundaries of genre, media, form, and social
lines must necessarily be crossed.
There, through the cracks, all matter which is difficult, frightening, and calling to us,
spill.

Anthologizing Affinities

The lineage of Asian American publishing is long and inexhaustive, threaded together
over time by Asian American scholars, cultural workers, and writers. These same scholars,
cultural workers, and writers have spent the last several decades creating living archives of Asian
American writing that could contest the longstanding erasure of our voices, which occurred not
just through the dismissal of our lived experiences but also through the barriers imposed in
mainstream publishing. Challenges have included and continue to persist in the forms of
representational limitations, the struggle against prevailing Orientalist attitudes, failures to
recognize Asian American as a racial identity alongside intersections of gender and other forms
8

of identification, the marginalization that exists even within Asian Americans as a factionalized
body, and the ongoing tension in conversations about identity politics and aesthetics. In response
to these challenges, Asian Americans took it upon themselves to create anthologies featuring the
very Asian American writing that has populated their communities, but which were not available
in mainstream publishing. These anthologies were organized across a broad spectrum of
aesthetic and thematic leanings, each with a different angle for their respective portrayals of
Asian American life according to specific geographic regions and periods of time.
These anthologies are useful for understanding the ways in which hybridity has always
been a burgeoning question in Asian American writing, and how writing by Asian American
women and femmes has always had to negotiate the space between social positioning and artistic
merit. In the latest edition of Aiiieeeee!, one of the earliest anthologies of Asian American
writing originally published in 1974 and edited by Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao
Inada, and Shawn Wong, scholar Tara Fickle offers a reflection of the book’s notoriety in her
foreword. She notes the feminist critiques of the anthology, “its conceptual phallocentrism” and
“how quickly [the editors] subsumed the experience of Asian American women under a default
ethnic humanity.”
2
The anthology upholds its masculinist tone by leveling some of their harshest
critiques towards Asian American women writers who were published through mainstream
channels at the time such as Jade Snow Wong, Betty Lee Sung, and Virginia Lee. Of Lee, the
editors scathingly refer to her as “the victim” of the racist imagination imposed upon her by
white publishers, and “so brainwashed” as to produce a project like The House That Tai Ming
Built, which they critique for its self-Orientalizing plot.
3

2
Aiiieeeee!, 108
3
Ibid, 750
9

While they also take issue with Pardee Lowe’s complicity in self-Orientalizing his work,
the editors appear more preoccupied with dismissing the merit of Asian American women
writers’ work of which there were so few to begin with at the time. In the anthology’s
“Introduction to Chinese and Japanese American Literature,” the editors cite an interview
between Frank Chin and Jade Snow Wong in which the latter expresses her comfort with the
support she received from white women editors in shaping her writing. The editors are quick to
pass judgment on this decision, referring to Wong’s attitude as “the talk of a good
businesswoman, not a serious or very sensitive writer.”
4
This response is patterned throughout
the editors’ language in the anthology, this conflation of Asian American women writers’ limited
access to mainstream publishing and their artistic merit. Although this recent reissue of the
anthology invites consideration of the collection’s positive contributions to the field of Asian
American literature, which are still profound, its attitude towards Asian American women’s
writing articulates a persistent racial and gender representational tension in the field. The critique
of the publishing sellout is equated with the accusation of racial and gender betrayal, a position
which those within Asian American communities, like the male editors of Aiiieeeee!, level with
disproportionate judgment towards Asian American women.
While Fickle offers a resuscitative reading of Aiiieeeee!, naming its radical rejection of
white hegemonic models of Asian American literary production, its conflation of assimilative
directives with Asian American women’s writing also has lasting impact such that future
anthologies have tried to rectify. For one, the Aiiieeeee! editors’ suspicion of what they deem to
be anthropological writing is a task that Asian American women have had to take on in response
to the historical and political erasure they experienced from outside and within their own

4
Ibid, 871
10

communities. Drawing from feminist and women of color activism, later anthologies such as
Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women edited by Asian
Women United of California sought to outline the history of racial and gender violence that
Asian American women have experienced from sex trafficking in early immigration in the
nineteenth century to the work limitations that delegated them to garment work and other forms
of racialized and gendered labor. The chronology offered by the anthology justified the thematic
organization of the book, which utilizes the metaphor of water or “Making waves” such as
“Moving Currents: Work” and “Where Rivers Merge: Generations” to illustrate shared
resonances across different ethnic groups within the experiences of women of Asian descent in
the U.S.
The editors’ transparency around the struggle to navigate inclusivity, especially in its
publication of South Asian and Southeast Asian women writers, represents a moment of
curatorial and political challenge in the effort to declare a collective set of experiences based
upon racial and gender affinity. In the preface to Making Waves, the editors describe their
selection process and the arguments around inclusivity and accessibility that emerged from this
effort:

As we worked hard to achieve a fair and balanced representation, tensions arose when we
had to sacrifice a piece because of length or when we tried to convince an author to treat
a topic more accessibly or when we had to make more effort to reach a particular writer
or community. We agreed, however, to retain as much as possible of the individual
writers’ styles and cultural integrity, and have respected their choices in a variety of
ethnic designations (such as Filipino or Pilipino) and romanticization (such as the modern
pinyin system or the Cantonese dialect familiar to most earlier immigrants from China).
5

5
Making Waves, x
11

The editors’ preface names, with rare honesty, the underrepresentation of South Asian and
Southeast Asian women’s writing in the wider field of Asian American literature, which has
predominantly featured writing by East Asian women. The representational challenge named
here marked a turning point in Asian American literary discourse in which the intersections of
racial, ethnic, and gender identities laid the foundation for the understanding that social and
political historical grounding and aesthetics were all intertwined. Despite its areas of omissions,
the anthology’s editors have named an often-undisclosed part of the editorial process that is
significant to the ongoing conversation about the politics of representation and aesthetic choice.
This part of the process honors the constraints that marginalized writers have always had to
operate within, particularly Asian American women writers who are subjected to the scrutiny of
their Asian male peers as much as they are diminished by the rest of the world, while recognizing
that there is not one preordained way of writing authentically. It is also a teachable moment too
for navigating the politics of editorial work, which very much involves looking towards the
margins of any circumscribed collective experience, to locate what is missing, underrepresented,
or otherwise left out—to understand the implications of the why and how.
In the decades to follow, Asian American literature has made tremendous aesthetic
strides while also becoming increasingly visible to mainstream publishers. This is also due to the
developments in Asian American activism and scholarship that have widened the discourse about
Asian American identity beyond the insider/outsider binary that has constituted so much of the
conversation around earlier work. In later anthologies such as Premonitions and Quiet Fire,
published by Kaya Press and Asian American Writers’ Workshop, respectively, there is a
deliberate attempt to broaden the definition of Asian American writing that can enfold the
cumulative conversations about identity, intersectional issues, history, and aesthetic range to that
12

date. Both anthologies utilize the language of recovery or excavation to describe their editorial
vision, as a means of bridging the narrative historical gaps in Asian American literary history
through inventive ways of curation. Whereas Quiet Fire addressed this task through a
comprehensive historical survey of Asian American poetry from the 1890s to the early 1970s,
Premonitions took a more experimental route with the division of the anthology into “zones,”
areas of creative and discursive practice that play upon the notion’s literal meaning as well as its
metaphorical reaches.
Premonitions also broadened its editorial vision to highlight not just Asian American
work but writing by writers of Asian descent based in North America. The anthology also
encompassed multiple genres, media, and forms, attentive to work by lesser-known writers as
well as more formally inventive work by established writers. According to the editors, the
hybridity of the anthology and its attentiveness to work on the margins are responses to the
historical omissions in Asian North American literature. They remark that some of these
omissions have included “the geographical and discursive isolation of various poets, their
reluctance to publish, or early deaths” as well as “editorial aversion to poetry characterized by
formal experimentation, homo eroticism, or the use of pidgin dialects.”
6
Additionally, these
omissions have entailed writing that involved “Orientalist materials and non-realist aesthetics, or
that developed multi- or extra-linguistic approaches toward renewing the poetic medium.”
7
By
addressing these exclusions through the curatorial work of this anthology, the editors found
themselves tasked with creating a cohesive collection that could pool all of these omissions in
conversation with one another. It also illuminated how experimental or hybrid work, writing by

6
Premonitions, 576
7
Ibid
13

queer and other marginalized members of North Asian American communities, and writing
produced outside of mainstream publishing processes have always persisted even despite their
exclusion from many anthologies up until then.
That hybridity has been named as one of the marginalized aspects of Asian American
literary discourse has set a path for future anthologies to resolve the tensions between realist and
experimental writing, even as previous conflicts between identity politics and aesthetics have
gained a bit of sturdier ground. The specificity of Asian American women and femmes’
contribution to hybrid and experimental literature, however, is underexplored territory. While
hybrid and experimental literature and race and gender discourses have gone through separate
stages of development, the convergence of these areas require the same editorial visioning that
can create a discursive bridge across these fields for Asian American women and femme hybrid
writing.
Just as these previous anthologies of Asian American writing have grappled with
questions of aesthetic and political circumscription, the work of Asian American women and
femme hybrid experimentation has only recently garnered attention. In 2015, Mg Roberts along
with Kelsey Street Press, an independent publisher of women and nonbinary poets, published
Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets, a short anthology of Asian American
women writers, the majority of whom are affiliated with experimental poetics. In this
groundbreaking anthology, Roberts identifies four pillar voices of avant garde Asian American
women writers: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, and Nellie Wong,
placing them in conversation with prominent Asian American women scholars and writers Sarah
Dowling, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Dorothy Wang, and Merle Woo who serve as interlocutors of the
former’s work. The structure of this anthology is a mirror of the book’s approach to its definition
14

of experimentation, which the introduction’s author Timothy Yu describes as “not a particular set
of formal techniques, but a willingness to regard all elements of a poem—political, contextual,
biographical, formal—as truly open.”
8
The openness with which Yu ascribes to the notion of
experimentation provides a portal to understanding where hybridity, a practice that is
experimental by nature, may factor into conversations about race and gender. If the experimental,
and thus the hybrid, is marked by the accumulation of all elements that include politics, context,
the writer’s life, and matters of form, then these are all tools at the disposal of Asian American
women and femmes working with hybrid experimentation as well.
The provocative argument that Nests and Strangers makes is one that aligns the issues of
race and gender in the writing of Asian American women and femmes with experimental poetics,
the ambition of pooling together the historical, the political, the tenuousness of aesthetic choice,
and its reflexivity. It is Roberts who poses this as a set of adjacent questions:

What does it mean to be an Asian American woman? What is an avant-garde Asian
American Poetic? The loop occurs, arising form “analogous explorations of language and
social location”—an index negotiating the boundaries of race and gender. Its locus is seen
in the works of Berssenbrugge, Wong, Kapil, and Kim, in gestural forms embodied by
the gross movements of language to express meaning. How can I say this? I’m thinking
of how sentences “are binding in terms of a system’s great churning,” of the ways in
which phonemes create nervous system entanglement: a syntax for injury.
9

Roberts’ description of the relationship between the identity of an Asian American woman and
Asian American experimental poetics turns towards the mechanics of the body, its ability to
make language and articulate its complex social embodiment. Her illustration of the “loop” and
the “entanglement” in particular, depict the circulatory and intertwined mechanisms of identity

8
Nests and Strangers, 5
9
Ibid, 93
15

and artistic experimentation, in which the movement of these parts continuously allow for these
writers to articulate their experiences. That she highlights the “syntax for injury” suggests that
the movement of these parts work in tandem to elucidate Asian American women’s experiences
with the pain of erasure.
What Nests and Strangers offers through this exploratory dive into Asian American
women and experimental poetics, is precisely this attention to the body, of language-making, and
how hybrid experimentation can become the most viable vehicle for Asian American women and
femme to investigate the terms of their personal history, the social politics of their (un)belonging,
and their relationship to the artistic rendering of the various parts of their identity. It should be
noted that while the discussion of these different anthologies of Asian American writing
highlights the term “Asian American women,” my purposeful inclusion of the term “femmes” is
reflective of more recent gender discourse in which our embracing of affinities can expand our
notion of collective or shared experiences. “Femme” was not an identity term available to editors
of these previous anthologies but for the sake of this project, it is used alongside “woman” to
emphasize the ongoing work of challenging the essentialization of womanhood and to recognize
the broad range of gender expressions embodied by nonbinary Asian American writers who do
not identify with the term “woman” but who feel that some of their concerns are shared and
should be necessarily intertwined with that of Asian American women.
The other contention that this project grapples with is the use of the term “Asian
American” as opposed to “Asian American and Pacific Islander.” The identity category that is
“Asian American and Pacific Islander” originated in the 1980s with the U.S. Census Bureau
grouping all identities of Asian ancestry under this banner, and it is not until 2000 when the two
were separated into “Asian Americans” and “Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders.” The
16

state sanctioning of these varied identity groups forced an alliance of disparate communities, all
of whom possessed varied histories of racialization and colonization. While there has been ample
coalitional work done around Asian American and Pacific Islander political organizing, it has
become critical to make those distinctions between our varied histories and experiences to
understand how the degrees of marginalization and representation differ.
Stephanie Nohelani Teves and Maile Arvin in their essay “Decolonizing API: Centering
Indigenous Pacific Islander Feminism” share that this distinction is important especially when it
comes to gendered experiences, noting that “[Pacific Islander women] issues differ considerably
because Pacific Islander representations and identities are relegated to a perceived and ahistorical
space of fantasy.”
10
That is, the history of sexualization and Orientalism experienced by Asian
women is one that will not map neatly onto that of Pacific Islander women, and the ascribing of a
collective set of Asian American and Pacific Islander women experiences must be done with care
and critical attention to these points of distinction.
Just as the work of compiling an anthology of voices representative of a community or
set of shared experiences goes, the terms we use and justification for how we ascribe affinity are
particularly loaded. It is why this project uses the framing of Asian American women and
femmes to denote a certain set of experiences, knowing that there will be those that do not fall
within that purview. While this framing does not include Pacific Islander women and femmes, it
is done so with the recognition that this other complex branch of history deserves its specific
time and place. Additionally, even without its inclusion, the very considerations of
decolonialization, indigeneity, and land/territory, issues that are particularly vital for Pacific

10
Stephanie Nohelani Teves and Maile Arvin, Asian American Women Feminisms and Women
of Color Politics, 110
17

Islander communities, are still part of, if not necessarily so, the fabric of Asian American
discourse.

Impassable Bodies

There is often great debate about how to situate hybrid experimentation in time, itself not
confined by any specific period or art movement. Its affiliation with experimental or avant garde
art suggests its origins in twentieth-century modernism, but as Asian American critics such as
Cathy Park Hong have offered, the avant garde is typically aligned with values of whiteness. In
Hong’s provocative essay “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant Garde,” she posits that “From
its early 20th century inception to some of its current strains, American avant-garde poetry has
been an overwhelmingly white enterprise, ignoring major swaths of innovators—namely poets
from past African American literary movements—whose prodigious writings have vitalized the
margins, challenged institutions, and introduced radical languages and forms that avant-gardists
have usurped without proper acknowledgment.”
11
Given what Hong dubs as its white inception,
avant garde or experimental art is regarded with suspicion—an artistic tradition that has
historically excluded artists of color and their innovations, extracting from them without due
credit. There is a distinction between the techniques, ideas, and the political grounding practiced
by experimental artists of color and the avant garde or experimental camp, and that distinction is
necessary for reclaiming the innovative properties behind the work of artists of color.
If we lean on Hong’s insistence of abandoning the avant garde in favor of isolating these
techniques, ideas, and political grounding of more experimental practices like hybridity as part of

11
Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” 248
18

something separate, then hybridity itself can have transhistorical properties. This enables a new
imagination towards what we might typically refer to as Asian American women and femme
hybrid writing beyond post-twentieth-century literature. In fact, this rearticulation of Asian
American women and femme hybrid writing invites us to think about how some of the earliest
Asian American women and femme writers have taken up the work of hybrid experimentation.
The nineteenth-century North Chinese American writer Edith Maude Eaton could be cast
in that light. Eaton, who published under the penname Siu Sin Far, has been noted as one of the
earliest Chinese North American women writers in the nineteenth century, known for her
nonfiction as well as fictional accounts of Chinese experiences in North America. These
accounts are particularly sympathetic towards Chinese women, which are infrequently heard of
during that time. Her writing was informed by her experiences as a woman of mixed-race
background—born to a white father and Chinese mother—who had been subjected to anti-
Chinese racism and xenophobia.
Recently, there has been renewed Asian American scholarly interest in Eaton’s work for
its ability to express complex sentiments about race and gender that were especially socially
radical for its time. While this scholarship has focused primarily on the content of her portrayals
of race and gender as a mixed-race North Chinese American woman, there are rich similarities
between the formal techniques she utilizes between her nonfiction and fiction writing that
suggest the interplay between biography, historical and social commentary, and complex
characterization across genres. This interplay emerged from not only an aesthetic imperative but
one informed by limited representations of her racial and gender background in both the field of
nonfiction and fiction, such that the aesthetic and political explorations in both realms would
inevitably color the other.
19

It is interesting to apply the notion of hybridity retroactively to the work of Edith Maude
Eaton whose writing is typically affiliated with more realist and formal traditions. Yet, given the
racialized and gendered implications of how artistic and literary movements have been
characterized over time, mining Eaton’s work for its hybrid properties allows for a more nuanced
approach to her work and to situate it within a different historical and literary trajectory. In this
case, to position Eaton as one of the earliest Asian American women to occupy the practice of
hybridity in her writing is to suggest that hybrid experimentation can be defined by artmaking in
the face of aesthetic and social constraints, both of which she confronted.
Beginning her career as a journalist, Eaton’s knack for descriptive details of people and
their internal world was a natural output of her trade. That she took special consideration to
examine the racial and gender dynamics of each scene made her gradual transition to fiction one
that not only demonstrates knowledge of storytelling but also expressive of her keen social
observation. In fact, in her short memoir, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of An Eurasian, she
recounts an instance in which her role as a teller of stories has been cemented. She recalls
overhearing a conversation in which the word “Chinese” was being used to talk about her parents
and being a young child without any understanding of her mixed-race identity, had rushed to tell
her mother what she heard. It was when she “fail[ed] to make [herself] intelligible” that a
caretaker told her mother, “Little Miss Sui is a story-teller,”
12
eliciting a slap from her
disappointed parent. The role of “story-teller” is conflated with one that tells lies or is unreliable
in her mode of relaying the truth, a source of initial confusion for Eaton who eventually turned
the notion of storytelling into one that illuminated underrepresented issues of Chinese American
life in both her nonfiction and fiction.

12
Sui Sin Far, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of An Eurasian
20

This desire to be a storyteller, one who can elucidate the different cultural worlds that she
straddles, is evident through the autobiographical content that makes its way through her works
of fiction and nonfiction. Oftentimes, in her fiction, her characters are obvious extensions of
herself. For instance, in her seminal short story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the titular
character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance bears a strong resemblance to Eaton as the moral core of
several short stories, facilitating relationships between various characters as they navigate the
trials of familial obligation and individual freedom, love and adherence to socially normative
values. These trials are representative of larger cultural tensions between what she frames as
Western and Eastern values, even as they play out between white characters. Mrs. Spring
Fragrance, a Chinese woman betrothed to a Chinese man in the U.S., becomes the inadvertent
go-between for characters maneuvering what she perceives as values that emblematize the
changing of times, the possibility of imminent blending of different cultural expectations.
In the story “The Inferior Woman,” these trials play out in a love triangle between a
young man named Will Carman and two women, each nicknamed the Superior Woman (Miss
Evebrook) and Inferior Woman (Alice Winthrop). Will’s mother disapproves of the Inferior
Woman, someone who did not come from inherited wealth but who has made tremendous strives
for herself as a law clerk, preferring the Superior Woman to her. This ails Will greatly, such that
he seeks the advice of Mrs. Spring Fragrance who offers the following anecdote:

“When I first came to America,” returned Mrs. Spring Fragrance, “my husband desired
me to wear the American dress. I protested and declared that never would I so appear.
But one day he brought home a gown fit for a fairy, and ever since then I have worn and
adored the American dress.”
13

13
Siu Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, 15
21

What Mrs. Spring Fragrance offers in this anecdote is the assurance that stuck values are allowed
to change over time. The example she gives is not so much an instance of compulsory
assimilation but an act of participating in American life that is freely chosen. It is also an
indication of her American influence that has granted her more flexibility in accepting the
different cultural attributes that she now embodies.
Mrs. Spring Fragrance, much like Eaton, was also impacted by the Suffrage Movement
and the growing conversations about women’s political rights. In an instance where the Superior
Woman’s mother speaks ill of the Inferior Woman, the Superior Woman steps in to challenge
her, expressing solidarity with the other woman, an attitude that is very much influenced by Mrs.
Spring Fragrance. To her mother, the Superior Woman says in defense of the other, “It is women
such as Alice Winthrop who, in spite of every drawback, have raised themselves to the level of
those who have had every advantage, who are the pride and glory of America.”
14
The Superior
Woman points out her mother’s hypocrisy as someone who attends Suffragette meetings but who
fail to examine the ways in which the values of women’s equality factor outside of the public
space. Her argument too upholds Eaton’s sensibility about the increased presence of Chinese
people in North America, that they should be offered the chance to raise their social and
economic status. The solidarity between women portrayed in this instance reifies Eaton’s dual
identity as a Chinese person and a woman, that the values of equality and fairness should be
afforded to those marginalized.
While current Asian Americanist discourse is beginning to stray from social mobility as
the political end goal for Asians, Eaton’s portrayal of race, gender, and economic opportunities
depicts a radical view of intersectional identities during the nineteenth century of which such a

14
Ibid, 21
22

concept was not readily made available. The complexity with which the writer regards Chinese
women is especially exemplified through her sympathetic portrayals of them in Mrs. Spring
Fragrance. In “Its Wavering Image,” the mixed Chinese and white female character of Pan
becomes the unwitting victim to white journalist Mark Carson who seduces her into guiding him
through her Chinatown community, granting him access that many white people could not have
alone. In turn, he publishes an exploitative piece about her community, causing her Chinese kin
to be extremely disappointed in her. To add insult to injury, Mark’s ignorance continues to show
through after he pursues her once more after the piece is published, insisting for the second time
that she is white and not Chinese, “You are a white woman—white. Did your kiss not promise
me that?” Pan’s response is a reflection of Eaton’s alliance with her Chinese identity as she
retorts, “I would not be a white woman for all the world.”
15

Eaton’s allegiance to the experiences of Chinese women also places her in solidarity with
other marginalized people, having borne the racial and gender violence in her own life, which
instilled in her a sense of justice. In an instance in her short memoir that parallels the story of “Its
Wavering Image,” she recounts a memory in which a group of young children gathered around
her and her brother to beat them up for being Chinese. Rather than recoil from shame, she turned
fiery in response, screaming, “I’d rather be Chinese than anything in the world.”
16
This devotion
to racial justice marks a moment of triumph for Eaton who had recounted many moments in her
childhood in which her mixed-race background received little sympathy from people around her,
even her own parents. While her writing could easily have advocated for the split identities that
had constituted so much of her lived experience, her allegiance to her Chinese identity exhibits a

15
Ibid, 54
16
Siu Sin Far, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of An Eurasian
23

strong political conscience about the racial taxonomy of her time. Rather than tout a binary take
on her racial identity, she chooses instead to name white supremacy in action and the ways in
which her occasional passing as white could make her complicit in racial violence.
The warning of this complicity is showcased in Eaton’s short story, “The Wisdom of the
New,” which follows the tribulations of Wou Sankwei, a Chinese man who had done well for
himself in the U.S. and is finally able to bring his wife Pau Lin to the States from China. This is a
circumstance that Mrs. Dean and her niece Adah Charlton, two women who had supported Wou
Sankwei throughout his journey in the U.S., are wholly supportive of. However, Pau Lin’s
arrival consists of a series of cultural shocks, one of which is her realization that men and women
in the U.S. can have close amicable friendships with each other without romantic intent,
something which in her more traditional upbringing would be regarded with suspicion. This
especially becomes an issue with Wou Sankwei’s friendship with Adah Charlton who does not
seem to understand how cultural differences would factor into Pau Lin’s ability to acclimate to
the U.S. Regardless of her well intentions, Adah Charlton’s repeated attempts to ingratiate
herself to the family, including painting a small portrait of the Chinese parents’ son, only served
to provoke Pau Lin’s ire. That the painting was discovered at the same time that Pau Lin had
given birth to a stillborn child only added further proof towards her suspicion of Adah Charlton.
As the tensions continue to unfold between the Chinese family and the white women,
Mrs. Dean and Adah Charlton speculate about the opposition that Pau Lin feels towards
American customs. Pau Lin refuses to allow her first-born son to speak English in front of her
and is against the idea of him going to an English-speaking American school, which Wou
Sankwei disputes. The strain of assimilation does not factor into either Mrs. Dean or Adah
Charlton’s imagination of the Chinese family’s lives despite their relationship to Wou Sankwei
24

for the past several years. When Mrs. Dean insists in a private conversation with Adah Charlton
that she does not understand Pau Lin’s lack of gratitude for all that her husband has provided for
her in the U.S., her niece replies:

“Everything that a Chinese woman could wish for, you say, Auntie, I do not believe there
is any real difference between the feelings of a Chinese wife and an American wife.
Sankwei is treating Pau Lin as he would treat her were he living in China. Yet it cannot
be the same to her as if she were in their own country, where he would not come in
contact with American women. A woman is a woman with intuitions and perceptions,
whether Chinese or American, whether educated or uneducated, and Sankwei’s wife must
have noticed, even on the day of her arrival, her husband’s manner towards us, and
contrasted it with his manner towards her. I did not realize this before you told me that
she was jealous. I only wish I had. Now, for all her ignorance, I can see that the poor little
thing became more of an American in that one half hour on the steamer than Wou
Sankwei, for all your pride in him, has become in seven years.”
17

While Adah Charlton offers her sympathies towards Pau Lin, expressing that she “do[es] not
believe there is any difference between the feelings of a Chinese wife and an American wife,”
her perspective still carries the weight of a white-centered and American specific view of Pau
Lin’s circumstances. Patronizingly too, she refers to Pau Lin’s “ignorance” and as a “poor little
thing” whose conditions are inscrutable to the experiences of white American women. Mrs. Dean
and Adah Charlton can only apply their lens as white women to understanding Pau Lin’s
feelings, but the Chinese woman’s emotions are far more complex and culturally informed by
not just her Chinese upbringing but her immigration experience as well. This instance, alongside
others, mark the limits of white women’s sympathies towards the experiences of Chinese
women.
Eaton’s own experiences as a mixed-race woman also frequently places her in such a
cultural bind, one that she admits to navigating the in-between spaces. In her memoir, she

17
Siu Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, 40
25

recounts a memory of a dinner party with a former employer Mr. K who prompts a discussion
about the differences between the Japanese and Chinese people, remarking that the former are
“bright and remarkable” in contrast to the latter of whom he is of the following opinion: “I
cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are human like ourselves.”
18
In a moment
of self-protection, she remains silent until she is prompted to speak on the matter. Carefully, she
informs the dinner party that "the Chinese people may have no souls, no expression on their
faces, be altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want you to
understand that I am—I am a Chinese.”
19
In a moment of forced self-representation, she has to
reconcile her ability to pass as a white woman with her reality, and can only respond within the
social constraints of her setting. Yet her response also addresses a dissonance that she feels
within herself, of at once being Chinese while also recognizing that she has the option to not
claim it and remain within the social graces of people who harbor such sentiments against her
people.
The toggling between her various identities that Eaton explores in her fiction and
nonfiction work emblematize the very impulse to assemble the disparate parts of oneself that is
not afforded the social and political space to do so given the context of one’s writing. By
situating Eaton as one of the earlier predecessors of Asian American women and femme hybrid
writing, we see where the political grounding of hybridity exists, which is its reflection in the
content as well as the crossing genre impulse of one’s work. In Eaton’s case, the limited
representations of writing about and by Chinese American women informed her traversal of
fiction and nonfiction and the constant transference of each genre’s characteristics onto the other.

18
Siu Sin Far, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of An Eurasian
19
Ibid
26

Writing the (Eternal) Body

If Eaton’s traversal of genres and multiple cultural vantage points indicate an early
introduction into hybridity, then its aesthetic and political currency had certainly commuted
throughout the next centuries. While hybrid experimental projects by Asian American women
and femmes are not typically formally recognized until the 1980s, placing Eaton at the helm of
this practice allows for us to imagine how the concept of hybridity can be applied retroactively
and create a resuscitative reading of earlier literature for their radical potential. For one, the
multiplicity of identities that Eaton explored in her fiction and nonfiction is certainly one that
continues into the intersectional politics of identity today. This idea of multiplicity is certainly
one that grounds the work of Vietnamese American feminist and postcolonial studies scholar and
multimedia artist Trinh T. Minh-ha whose groundbreaking Woman, Native, Other has become
one of the most cited works of autotheory.
According to Lauren Fournier in Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and
Criticism, autotheory implies a hybrid medium given its blending of autobiography with critical
theory and research. She defines autotheory as “transmedial, taking shape across forms—from
the personal essay, new journalism, and creative nonfiction to the expanded field of art writing
and criticism, confessional feminist memes and performance for the camera, and film and
television,” characterizing work that “exceed existing genre categories and disciplinary bounds,
that flourish in the liminal spaces between categories, that reveal the entanglement of research
and creation, and that fuse seemingly disparate modes to fresh effects.”
20
Fournier’s definition
emphasizes not just autotheory’s hybridity in written form but as something conveyed across
media, genres, and forms, with a reference to feminist memes to suggest that the platforms that

20
Fournier, Lauren, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, 2
27

autotheory can embody, especially in the digital realm, are constantly evolving. Given this
expansive definition, Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other is a prime example of literature that
carries imprints of the scholar and artist’s multimedia practice as it draws from multiple sources
of research and artmaking, which includes autobiography, myths and stories, ethnographic
writing, critical theory, film analysis, and more. This “entanglement of research and creation”
yields precisely what Fournier describes as “fresh effects,” the production of something new by
nature of its technical layering.
For Minh-ha, autotheory is not only a feminist practice but also an anticolonial one. In
Woman, Native, Other, she argues that for women of color in particular, writing is an embodied
practice that actively defies patriarchal and colonial authority. Specifically, she posits that
writing is an act of constant navigation of openness and enclosures, of writing in response to and
despite the boundaries of racial and gender expectations in an act she calls the “Gathering [of]
the fragments of a divided, repressed body and reaching out to the other[…]”
21
In other words,
writing as a project of assemblage to bring together the disparate parts of one’s identity, divided
through social limitations, but cohering momentarily through recognition of shared experiences
with other women of color. This act involves the body, something which Minh-ha describes with
great physical detail:

Touch me and let me touch you, for the private is political. Language wavers with desire.
It is “the language of my entrails,” a skin with which I caress and feel the other, a body
capable of receiving as well as giving: nurturing and procreating. Let it enter and let it go;
writing myself into existence also means emptying myself of all that I can empty out—all
that constitutes Old Spontaneous/Premeditated Me— without ceasing from being.
22

21
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native Other, 37
22
Ibid
28

The language of the body here is not incidental. Minh-ha’s frequent use of poetic language
interspersed throughout ethnographic writing infuses a bodily tactility to the act of writing. In
portraying the feminist idea of “the private is political,” she leans into the sensuality of body and
language, what she calls “the language of my entrails.” This form of “writing the body” refers
not just to the physicality of the body but its guttural instincts, its ability to perform feminine
care.
While the act of writing the body is not excluded from male writers, Minh-ha articulates
the difference between feminized writing and that performed by men as one of proximity versus
embodiment. She states that men approach writing the body as “writing closer to the body,”
often making a sharp distinction between the physicality of the body and the social conditions
that inform this body. However, feminized writing does not make any distinction. In fact, writing
the body as embodied practice is compulsory, by Minh-ha’s depiction, by sheer manner of living
as a feminized body, the distinction between writing, being in one’s body, and understanding the
world through a body that is constantly charged by its social environment.
If writing the body is a feminized practice, that the same can be applied to the notion of
hybrid writing, which sees to it that the lines between assorted genres, media, and forms that
make up the art object are blurred. To dissect the hybrid object, or delineate its parts, would be as
impossible a task as separating writing from the body, feminized experiences from the social
circumstances that inform them. Hybridity, in fact, has the power to critique the naturalization of
social categories in the way it draws attention to questions of what constitutes the separation of
genre, media, and form. When it comes to fusing theory with other genres such as poetry or
autobiography, it turns our attention to how language too has been naturalized in such a way that
the framing of the world has rested on male dominated narratives. Minh-ha argues that it is
29

worthwhile to consider how theory can be lifted from the determination of men and revived for
what it is at its core, which is a means of meaning-making, a tool that is not unlike language or
art. She writes:

If it is quite current today to state that language functions according to principles that are
not necessarily (like) those of the phenomenal world, it is still unusual to encounter
instances where theory involved the voiding, rather than the affirming or even reiterating,
of theoretical categories[…] instances where the borderline between theoretical and non-
theoretical writings is blurred and questioned so that theory and poetry necessarily mesh,
both determined by an awareness of the sign and the destabilization of the meaning and
writing subject. To be lost, to encounter impasse, to fall, and to desire both fall and
impasse—isn’t this what happens to the body in theory?
23

In this poetic depiction of “the body in theory,” Minh-ha paints a portrait of hybrid genre as a
movement between knowing and the unknown, destabilization and creation of new meaning.
Hybridity, she posits, not only highlights the role of power in determination of meaning, but it
also uproots it. If women and femmes are behind the wheel of hybrid experimentation, especially
in engagement with theory and other blended forms, then it is an entry into another world of
meaning-making outside of male-dominated narratives.
This attention to the body, feminized writing, and hybridity makes up the multiplicity of
meanings that hybrid experimental artists like Minh-ha embrace. If the world’s patriarchal and
colonial authority restricts meaning-making to singular areas of knowledge, then multiplicity
offers different channels of knowing that are not limited to the artistic or literary canon but the
influences of which are dispersed. The dispersal of knowledge, which encompasses bodily and
lived experiences as much as researched information, is a labor of historical solidarity, piercing
through the veils of time. If the voices of Asian American women and femmes have been

23
Ibid, 42
30

historically omitted from past narratives, then hybrid writing extends many arms across time and
place, forging affinities with other women and femmes of color in this traversal. Minh-ha refers
to this writing as “a commitment of language,” one which “denotes a historical solidarity (with
the understanding that her story remains inseparable from history).”
24
In other words, a promise
of continual political labor, of constructing new stories that disrupt dominant narratives—a
perpetual process of restructuring and rewriting that sees no end.
This continuity marks a powerful conclusion to Woman, Native, Other, which ends with
the poem “A Bedtime Story” (from Camp Notes) by Japanese American writer Mitsuye Yamada
rather than Minh-ha’s own words. In the narrative poem, the speaker’s father tells her an old
folktale about an elderly woman who goes to door to door in a rural village, seeking housing for
the night but is denied repeatedly. At the end of the folktale, the woman does not find housing
but sees instead the full moon under a clear sky and expresses aloud her gratitude that had she
not been turned away from all the houses, she would not have seen the glorious natural sight
before her. At the conclusion of the poem, the speaker is surprised by the seemingly
anticlimactic nature of the story, exclaiming, “That’s the END?”
25
In this humorous and
bittersweet final moment, the speaker’s exclamation reveals her naïve unawareness of how the
folktale’s message parallels the scene of her own home, alluding though that at some point in her
coming of age, she will grow to recognize that possibility can flourish from life’s limitations. If
the traditional story structure imposes a binary of victory or loss, then the inconclusiveness of
this tale is a lesson that Minh-ha chooses to impart too, demonstrating this by relinquishing her

24
Ibid, 79
25
Ibid, 151
31

own words to another Asian American woman, an act of solidarity in of itself.

Diseuse, A Hybrid Afterlife

In 2018, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) hosted a
posthumous solo exhibition of Korean American artist, filmmaker, and writer Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha’s multimedia work with a special focus on her experimental text Dictée, a hybrid
poetic memoir blending myth and historical account as it moves through Cha’s personal history
as well as that of Japanese colonization of Korea and the Korean War. The genre-defying work
gained prominence particularly after Cha’s violent death when she was raped and murdered in
New York. At the same time that Cha became increasingly associated with Asian American
women and the avant garde, of producing work that engages with personal identity and larger
social and political history, the circumstances of her death were ironically left out of most
criticism surrounding her work. This omission seems to emblematize a familiar tension in art and
literature in which the discussion of aesthetic innovation often seems at odds with personal
biography, especially where Asian American women and femme artists are concerned. That
Cha’s death is an act of racial and gender violence too seems to make the matter difficult to
engage with in discussions of her work. This was the case with her solo exhibition at BAMPFA,
organized by curator Stephanie Cannizzo, which was thoughtfully structured around the nine
Greek muses that appear in Dictée, but which mostly elided how her identity as a Korean
American woman factored into her art, and most certainly did not touch upon the circumstances
of her death.
This omission came as a surprise to me as I made my way through the BAMPFA
exhibition, moved by eclectic displays of Cha’s larger body of work, but also emptied by the
32

sterility of the space. Years after Cha’s passing, I had believed that the theory and praxis of
women of color feminism alongside developments in conversations about aesthetics would
inform the blending of these approaches to her work, but it seemed that despite these
progressions, art and literary critics continue to struggle to reconcile both. As such, Cha’s death
floats in the ether, regarded with emotional distance, a silence that Cathy Park Hong in Minor
Feelings notes as particularly weighted:

But where does the silence that neglects [Theresa Hak Kyung Cha] end, and where does
the silence that respects her begin? The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and
say why it’s silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our
intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame,
and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.
26

If the silence surrounding the violence against Asian American women and femmes of these
recent years have been any indication, then certainly the lingering silence surrounding Cha’s
death signals the persistent difficulty in speaking about the racial and gender dimensions of her
life and work. Hong’s description of the amplifying silence aptly gestures to the ways in which
the avoidance of the details regarding Cha’s rape and murder, regardless of critics’ intentions,
have the unintended effect of perpetuating very racial and gender violence that intimately
impacts Asian American women and femmes.
Hong’s criticism also points to the ways in which engagement with Cha’s work seems to
always serve an academic purpose rather than provide the sensorial transformation that the
textures of her work command. Thus, this exploration of her hybrid experimentation looks not
just at the technical execution of her traversal of genres in Dictée, but of the afterlife of the book
and her authorial presence, which seems to foreshadow imminent violence while also noting the

26
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings, 164-5
33

will to persist beyond the label of silent victimhood. In recalling Cha’s contemporary, Trinh T.
Minh-ha’s reflections on “writing the body,” the work of hybridity by Asian American women
and femmes that blends autobiography with ethnographic research and other engagement with
social and political critique, already connotes a historical solidarity. In other words, by situating
Dictée in the realm of other hybrid texts by Asian American women and femmes, we see echoes
of a deep and intimate historical and social connection, and that reverberation carries Cha’s life
and death, her larger authorial story, into the decades to come.
It is the history of enmeshment that factors into the afterlife of Cha and the feminist and
anti-imperialist politics of her work. The history that Cha explores in Dictée is centered around
the relationship between several nations that came about as a product of imperialism—the U.S.,
North and South Korea, and Japan—and the residual impact this force has had on language,
identity, and the understanding of one’s place in the world. For Cha, this involves not only her
familial history, which includes the recurring figure of her mother Hyun Soon Huo, but also that
of the Korean March 1
st
Demonstration led by activists against Japanese occupation of Korea and
the presence of Yu Guan Soon who was one of the organizers of the protest. In Dictée, Cha’s
weaving together of these assorted national narratives portrays an intricate web of colonial
relations, one in which Japanese occupation of Korea was first spurred on by Japan’s own
experiences with Western imperialism. Cha’s depiction of her immigration experiences to the
U.S. is also a primary part of Dictée also illustrates how the interlocking forces of Western and
Eastern imperialism and colonialism had led her to immigrate to the U.S., the violent intimacies
of these political points of contact.
While this webbed political history presides over the book, it is Cha’s perpetual return to
the visceral experiences of these forces that allow for points of intimate connection through
34

which their impact resounds most clearly. Dictée opens with French translation lessons that
center upon corrective grammar and gradually allows these lessons to devolve into scattered
utterances throughout the text. In an opening passage, Cha’s speaker is instructed to translate
several sentences from English to French:

1. I want you to speak
2. I wanted him to speak.
3. I shall want you to speak.
4. Are you afraid he will speak?
5. Were you afraid they would speak?
6. It will be better for him to speak to us.
7. Was it necessary for you to write?
8. Wait till I write.
9. Why didn’t you wait so that I could write you?
27

In this translation exercise, the verb “to speak” is emphasized and applied with grammatical
scrutiny. Like many grammatical exercises, the syntactical ordering of subject and object through
the subject’s action is being done to them marks a power dynamic that Cha indicates through
these series of sentences centering speech. The sentence contents move from instructions
towards speech to the topic of fear before concluding with the permission to write. The
progression of these directives indicates the linked notions of speech commands, fear of
authority, and the ability to write freely. In each of these sentences, speaking and writing are
carefully monitored. By the last two sentences, it appears that the sentiments are positioned such
that no matter what the writer does, she will always be wrong. An authority figure places an
impossible contradiction upon the writer in which she is instructed to “Wait till I write” but in
order to complete the translations, she must proceed ahead, ultimately defying the instructive

27
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, 8-9
35

figure who already anticipates this failure. This reprimand is intended to instill order. In fact, the
reiteration of these ideas from English to French ensures that every language that Cha’s speaker
communicates in will be accompanied by this naturalization of linguistic and social authority
presiding over her body.
Despite the establishment of this social and linguistic order, Cha’s Dictée is determined
to further complicate the linked connection between speech, writing, and authority. She does this
by scrambling what we understand as linear time and national belonging, turning time and space
into a cosmological question that women and femmes are able to reconceptualize to disrupt male
dominated narratives of history. Rather than rationalize speech and writing practices that may
play in her favor, she abandons modern logic altogether in favor of utterances, which names a
third space between speech and non-speech. In the opening of the section named after a fictional
muse “ELITERE” (based on the Greek muse Euterpe) whose gift is “LYRIC POETRY,” a black
and white image of the March 1
st
Demonstration accompanies a prose poem that describes how
vocal utterance can reverberate through time and history:

Dead time. Hollow depression interred invalid
to resurgence, resistant to memory. Waits. Apel.
appellation. Excavation. Let the one who is
diseuse. Diseuse de bonne aventure. Let her call
forth. Let her break open the spell cast upon time
upon time again and again. With her voice,
penetrate earth’s floor, the walls of Tartaurus to
circle and scratch the bowl’s surface. Let the
sound enter from without, the bowl’s hollow its
sleep. Until.
28

28
Ibid, 123
36

The opening prose poem utilizes a series of imperatives (“Let”) to describe an upending of time
and space. Next to the image of women at the March 1
st
Demonstration, the prose poem takes on
the power of the message of speaking against erasure of one’s racialized and gendered
experiences through imperialism and colonization. However, it is not speech in the conventional
sense that the prose poem seems to advocate for but a desire to break through historical silence.
Thus, the poem calls for utterance, the making of a prescient sound, one that can disrupt the
oppressive forces at play and alter the circumstances of one’s subjugation.

It is also a poem that eerily refers to “Dead time,” a reference to historical erasure but
also foreboding in its reverberations through the circumstances of Cha’s death. Yet the call to
utterance, an “Excavation” of historical memory, is a collective call to challenge the authority of
those who typically narrate political history, which can aptly apply to the literary and social
dissonance between Cha’s work and her death. If we heed this call, then perhaps what we need to
listen to is not for the precision of language but a more visceral message. Cha’s plea for the
destruction of the walls of Tartaurus, the underworld, may as well be a call to relinquish the
memory of her from that which is merely suffering or its absence. The poem’s final word “Until”
punctuated with a period, makes it a fragment that also distills the continuity of this utterance,
the perpetual work of figuring what lies between Cha’s life and her afterlife from within the
cross-sections of history that preside over Dictée.
Cha’s utterances shine a light on the fragmentation of the body within Dictée, at times
describing the movement of a throat, and others, a more guttural illustration of the body. This
fragmentation mirrors the assemblage of disparate genres and forms that comprise the book, for
the purpose of creating an elusive authority that would not reify the historical tyranny that Cha
critiques. Cha’s defiance of this historical tyranny is embodied through her subversion of
37

translation practices, namely the French language when opens Dictée in the form of dictation
lessons. The act of translation is a notably corrective one, intended to assert authority over the
speaker through the process of repetition, or the body through practiced refrain. When the
translation takes place again following the speaker’s description of having her blood drawn at a
medical doctor’s office, a procedure that accompanies other tests and vaccinations upon arrival
to the U.S., Cha usurps the corrective purpose of translation to depict a struggle for bodily and
linguistic agency:

Bite the tongue. Between the teeth. Swallow
Deep. Deeper. Swallow. Again, even more.
Until there would be no more organ.

[…]

No organ. Anymore.
Cries.

Bit by bit. Commas, periods, the
Pauses. Before and after.
After having been. All.
Before having been.

Phrases silent
Paragraphs silent
Pages and pages a little nearer
To movement
Line
After life
Void to the left to the right.
Void the words.
Void the silence.
29

In defiance of the typical instructions given to patients in a doctor’s office, Cha’s command to
bite her own tongue for the purposes of swallowing her own body demonstrates an act of self-

29
Ibid, 71-73

38

annihilation that would prevent any further cooptation of her body and language. The extremity
of this act is gradual, just as assimilation of language and cultural normative values often forces
this slow correction of the body and selfhood. Cha points to the devastation of this loss of
language, the impact it has on her writing and speech, and yet, this passage is also a justification
for the fragmentation of the text within Dictée. It is a destruction of the preciousness of language,
a deliberate break from the mirroring act of translation, such that the process becomes an echo of
an attempt to move the body away from authoritative control. The doubling effect of the final
two lines of this passage, which utilizes the refrain of “Void,” reflects this duality of social
defiance and self-annihilation. In this extreme motion of voiding the words on the page, she is
also voiding the notion of silence that purportedly remains, leaving behind the residue of this
destructive act. The irony of this brutality is that it also becomes an act of creation, the
production of another option beyond speech or silence, an alternative that is not state sanctioned
but generated through the imperative to renew oneself.
Cha’s grappling with the dilemma of life, death, and assertion of personal agency is also
an extension with racialized bodies’ relationship to the modern mechanisms of biopower, the
state authorized management of a life. The experience of immigration, of passing through
national borders, compels state oversight over the immigrant’s bodily health, and yet, the forces
of racist and xenophobic practices simultaneously operate against these virtues. The constant
straddling of the state compulsion to manage life and death leads Cha to the ultimate self-
destructive act in which body, writing, and speech are decimated in the effort to locate what lies
beyond authoritative control. Its extremity is only a reflection of the violence that underlies the
mechanisms of biopower, which Rachel C. Lee in The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America refers
39

to as its “tenacity, efficacy, and perverse logic”
30
such that even the ways in which its modern
form has shaped racial taxonomies at the turn of the twenty-first century proves its persistent
rhetoric. Lee’s argument for the abandonment of modernist biopower in the effort to explore “a
planetary commons of entangled biological life”
31
and “to consider other political directives of
artistic endeavor not commensurate with returning the part (particularized marked subject of
difference) to the whole (the nationally recognized subject of rights),”
32
seems to illustrate in
cosmological terms, the very necessary destructive and creative force behind Cha’s approach to
language and the body. Cha’s attention to speech acts is very much rooted in the body, how it
produces sound and meaning, always in recognition of the biological processes of muscle
movement and guttural exchange in relation to the various bodies that have filtered through
history, oppressors and agitators, mothers and other women activists alike. Cha’s pooling of
these various figures belies the preciousness of historical representation, a challenge to a system
of positioning knowledge of not just history but also her role as an artist within a preordained
historical narrative.
Cha’s material relationship to history also makes her an unreliable speaker as someone
who eschews conventional narratives. Throughout Dictée, she appears to misrepresent
information from the proper name of all nine Greek muses to the accuracy of historical
documentation. Yet, this misrepresentation gestures to the primacy of authenticity and fact, the
terms of which have always been dictated by Western and white men. The conflation of Cha’s
embodied truth and fictionalizing of history is part of the contradictory and contrarian approach
to hybridity that scholar Lisa Lowe describes in Immigrant Acts:

30
Rachel C. Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America, 46
31
Ibid, 65
32
Ibid, 52
40

If one of the aims of literary representation, with its premise of mimetic correspondence
between the name and the thing, is to provide a fiction of reconciliation that resolves the
material contradictions of differentiation in and between spheres other than the literary,
Dictée suggests that every representation claiming such correspondence must bear
anxious traces of the fundamental conditions of unmimetic irresolution. In its
discontinuity, fragmentation, and episodic unfluency, Dictée attests to such irresolution,
and its aesthetic of infidelity not only prompts the revelation of differences beneath the
claim to verisimilitude, returns us, as readers, to the material contradictions of a lived
political life.
33

Lowe argues that Dictée’s refusal to provide a reconciliation of history through the irresolution
of its multiple genres and forms depicts the very contentions we as readers experience through
our respective political negotiations through national (un)belonging, language, and identity. It is
a disruption of the conventional way we have been trained to engage with literature as an
extension of representation of history. The “aesthetic of infidelity” that Cha embraces is what
drives her hybrid artistic practice, which sees the trappings of the mimetic impulse, to represent
subjective viewpoints of history in a singular vein. Rather than offer her own narrative as a
corrective gesture to views that may seek to overwrite her own experiences, she abandons any
notion of cohesion or continuity in Dictée, determining that these same tools used by the
authority of the state and other powers will never be sufficient in truly capturing her complicated
material reality, which means that they will also fail to serve the embodied experiences of other
Asian American women and femmes as well.
Cha’s hybrid poetics can more accurately be described as a poetics of imprecision, of
gesturing always to the afterlife of historical and linguistic impressions, knowing that in any
description of an action in real time, the action would have already passed. This knowledge of
decay and passing is not necessarily a form of despair but one of acceptance. Near the end of

33
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 152
41

Dictée, she writes, “If [time] should impress, make fossil trace of word,/ residue of word, stand
as a ruin stands,/ simply, as mark/ having relinquished itself to time to distance.” In this poetic
description of the passage of time, Cha acknowledges that language can create artifacts of
experiences, but even so, these artifacts are ruins, which will imminently decay. The acceptance
in the form of relinquishing language to time and distance is a foretelling of the book’s lingering
impact.
Given the many scholarly writings about Cha’s Dictée, every discussion of her work
seems to run the risk of deifying her in her afterlife, but what I hope to exhibit here is the way
her hybrid poetics had transformed the way we talk about autobiography and ethnography,
personal and historical memory, the artist life and death and her art. In Dictée, we see
reverberations of how these various aspects of genre, autobiography, and political considerations
are intertwined, made urgent by the constant specter of imminent violence towards Asian
American women and femmes. These days, I have been thinking a lot about Cha’s diseuse, the
concept of women as tellers of stories, wielders of narratives of social and political fates, which
she frequently references throughout the book. The diseuse is a gendered performer who operates
in between spaces, namely “She who waits inside the pause.”
34
She is not a passive reciter but
one who has figured out the grammatical order of her universe and is figuring out how to
intervene. Towards the end of the opening section titled “DISEUSE,” Cha writes:

Begins imperceptibly, near-perceptible. (Just once.
Just one time and it will take.) She takes. She takes
the pause. Slowly. From the thick. The thickness.
From weighted motion upwards. Slowed. To deliber-
ation even when it passed upward through her mouth
again. The delivery. She takes it. Slow. The invoke-

34
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, 4
42

ing. All the time now. All the time there is. Always.
and all times. The pause. Uttering. Hers now. Hers
bare. The utter.
35

In this slow and tortuous process in which Cha’s speaker is forcibly navigating the recitation
process of someone else’s words, there is also a gradual recognition of an opening through which
she no longer has to remain a passive participant in speech acts. The body’s movement towards
speech is examined with such deep attention in order to determine that moment of resolve in
which the speaker’s realization that the pause holds the promise of something that might alter the
constraints around her condition. The noise that comes out is an utterance, one that transforms
the silence of the pause into an occasion that is “Hers now.” In other words, the performance of
her body alone, regardless of its circumscription under the authority of social constraints,
discovers its freedom by merely uttering.
Perhaps the opening and concluding utterances of Dictée portray a less-than-glamorous
view of hybrid texts that exact a more overt view of aesthetic and political resistance, yet Cha’s
utterances anchor a text of disparate genres and forms, revealing its power through is ability to
resurface time and time again. The utterance, through Cha’s perspective, is not restricted to her
speaker alone, but is an act that all Asian American women and femmes have the capability of
doing. It is a wish to offer all of us that same moment of reckoning, that we too may find
possibility in the pause.

35
Ibid, 5
43

The Hybrid Wild

Just as Trinh T. Minh-ha and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s works have challenged the
authority behind ethnography, Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal disrupts traditional ethnographic
practices through its hybrid blend of anthropological research, autobiography, poetry, and
fiction, even at times adapting the index as a form of enumerating colonial “facts.” Writing about
the story of Kamala and Amala, two girls who had been found living with wolves in Bengal,
India in 1920, Kapil draws on the source text that is the diary of Indian missionary Reverent
Joseph Singh who chronicled the discovery of the sisters and their development in the time after.
The story of Kamala and Amala has been sensationalized throughout history, some even
claiming it to be a hoax. Yet, the hybrid undertaking of this story by Kapil is an attempt to
redress this history, engaging with the speculation of its fictional or realistic account.
The source text, whose accuracy remains debated up to this very day, is also one that
Kapil reads for its colonial allegory. Singh’s records depict the days following the lifting of
Kamala and Amala from a wolf’s den where they were forced to acclimate to a life with other
human adults and children. This, they refused adamantly, responding by “opening their jaws,
showing their teeth, and at times making for them with a peculiar harsh noise.”
36
According to
Singh’s diary, the girls’ feral upbringing by wild animals had colored their behaviors and
mannerisms, remarked upon with the same language of primitivity and civilization that is
familiar taxonomy to colonial encounters with indigenous people or people of color in non-
Western territories. The details about their day-to-day lives following their discovery by humans

36
Joseph Singh, “The Diary of the Wolf-Children of Midnapore”
44

emphasized their assimilability or lack thereof. In a journal entry marked between the dates of
November 1920 to January 1921, Singh notes:
At this stage of their association with us, for nearly three months from the fourth of
November, 1920, up to the end of January, 1921, there was a complete disassociation and
dislike, not only for us, but for their abode among us, for movement and play — in short,
for everything human.
They could not find here their mates in the jungle; they could not prowl about with the
wolves; they missed their cosy den, and could not get to feed on meat or milk.
Consequently, the thought of their old environment preyed heavily on their mind, and
their thought was to regain their former habitation and company. This fact made them
meditative and morose.
37

Despite these descriptions of clear resistance to assimilation, Singh’s efforts towards
“rehabilitation” of the girls continued until their death. The “disassociation… for everything
human” was a condition to be corrected, just as colonial subjects were to be civilized. In its
purported claim to do good, these efforts were merely an extension of colonial violence with
psychic and physical repercussions.
Given the colonial project at the core of Singh’s diary, Humanimal’s hybrid form is also a
response to the ethics of ethnographic research. It is self-aware of potential complicity in reifying
colonial violence even by attempting to broach the subject of Kamala and Amala in its own way.
To address this potential pitfall of her project, Kapil disperses the linear narrative form of
ethnographic account. Split in two parts, “Humanimal 1” and “Humanimal 2,” the book opens
with Kapil’s account of “discovery” in which she implicates herself as investigator, staring into
the photographic image of a wolf girl’s eyes. Kapil’s subtitle for this first portion of the book,
“Blue Sky Fiction for a Future Child,” names the genre of this section as a “fiction” though

37
Ibid
45

already the compelling sensory account of her encounter with the image blurs the boundaries of
truth and embellishment. She considers the wariness of authenticity, which is what the traditional
ethnographic project often aims to produce through study of its objects. As such, the assignment
of “fiction” to an ethnographic project allows her to align herself with Kamala and Amala who,
through every account of their lives, were never able to speak for themselves.
This is also echoed in the second section, which enumerates Kapil’s different points of
engagement with Singh’s diary, at once highly aware of her implication in this ethnographer role
and identification with Kamala and Amala in their rejection of human life. The “Future Child”
that looks back at Kapil in the first section haunts the second, beckoning to the poet who writes,
“Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the
memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to
become four-limbed.”
38
In this address, Kapil notes that there must be a form of engagement
beyond clinical observation or attempting to speak on behalf of the subaltern. The form of
engagement that Kapil deems suitable is one of full embodiment, where the speaker literally
volunteers to join flesh with the future child.
How, in fact, do you speak to and about bodies that are not present and could only talk
back as ghosts? Kapil’s response takes into consideration that there can never be an equivalent
offering form her position, but there is her own autobiographical reference point to start. Her
body and memories for the projections of their own. The story of Kamala and Amala is
intricately tied to her father’s mortality and the fragility of her own birth-giving body, with the
same proximity to life and death as the young girls experienced. The offering of her body and

38
Bhanu Kapil, Humanimal, 15
46

memories is not to proclaim exact likeness of transference of sympathies, but merely to illustrate
the imprecision of both. Kapil writes:

A scar is memory. Memory is wrong. The wrong face appears in the wrong memory. A
face, for example, condenses on the surface of the mirror in the bathroom when I stop
writing to wash my face. Hands on the basin, I look up, and see it: the distinct image of
an owlgirl. Her eyes protrude, her tongue is sticking out, and she has horns, wings and
feet. Talons. I look into her eyes and see his. Writing makes a mirror between the two
children who perceive each other. In a physical world, the mirror is a slice of dark space.
How do you break a space? No. Tell me a story set in a different time, in a different
place. Because I’m scared. I’m scared of the child I’m making.
39

In this instance of metamorphosis, the process of turning wolf girls into humans is reversed—
Kapil’s narrator looks into a bathroom mirror and identifies herself as an “owlgirl,” a hybrid of
animal and human. This hybrid form, much like the process of writing, is not corrective. It does
not rectify a history of colonial, racial, and gender violence. This excerpt elicits an earnest
question: How did we become conditioned to fear our ferality?
The relationship between the scar, memory, and writing speaks to the haunting that
possesses Kapil’s imagination, a product of the navigation between past, present, and a future in
which there is fear of imminent violence. Kapil’s description of looking into a mirror highlights
this fear of historical violence repeating in its modern-day form, the unrelenting visitation of the
past in the present. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery
Gordon calls this a type of “rememory,” which is the claim that the past has on present social and
lived conditions. In a reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she raises the following questions
about this function of rememory:

39
Humanimal, 55
47

What original instruction can we make out of this time of things that passes on or just
stays? What can we make out of this rememory that forgets some things and never ever
others, a memory already indicated as uncanny by its fundamental repetitiousness and by
its gesture to the haunted house?
40

These questions pertaining to the haint of Morrison’s Beloved are applicable to the specters of
Kamala and Amala in Humanimal, their persistence of which means that the past has not been
reconciled nor could it ever be. The hybridity of the text suggests that its disparate parts make up
the remainders of this irreconcilability, and why the haunting takes place in the form of the
animal and human contortions that Kapil’s speaker witnesses in the mirror.
Kapil’s self-reflexivity throughout Humanimal also permits a passageway through the
ethnographic tensions that inevitably arise through engagement with a violent source text. Her
frequent reflection on the process of writing, particularly the hybrid experimentation of this
work, ultimately leads to her conclusion that the relationship between text and embodiment is an
intimate one, and that while this does not promise liberation from the past, it animates the lives
of those subjects who could not speak. In the case of Kamala and Amala, Kapil’s speaker
realizes ultimately that any liberatory instinct would only reify the injuries that the girls suffered,
but what she could do within her means is to allow their shared experiences to become a conduit
through historical time, and in this way, allow them to occupy the present with greater vitality:

58. A girl returns to her jungle home, shedding her dress at the perimeter. No. There’s a
citron-yellow flare of thunder and simple, pure red blossoms hang in the rough black air.
The girl is lying in a nest, endangered yet coiling a sea-creature in her sleep. I stay awake
all night on the tip of love, a test of sight’s force. How come you love her too? Do you
have a child? Do you want a baby? These are the wrong questions but they pass the time.
They make a body real. This is a text to do that. Vivify.
41

40
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting of the Sociological Imagination, 165
41
Bhanu Kapil, Humanimal, 63
48

In this prose poem excerpt, indicated as #58 in the book’s index format, Kapil’s story bears the
essence of fairytale through the lush language of colors and other hyperbolic sensory details. Yet
it serves to depict the blurred lines between fiction and autobiography, uncertain as to whether
the girl is made of myth or a projection of a real child, either an extension of the speaker or one
from her own body. The speaker’s questions about love suggest that Kapil’s investment in
Kamala and Amala comes from her perspective as a birth-giving body, but the birth itself seems
secondary to the ability to validate the life force of marginalized kin. When Kapil declares “This
is a text to do that” followed by the imperative “Vivify,” she calls attention to the ability of the
hybrid text to bring back to life not only the story of Kamala and Amala, whose origins are
subjected to speculation of a hoax, but also to offer them a place in the present.
Kapil’s subject of the humanimal is both literal entity and metaphor whose traversal of
identities and forms make her both vulnerable to those who want to civilize her while also
possessing a feral vivacity that persists even when trapped. As a literal form, the humanimal is
Kamala and Amala as much as it is the part animal and part girl figure who haunts the text. As
metaphor, she seems to elude the confines of linear narrative, slipping through the cracks of
ethnographic definition. In one of the final passages of the book, Kapil describes how the
humanimal is inevitably captured, and yet, she persists through historical memory and time:

59.i. With nets or sheets, shawls or ropes, they get her and bring her down. For
humanimals, this is a destiny that cannot be averted. Each time she crosses, in truth or
fiction, she breaks the tracery of delicate threads that marks the border. A border is felt in
the body as fear and sometimes… no, I cannot speak for her now[…] Each crossing
disrupts the gelatin envelope, producing tracks.
42

42
Ibid, 63-4
49

Through the literal and metaphorical description of border crossing, the humanimal’s
transgressions create a social rupture that inevitably challenges the boundaries that once
delineated categories of understanding from one another. The humanimal’s body itself as a
demonstration against ethnographic authority, defying the powers of circumscription. Even
Kapil’s speaker admits her own limitations through the pronouncement of “I cannot speak for her
now.” Despite the persistence of borders—geopolitical, national, identity, and genre—the
humanimal’s crossing as a hybrid creature leaves an imprint in the world design. While this does
not protect the humanimal from further danger, her lingering impression is a form of extended
afterlife.
The hybridity behind Kapil’s Humanimal is ultimately a mirror of the hybrid figures who
move throughout the text. Just as the movement across genres and forms render each one
indistinguishable from one another, so does the traversal of the wolf girls Kamala and Amala as
well as the humanimal figure throughout the book. Through this parallel journeying, the
possibility and limitations of hybridity become a point of investigation in aesthetic and political
terms, with the concluding sentiment that upon relinquishing writerly or cultural authority, we
create a portal for our marginalized kin to come through.

Beyond the Tragedy Genre

In Joseph Campbell’s mythic framework of the hero’s journey, a heroic figure or
protagonist undergoes various symbolic stages of development that either leads to their victory
or success. It is a common framework for plot development that traverses multiple genres,
allowing writers to conceptualize various ways in which their characters can unfold under a set
50

of developmental constraints. This conceit underlies the genre-bending memoir Fierce Femmes
and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Chinese Canadian trans
femme writer Kai Cheng Thom who subverts this framework by blending autobiographical fact
and hyperbolic fiction. While Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey has largely applied to
masculine figures, Thom appropriates this framework to serve the adventures of an unnamed
protagonist who is a young transgender girl runaway, arguably a fantastical extension of herself.
Rather than follow the journey to its binary endings, Thom’s unreliable narrator weaves a
winding tale that purposefully elides a straightforward narrative, creating a conclusion to the
journey that is not complete but open-ended.
Among many traditions that Thom’s work defies, perhaps the primary one is the fact-
telling aspect of memoir. In the gendered view of the world, women and feminized people are
prone to lying and are unreliable in their narratives. For transgender women, lying is usually an
accusation leveled at them for embodying a gender identity that cisheteronormative society
disputes in favor of naturalized concepts of gender and sexuality. To defy the normative values
of biology and gender is to be a liar, an accusation that typically comes with disastrous and
violent consequences for transgender women and femme-presenting nonbinary people. This
relationship to truth and fiction is one that women and femmes share, and why the alignment of
these struggles is so essential to understanding how hybrid writing is responsive to the social
conditions impacting Asian American women and femmes in particular. If women and femmes
are prone to lying and are unreliable narrators of their own experiences, then Thom’s decision to
lean into the fictional extreme by imbuing her memoir with high fantasy is a divergent approach
to getting at the authentic truth, which is not safe to share in a transmisogynist society.
51

The burden of representation for trans femmes is one that places a heavy onus on genre
and mode of storytelling, especially so for Asian transfeminine stories that may deviate from the
struggles of cisgender Asian women. According to cultural critic Jules Gill-Peterson who penned
the essay “When I Reclaim My Spirit, I Am Not Your Tragedy” following the Texas state
decision to arrest the parents of transgender children, the “tragedy genre” is a familiar narrative
mode utilized throughout media and other cultural outlets that operates at the detriment of
transgender communities:

However secular we might think ourselves, the tragedy genre is still organized in deeply
messianic terms. Even in the Western queer and trans imaginary. Tragedy, that very
Christian narrative of the predestined fall from grace, creates a difficult narrative
situation for politics. Tragedy can only be remedied by redemption, as when Christ, who
bore the cross of the human world of sin, comes again but with the full force of God. And
indeed, the idealization of trans women and children today has that messianic quality to
it. If only we celebrate Saint Sylvia and Saint Marsha properly, the second coming of
the trans women of color of Stonewall will redeem us all. If only we learn to
protect trans children to save them from suicide, their pure innocence will redeem us
from the harm we have inflected on them. Our politics will be saved by
invoking trans women of color, or children, and acting in their name. We will rescue
them from their betrayal by idealizing them.
43

Gill-Peterson’s critique of the tragedy genre situates the common approach to transgender stories
in an ancient narrative trope that ultimately allows these stories to exist as redemption or tragic
tales. These limitations are not only imposed by larger society, but their pervasiveness certainly
impacts the kind of stories that transgender artists and writers can share about their communities.
Gill-Peterson’s interrogation of this limited genre also names the paternalism that accompanies
this constraint in which all people, transgender and non-transgender can be complicit.

43
Jules Gill-Peterson, “When I Reclaim My Spirit, I Am Not Your Tragedy”
52

Faced with this narrative challenge, Thom’s memoir exhibits a deep awareness of these
aesthetic and social constraints, oftentimes making explicit that this project will deviate from
traditional genres and tropes intentionally. In the chapter “Dangerous Stories,” which opens the
memoir, Thom describes the experience of watching a white transgender woman on television
whose beauty and glamour present a fantasy of what it means to be privileged and well-
resourced enough to elide the dangers that other transgender women experience. This inspires
Thom to pen this book, declaring, “… I decided then and there that someone had to write us girls
a dangerous story: a transgender memoir, but not like most of the 11,378 transgender memoirs
out there, which are just regurgitations of the same old story that makes us boring and dead and
safe to read about.”
44
According to Thom, the writing of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a
response to sanitized versions of memoirs by transgender authors in which an utterly happy or
tragic ending is compulsory, leaving little in between. If the ending is indeed this binary, then the
script of the hero’s journey is insufficient; this framework must be disassembled in much the
same way as truth-telling in memoir needs to be relinquished to make way for more complex
stories by and about trans femmes to come through.
This eschewing of memoir’s adhesion to truth provides a passageway for Fierce Femmes
and Notorious Liars to engage in tenuous topics about racial and gender violence towards Asian
American women and femmes in such a way that does not reify trauma wounds but offers
another way to engage more safely. Oftentimes, fantastical elements become a way of illustrating
the intensity of these trauma wounds. For instance, a swarm of angry bees infest Thom’s
narrator’s body each time she is triggered, a literal and fantastical manifestation of post-traumatic
stress from a past sexual trauma. In describing the origin of the bees, Thom writes that when they

44
Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, 3
53

came for her, they “covered [her] with their vibrating bodies” and that she “prayed to the
ravenous swarm, forgive me.”
45
The depiction of these bees is accompanied by shame, a sense of
paralysis that takes over after the assault by the initial unnamed perpetrator and later, the bees.
She describes how some of the bees remain within her body: “They are still inside me. They will
always be.”
46
It is an indication of violence’s lasting impact. In this recurrence of the swarm,
Thom is invested less in the narrative of “what happened” to her and more on how this trauma
reverberates through different aspects of her life. The bees illustrate the way in which a trauma
response can come suddenly and intensely, awakening the bees within her as well. The swarm
becomes a demonstration of what feels all-consuming, affecting a vivid portrayal of what it
means to suffer the consequences of a deep violation.
This suffering is the catalyst for Thom’s narrator to finally embark on her quest out of the
city of Gloom and towards the City of Smoke and Lights where she eventually encounters the
archetypal figures who will usher her into the next phases of her hero’s journey. In the place of
the Mentor, there is the wise and noble Kimaya who takes the narrator in upon her arrival to the
city, and her enemies and allies range from the cop she murders to Lucretia, a member of her
transgender sisterhood with whom she shares a bitter rivalry. While these characters easily fulfill
the purposes of these archetypes upon introduction, the memoir complicates their plot trajectory
through the lens of trauma and restorative justice. Kimaya’s unflappability as a leader is
challenged when fellow transgender sister Soraya is murdered, and her message of peace and
reform is disputed by members of the community who want revenge. Thom’s narrator, who has
always looked up to Kimaya’s direction, finds herself at odds with her, desiring the same

45
Ibid, 17-18
46
Ibid
54

vengeance that her fellow sisters are rallying for. When the narrator joins the Lipstick Lacerators,
a girl gang seeking to beat up men and police who pose potential harm to transgender women, it
creates a rift between her relationship with her mentor who sees this move as an act of betrayal.
After the gang debanded and the narrator embarks on healing the past wounds that have
propelled her towards vigilante justice, her relationship to Kimaya necessarily changes from
mentor and mentee to friends, demonstrating a different type of side quest to the hero’s journey.
The narrator reflects on this transformation, noting, “I think we’re relearning how to be friends,
Kimaya and I: she’s taking care of me less, and I’m trying to take care of her more.”
47
This
realization marks the mutuality of personal and relational transformation for the two transgender
women, making this originally solo journey something that is intertwined with greater
community care.
This transformation also takes place with the cop that the narrator murders as well as
Lucretia’s fate. After killing the cop by accident in order to save Lucretia’s life, the narrator
realizes that every death produces an afterlife of violence. In the case of the cop, the literal and
fantastical manifestation of this is the return of the cop in the form of a zombie. In a nightmare
following the cop’s death, the narrator dreams of the cop kissing and taunting her for her
violence, describing the interchangeability of their bodies:

Because then I am him and he is me, and it’s his razor-angled Asian body I am holding in
my muscled, blonde-haired arms; it’s his longish black hair that I am caressing in my
heavy-knuckled hands, his slender hips that I am grinding my larger ones against, and my
killer cop cop killer body that is stirring blazing devouring devouring devouring
devouring swallowing him/her/me whole.
48

47
Ibid, 158
48
Ibid, 126
55

While there is an incommensurability to the violence that the cop and the narrator enacts due to
varying access to power, the narrator’s description of the warping of their bodies demonstrates
the debilitating impact this violence has on her. The racial and gender violence that she had
experienced all her life is mirrored back to her in a circulatory pattern of injury, such that all
violence becomes indistinguishable. This recognition of the circulatory nature of violence
complicates her path on the hero’s journey in which the intended mission must go awry in order
for her to pursue a different one of intimate healing.
Interspersed throughout the memoir’s fantastical prose are poetry excerpts from the
narrator’s notebook, which marks different points in her path to healing. These excerpts, noted as
simply “from my notebook—” and titled variations of the “song of the pocketknife,” indicate the
narrator’s burgeoning realization that finding a transgender community is not enough for one’s
healing, there are still longstanding wounds that need to be addressed to truly be free. The
pocketknife, in this case, is a metaphor for the narrator’s tendency to react with violence, a
product of post-traumatic stress after having endured violence done to her. The pocketknife is a
representation of recurring violence, spurred by real harm done to her chosen family of
transgender sisters as well as the fear of imminent injury such as the proximity to sexual
intimacy. At times, the narrator’s personal negotiations would have her believe that she no longer
has to rely on the pocketknife or instinctual response to violence as a way of moving through her
life, but she finds herself very easily falling back on this pattern. In one of her journal entries, she
addresses the pocketknife directly:

if i hadn’t stopped believing
in you, pocketknife,
maybe I wouldn’t be
in so much trouble now,
i know that you
56

can’t make it better,
you can’t fix
what’s always been
broken,
but still,
i deserve this,
you.
49

The evolution of the narrator’s message to her pocketknife depicts shame and a sense of futility
as the driving force behind this violence. In a complication of the notion that violence begets
violence, the narrator points to the ways in which violence feels inescapable such that it seems
the only option. Her remark towards the end in which she writes, “i deserve this,/ you” points to
the contradiction she experiences within herself, which is both the propensity towards violence
and her desire to seek an alternative.
In the final poetic interlude, Thom’s narrator experiences an epiphany that alters her
relationship to the symbolic pocketknife. In her realization that there are limits as to how much
she can externalize her anger through violence before she injures herself gravely, she
renegotiates her connection to the pocketknife and violence, not as the only means of response
but as something she can put away. She resolves to move towards forgiveness and
accountability, which includes first an apology to the tool through which she has projected much
of her anger. In this moment of growth, she writes:

it's not your fault,
you couldn’t cleanse me,
cure me,
forgive me,
love me,
i have to do these things
on my own.
and that is why, sweet knife,

49
Ibid, 128
57

i’m setting you free,
snapping you open and closed,
fluttering your wings,
offering you to the moon, a final taste
of my blood on your blade,
i’m setting you free,
releasing us both.
50

Thom’s narrative takes accountability for her violent actions, which means also coming to terms
with the trauma she has endured. Her declaration to set the knife free permits the object to
transform into a magical creature, which only bears a touch of the likeness of its original form.
This acceptance of the object’s ability to transform is also indicative of the narrator’s own
healing journey in which she realizes that though she cannot change her past, she can certainly
transform how she sees it, assuring a mutual freedom for her pocketknife and herself.

At the conclusion of the narrator’s journey, her happy ending appears at first to come in
the form a growing romance with a transgender boy named Josh. Yet the genre-defiant nature of
the fantastical memoir also introduces an unexpected twist in the plot in which the narrator
decides she must leave the external comforts of that relationship to create stability for herself
beyond someone else’s ability to do so for her. This personal realization is a justification for the
genre-bending nature of the memoir, propelled by Kimaya’s final advice, “Don’t get stuck in one
story, not even your own."
51
Just as Kimaya names it, Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious
Liars broaches traditional transgender memoir themes by blending multiple stories in addition to
meta recognition of these tropes that limit transgender stories to one of tragedy or victory. In this
sense, the narrator’s departure from what appears to be a happy domestic living situation with

50
Ibid, 156
51
Ibid, 179
58

Josh is an ending that defies this binary conclusion, expanding the social limits of what it means
to live a trans femme life.
This realization is solidified by the narrator’s last letter to her sister Charity, in which she
explains, “Sometimes fiction is truer than facts, and the trouble is knowing which fictions are
facts and which facts are fictions, if you know what I mean.”
52
This explanation serves as the
reasoning behind the future that the narrator chooses for herself as well as why this book
operates as both memoir and fantasy, fact and fiction. If mainstream societal claims to race and
gender often conflate the two, then Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a hybrid concoction of
fact and fiction as well, not just to highlight the impact of racial and gender inequities on North
American Asian trans femme communities but to make use of the terms allotted to the author so
that they can be used to pave an individual journey. In this way, the conflation of fact and fiction,
by way of hybridity, ironically creates a pathway for representation of a more authentic truth.

No Resurrection, No Return

If Kai Cheng Thom’s narrator’s disappearing act at the end of Fierce Femmes and
Notorious Liars is a lesson in wayward journeying, then she is joined by a lineage of Asian
American women and femme interlocutors whose literary and artistic contributions to hybrid
experimental writing far extend the aesthetic and political possibilities for their racialized and

52
Ibid, 187
59

gendered experiences. While the artists discussed throughout this project demonstrate diverse
formal and content approaches to hybridity, informed by the contexts of their varied experiences
across ethnicity and gender, it is compelling to see where their paths overlap—the desire to blur
the lines of truth and fiction, the defiance of ethnographic and literary authority, an intimate
relationship to social and personal history, what it means to possess multiple identities that are at
times at odds with one another, to name a few thematic resonances. Perhaps the ultimate tether
between these hybrid practices though is each project’s relationship to the viscera, the physical
and psychic interior matter of the body, which so often is contested in the larger world view.
While retreating inward is often accompanied by accusations of being solipsistic, the texts
described here are distinctly conscious of what Trinh T. Minh-ha refers to as the musts of writing
the body. That is, the pressures circumscribing the racial and gender terms for portraying Asian
American women and femme experiences will always be in the background of this writing, and
yet, the compulsion to write will be just as persistent.
If the anthologizing of Asian American literature is any indication, the project of
determining what is next for us—thematically, by manner of aesthetic innovation, politically—is
a constant question that the curation of our artistic rendering across time will always try to
answer. I cannot tell sometimes if the escalation of anti-Asian violence these past few years is
particularly exceptional to the ongoing racial and gender violence that I have encountered all my
life, but I do know that the ways in which we position our affinity to our communities and our art
have a profound impact on the newest claims we make about any collective politics,
identification, and projections for the future. I invoke our literature past and present with this
purpose in mind, to see what of this especially socially and politically silenced set of experiences
60

for Asian American women and femmes can yield, and the answer in the form of hybrid
experimentation is just as complex as the question.
This project concludes with the reading of Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
subversive take on the hero’s journey in the effort to also name the last two stages of resurrection
and return of which are just as vital to the trajectory of Asian American women and femme
hybrid writing. It is tempting to want to find resolution, to declare a turning point in Asian
American women and femme hybrid writing that will mark a new political objective for these
intersecting identities and alter the course of hybrid writing for good. In fact, these stages of the
journey apply pressure to the course, which has never been about reclaiming a new identity for
oneself or resolving one’s contentious relationship to another power, be it nation or the
traditional racial and gender scripting of history. The purpose of establishing affinity in this way
is to alter the lens of an individualized path, which directs oneself towards reclamation of a
suspiciously simple truth, in favor of an expansive collective history that is constituted by
assorted memories, and which is perpetually being constructed. The texts discussed throughout
this project provide only a small sample of this collective history, but the pooling of their
contributions name the ongoing efforts of many, promising that there will be others to come.
I want to conclude with this: The sadness I recall with such clarity as a child, and which
continues to pervade my life had only deepened with my emergent social and political
consciousness. That sadness has come to color my writing, which despite its willing engagement
with racial and gender violence, topics that can be despairing upon frequent visitation, has also
yielded many a generative outlook on the social and political constitutions of this life, by sheer
manner of necessity and survival. It is the same impulse that I imagine drives the work of the
authors discussed in this project. Through the examination of these hybrid texts, I recall a
61

moment in kindergarten when I drew an image of a girl carrying a large bowl of water. At one
point, I added a tree. There was no intention of any story there, simply a girl and a tree, neither of
whom knew of each other or existed in the same realm, for all I cared. However, upon glancing
over my shoulders, my teacher remarked, “Oh my! Is she going to water the tree?” At the time, I
knew only the English words “Yes” or “No” with social encouragement to lean towards the
former, so I said, “Yes” despite feeling quite surely, even if I did not have the words at the time,
that the answer was much deeper. Was it possible then, that some things were beyond language
and translation? To be honest, I struggle with this question still, but in this grappling, have made
many attempts at coming close.
What was the image about? There was a girl. She held the world’s water in her hands.
She walked ahead to save herself.

62

OPENING :: A MOUTH

As a child about to begin school for the first time, my father gave me the complicated gift
of another language. I did not know then what path it would set for me until it did.
In our household, we had only spoken Cantonese for the first few years of my life. It was
hard to fathom anything else beyond it. I could not even write it yet, and so, my first language
had a sweet tactility to it. I knew it by the mounds formed in my mouth, how the sound moved
from back to front. It was full of soft nasally intonations, one that when I would attempt to
switch over to my grandmother’s dialect of Toisanese—considered a close cousin to Cantonese,
but which I would eventually learn as having fewer sonic ties than I thought—would be a
comedic clattering of “m” sounds. How my grandmother would say often, “Nay yeem mm yeem
ah?” (“Would you like a drink or not?”) when I would come to her apartment after school,
presented with hot milk tea. When those same words would come out of my mouth, the adults
would burst out laughing, saying, “This is what happens when a kid learns Toisanese from
someone without any teeth!”
If the shift from one dialect to another could incorporate this delight of play, then I would
soon learn that English would get a different reception. Before my first day of school, my father
wrote the letters of the English alphabet in a single column on a sheet of spiral notebook paper.
English, I would eventually learn, was a barbed language. It needed some coaxing out. At five
years old, none of this was apparent at first. My father must have known this, or else he would
not feel it necessary to prepare me. On paper, he had me write each English alphabet letter over
and over until the lopsided clones of each one collided with the edge of the page.
63

But why? I had asked. “ 點解?” I was always asking why.
“ 聽我講” was all he said. Just listen to me.

We all have our own origin stories with reading and writing. Yet it always seems that the
story of learning of English tends to be especially fraught for people of color and immigrants in
the U.S. The story has little levity, is rarely light. I never quite understood it, how my father
passed it on to me as both gift and burden. Frantz Fanon wrote, “To speak means to be in a
position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means
above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” That much then, of the
English-speaking Western world, I understood later, but as a child, I had no sense of my
connection to nation, state, or civilization until it brutally landed upon me. To learn English then
is always a compulsory part of American survival. It also means that the fluency of its grammar
is essential to the order of the Anglophone world, a matter of constant upkeep.
Beyond my father’s notebook, I found myself in a classroom where everything only made
sense in motion and context, but the words that came out of my white teacher’s mouth registered
with the indecipherability of a thousand faces in a crowd where I could only pick out a phrase or
two at a time. I understood then that English was about belonging, long before I understood it as
a language of power and dominance—the enforcement of its education, at times, an act of
violence against Black, indigenous, and people of color. Perhaps this early comprehension was
why I resisted its acquisition for so long, far more interested in the invisible grammars of moving
about my day with my own unique schedule, against all classroom order and instruction. I
colored when I wanted to. I made books with no words, just images of people watering trees,
64

caterpillars that dreamed of being butterflies, the slow transformation of everything and everyone
in the world against the infinite coils of time. There was a delicious freedom to not knowing the
predominant language being spoken, not when the abundance of one’s own imagination wins
out. But that freedom is always temporary.
Failure to acquire the language, to commit to full fluency, has its consequences. After
forgetting my backpack in my kindergarten classroom after school, I told my grandmother to
wait while I dashed back in to retrieve it. My teacher caught me passing through the doors and
stopped me.
“Where are you going?” she likely said.
I pointed to the hallway leading to our classroom and continued to walk forward.
She stood in front and stopped me again, more firmly repeating herself, “I said: Where
are you going?”
Again, pointing, I ducked right to bypass her and then left when she mirrored her body to
mine. It had seemed to me at the time that my want was straightforward. I did not need an
attendant, did not need to provide further explanation. Still, she shouted, and when I tried to
barrel past her once more, she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard. I stared blankly
into her furious face, all red and sputtering. I cannot remember what she said next but that is the
least important part of this story.
If the instruction of English language and grammar is intended to convey ideas and
commands with legibility, then it also begs the question of what gets elided through this
enforcement of a singular idea of comprehension. It took me years to have a different
65

relationship to the English language that was not affiliated with its punitive measures. Until then,
the gift my father gave me was merely a doorway to a place I had to keep earning to stay.
Has that changed much? I don’t think so.

More time had to lapse before I could recognize English grammar’s elasticity. That came
only after prolonged study of Anglophone literature. Even so, I have my suspicions.
What I concluded was that any grammar is forged by constraints, but that the constraints
themselves are not immovable or impermeable. I think of a former professor Sue Weinstein who
told me that she likes to teach mini grammar lessons before each writing class built out of
common questions or concerns that have emerged from student essays. She does this, she
explains, as a way of making English grammatical constructions feel more accessible, that
oftentimes we move through speech so absently that we forget the guiding principles of its
written form and its many possibilities. That is, grammar not as enforcement of rules, but as tools
that can be repurposed and reclaimed. And it can happen in the most ordinary setting, at the
beginning of a class, writing a sentence that no one will likely remember years from now. This
pedagogical tactic is something I recall often as a reminder that we never tire of repositioning
ourselves in relationship to language and grammar.
Eventually, everything becomes a kind of grammar, depending on how you look at it.
Grammar as a type of organization of sense-making, assuming that the ultimate goal is to make
some sort of sense. What the pathway to learning another language has taught me through its
enforcement is that there are other ways to perceive meaning and its making; that they often
necessitate a close attention to the imperceptible, the interstitial spaces between moments of
66

collective understanding, and the messy collision of feelings across embodied experiences over
time. In other words, language and grammar are a matter of affect, of holding still what passes,
to study it in the light.
We understand that language and grammar are raced, gendered, and impacted by their
sociality, but the social constructivist approach to these manners of communication has reached
its limits in the accelerated efforts of these times. With the rapid digital technological
advancement of this 21
st
century, we are receiving an influx of new media and platforms through
which we can connect with others, bridging distance and other prior communication barriers.
The accessibility of these new digital technologies—the smartphone, videoconferencing,
international texting applications that did away with old calling cards—is the surface attraction
of these platforms, offering a way to not only speak to or read someone, but to hear and see them
at the same time. This simultaneity of senses is the not-so-silent goal of technological
advancement, which strives to recreate human experiences though “enhancement” or correction
of what is perceived to be the usual errors of humanity.
In medicine, for instance, it is the slip of the surgical hand, the fragility of our bodies that
robotic technology tries to avoid. A machine is invented to mitigate this very possibility of
human mistake. It is called the da Vinci, after the inventor Leonardo da Vinci, a figurehead for
Renaissance humanism, a philosophy that touts the importance of the human individual as “the
measure of the universe.” This universe, unironically, encompasses its mechanical extensions—
the human behind the machine, the machine that is both human in design and operation.
Sometimes we forget that the digital is a human instrument, its errors and all, a part of our
distinct collective language and grammar.
67

Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” defines this modern state of our being as a cyborg
world in which the lives of people, other animals, and machines are entangled, difficult to
extricate from one another. Of this inextricability, she writes, “The last beachheads of uniqueness
have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks—language tool use, social behaviour,
mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And
many people no longer feel the need for such a separation […]” Published in 1985, Haraway’s
words certainly continue to ring true in some respect but the hybridization of human, animal, and
machine has proved to be ever more complicated with each new digital tool that is ushered into
our greater language and grammar repertoire. Rather than the collapsing of our particular parts in
this entanglement, what we are increasingly witnessing these days is the pronouncement of
difference, the fragments emerging from what we have accepted as our hybridized whole.
This enhancement of difference also means a close attention to the ways in which the
social taxonomies of race, gender, sexuality, and disability have evolved over time. Kimberlé
Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to speak to the ways in which we can possess
multiple identities that indicate different degrees of privileges and oppressions. Intersectionality
is an invitation to a perspective of power and its evolving complications that are always influx
depending on the shifts in the way we understand social identities at any given moment in time.
It means that even as we are a hybrid of many different identities, not all our experiences are
equal, and our interactions with one another are determined by the way we navigate this very
engagement with social and personal power. Coupled with the growing notion of digital selves
and communities, the ways in which we inhabit the world then are innumerable, even as we are
tethered to changing social taxonomies.
68

The language of grammars and hybridity connotes structure in a time when social and
political identification becomes increasingly challenged. Hybridity as an artistic practice has
always been affiliated with moments of social and political challenge. In the introduction to
American Hybrid, an anthology of “hybrid” poetry edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John,
Swensen argues that hybridity has a deep connection to the political, even if it is not immediately
apparent in the content of the work. She writes:
Hybrid poems often honor the avant-garde mandate to renew the forms and expand the
boundaries of poetry—thereby increasing the expressive potential of language itself—
while also remaining committed to the emotional spectra of lived experiences… While
political issues may or may not be the ostensible subject of hybrid work, the political is
always there, inherent in the commitment to use language in new ways that yet remain
audible and comprehensible to the population at large.

She further defines hybridity as a blend of art movements from narrative to experimental,
borrowing qualities of each in the final composition of the hybrid poem, thus forming an
argument that the formal attributes of hybridity matter just as much as content, the two
inextricably tied. While the relationship between form and content is something now readily
recognized as part of any discussion of art, hybridity turns our attention to the very layout of
social and political matter through both form and content. To Swensen’s point, it is not just about
locating the political in the content anymore but the ways in which hybridity turns our attention
to how language is used.

In the context of Asian American hybrid literature, the origin of hybridity as an artistic
practice for its writers is a little harder to trace. Hybridity is often affiliated with the avant-garde,
a concept that is as difficult to articulate as a specific frame of time as the notion of hybridity
69

itself and which connotes the development of work that is forward-thinking, experimental, and a
departure from the current artistic traditions and practices of the time. In Race and the Avant-
Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965, Timothy Yu makes the
provocative argument that since the initial publication of Asian American poetry in the 1970s,
Asian American poetry has always been avant-garde. This assertion comes from his definition of
the avant garde as both “an aesthetic and a social grouping, defined as much by its formation of a
distinctive kind of community as by its revolutionary aesthetics.” This era of Asian American
poetry publishing began with the formation of the political identification of “Asian American”
by University of California Berkeley graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka in 1968,
denoting for the first time, a coalition of Asian ethnic identities in the U.S., bound by shared
struggle against anti-Asian violence domestically and overseas. The inception of this political
identification was the catalyst for Asian American poetry’s growing national recognition. While
the poems published by writers such as literary vanguards Li Young Lee and Cathy Song would
not be typically considered experimental—oftentimes leaning on narrative and lyrical modes
most commonly associated with traditional forms—Yu’s argument for Asian American poetry
and the avant garde to be interchangeable is a means of reclamation in response to the whiteness
of the literary avant garde or what is known as Language poetry in the twentieth century.
Yu’s desire to reclaim the term avant garde for Asian Americans stems from the
overwhelming whiteness of the Language poetry camp, which knew no shortage of white writers
such as Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman. The predominance of white experimental writers in
this camp meant that the contributions of Black writers and other writers of color who wrote in
the same experimental vein were often elided, considered less forward-thinking or innovative in
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contrast to white peers. By virtue of this exclusion, whiteness has become the default aesthetic of
Language poetry, and thus, what we know of the avant garde and the experimental.
By contrast, Cathy Park Hong seems less concerned with Asian American poetry’s
identification with the avant garde milieu. In her groundbreaking essay, “Delusions of Whiteness
in the Avant Garde,” she critiques the predominant whiteness of Language poetry as Yu does,
referencing the white imagination in experimental poetics as a form of delusion—that is, its
belief that art transcends racial identity, thereby neutralizing identity altogether. The white
imagination insists on this, Hong argues, despite the fact that our lived experiences as people of
color continue to reverberate through the world and confrontations that we have with difference
become increasingly inevitable. It is from this misrecognition of differing stakes between white
experimental writers and experimental writers of color that the former operates. Hong retorts that
“For too long, white poets have claimed ownership and territorialized ‘the new’ as their own and
for too long experimental minority poets have been cast aside as being derivative of their white
contemporaries.” This exclusion has yielded an aesthetic response from writers that color that
she argues is even more radical than what white contemporaries have brought to the canon of
experimental writing. This radical response consists of “code-switching between languages,
between Englishes, between genres, between races, between bodies.” Experimental writers of
color turning to the interstitial, the hybrid, in their art.
The experimental techniques that Hong names are by no means an exhaustive list, but
they represent a key characteristic of hybridity that is notably raced: By sheer necessity of
survival is innovation forged. Which is to say that survival is also raced.
Having raised the social and political stakes of hybrid experimentation for writers of
color, we can see how this very drive to survive is the trial by fire that has led to the
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reinvigoration of language and its grammars, especially various iterations of English, and which
has also come to shape Asian American hybrid literature. If Asian American literature as a
category or genre had emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, then its
experimentation with hybridity peaked in the 1980s, more than a decade after Asian American
identity had begun to establish political relevance. The works of multimedia writers, scholars,
and artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha rose to prominence during this
time, their blend of film, visual imagery, performance, movement, and text as part of these
works’ common execution. The technical usage of hybridity for these writers has a deep intimate
tie to a sense of political urgency—the aftermath of the Korean and Vietnam wars. While these
wars preceded the hybrid experimental output from these artists, their works reflect on the
lingering impacts of U.S. militarization overseas and its ripple effects on Asians in the U.S.
The transnational considerations of these hybrid artists’ works contribute to a skepticism
about the lines that delineate genre, media, and form from one another. If U.S. militarization in
Asian countries and the ensuing racism and xenophobia towards Asians in the U.S. have enacted
policymaking and foreign relations with a naturalized sense of entitled entry and intervention,
then certainly the art that emerges in response should come with some scrutiny. Suspicion of
authority, particularly of colonial governance, necessitates an artistic response that similarly
contests ideas of singular genre, media, and form.
This rupture is one that Minh-ha explores in her hybrid film Surname Viet Given Name
Nam (1989), which utilizes the documentary format in its interviews with various Vietnamese
women. While the first half of the film showcases what appears visually to be Vietnamese
women in Vietnam, the latter half reveals that the interviewees are all actors reciting translations
of interviews from Mai Thu Van’s Vietnam: un peuple, desvoix. The revelation in the latter part
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of the film creates a commentary on the instability of the notion of authentic representation,
challenging the ways a viewer reads and receives the visual and audio grammars of the film’s
portrayal of Vietnamese women experiences. The juxtaposition of these two performances points
to the ways in which the proximity to reality is merely just that, a heightened sense of embodied
performance. Furthermore, Minh-ha’s frequent use of image resizing, unconventional framing
that deviates from typical documentary portraiture, and dislocated sound enhance the feeling of
hyper-performativity throughout the film.
This reflexivity is key to Asian American hybrid experimentation—the idea that the
traversal of traditional definitions of genre, media, and form turns our attention to the very points
of delineation in the first place. While this is true for many instances of hybrid experimentation,
the racial particulars of Asian American hybridity further complicate this aesthetic mode through
its illumination of the political intensities laden in its experimentation. As Minh-ha’s Surname
Viet Given Name Nam demonstrates, the representational politics of race and gender concerning
Vietnamese women in the post-Vietnam War context are inextricable from the writer and
filmmaker’s exploration of genre, media, and form. In fact, the exploration denaturalizes those
default assumptions of genre, media, and form, and applies a consideration of how hybridity is
reflective of a particular moment and time for Asian American politics. In Minh-ha’s case,
hybrid experimentation elicits questions about the position of Vietnamese American women in
relation other Asian American women across ethnicities, women of color politics, transnational
solidarity with Asian women outside of the U.S., and feminism. It is not that this position cannot
be explored through more conventional means, but that the hybrid mode engages not only with
viewer assumptions but the writer and filmmaker’s own personal relationship to her subject
matter, which is also the same relationship to her artistic practice.
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Years later, Minh-ha’s work continues to be regarded as a vanguard for Asian American
hybrid art, and yet, the questions elicited by hybrid experimentation have become increasingly
complex. The representational politics that had once circumscribed artmaking in the 1980s has
taken on a new set of challenges in the twenty-first century. For one, while Asian American
political mobilization has certainly led to the proliferation of Asian American writers that we see
and read today, this growing visibility is reflective of only a cursory outlook of the publishing
field in contrast to the dismal numbers before. In a 2020 article entitled “How White Is the Book
Industry?” journalists Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek report that only 11% of books were
published by people of color through the major publishing houses in 2018 with Asian American
authors occupying only a fraction of that overall percentage. While this survey’s data is culled
from mostly mainstream prose, the disproportionate number of books published by white authors
and authors of color reflect a persisting inequity in the literary arts that is at odds with the
growing post-racial sensibility that occupies so much of American imagination. That is, that race
is no longer a point of friction. The supposition that any writer of color publishing at all is a sign
of change. In truth, the benchmark has always been set low to create the appearance of progress.
This notion that racial disparity no longer exists ultimately hinders a vision of systemic change,
masquerading the inequities that continue to prevail.
This is where present-day Asian American hybrid experimentation intervenes. Exhausted
by the constraints of representational politics of the latter half of the twentieth century,
throughout which social progress seems limited to acceptance into mainstream publishing, Asian
American writers have increasingly shifted towards cross-genre work in a test of the constraints
of the publishing market and the limits of political identification that we are grappling with. So
much of the world has changed with great rapidity in the past few decades that have altered the
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political allegiances of Asian American identity—the rise of racism and Islamophobia against
Arab and South Asian communities following the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers,
escalation of U.S. militarization in Southeast Asian countries that have led to increased number
of refugees, all of which have run up against the frontward facing impression of Asian American
identity as primarily concerned with affirmative action and other issues of inclusivity.
Additionally, the surge of protests in recent years against policing in response to anti-Black
violence and displacement of indigenous communities in favor of oil pipeline construction has
propelled Asian Americans towards conversations about where our political alignment falls,
raising questions of solidarity, affinity, and kinship built over collective desire to alter a system
that has historically and presently operated against Black, indigenous, and people of color.
Between the politics of inclusion and the desire to forge an identity outside of belonging, such
political movement of these past years has swayed Asian American political discourse largely
towards the latter. This shift is reflective of a desire to move beyond state-centered solutions,
even as our lives are enmeshed with matters of the state.
Lisa Lowe describes this enmeshment as a site for decolonizing work for Asian American
writing and critique. She draws from Fanon’s definition of decolonization, which posits that
rather than a single act of resistance against colonial governance, the act of decolonizing is a
repeated practice of contestation against the state. It is also not only about a physical removal of
allegiance to colonial governance but also a psychological detachment from political affiliation
with the state. As this affective refusal is connected to art and cultural processes as well, then
Lowe argues, Asian American writing is similarly embedded in anti-colonial struggle. In
Immigrant Acts, she writes:
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… if we understand “decolonization” as an ongoing disruption of the colonial mode of
production, then Asian American writing performs that displacement from a social
formation marked by the uneven and unsynthetic encounters of colonial, neocolonial, and
mass and elite indigenous cultures that characterize decolonization. These material
pressures produce texts that resist the formal abstraction of aestheticization that is a
legacy of European modernism and a continuing feature of European postmodernism.

Lowe’s argument that Asian American writing occurs within the “uneven and unsynthetic
encounters of colonial, neocolonial, and mass and elite indigenous cultures that characterize
decolonization” emphasizes the ways in which decolonizing art practices do not exist outside of
colonial or neocolonial states. In fact, these processes take place within the complex framework
of the colonial state and anti-colonial struggle and the various cultural outputs of these forces in
between. By situating Asian American writing under these circumstances, Lowe contextualizes
how an aesthetic response by Asian American artists can be forged through the political and
cultural pressures of our relationship to and under the U.S. state. This aesthetic response does not
lie outside of postmodernist influence, but rather draws from Western modes of thought while
also channeling these ideas into something quite distinct and specific to Asian American
struggles. One such aesthetic response is the hybridization of genre, media, and form—a
confluence of Asian American history of civic striving and political unbelonging, U.S. domestic
contentions and the diasporic tether to the impacts of state-sanctioned violence in Asia and the
Pacific Islands, narrative impulse and non-linear exploration of other modes of identification.
The political end goal of hybridization for Asian Americans is as open-ended as its artistic drive;
rather than articulate a future that provides an alternative way to participate in civic life, it
presents a myriad set of possibilities for survival under the frictions of the current state. Each
hybrid artistic response adds itself to the archive of possibilities, and it is from this eclectic
inventory where Asian American artists can continuously draw from, innovate, and create points
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of intervention that charge our circumstances with renewed energy. If the future of Asian
American identity is no longer about subservience to the state, even as we currently exist within
it, then the tactic of hybrid experimentation creates multiple pathways for political reckoning that
brings us closer to a vision of collective liberation.
Drawing from this well for survival, the Asian American hybrid writer is an assemblage
of several traits: well-versed in the conventions of multiple genres, media, and forms; inclination
towards experimentation in their work; the reluctance to call what we write as definitively a
“poem” or “essay” or “novel,” leaving its inscrutability up to the reader; cognizance of the
relationship between artistic practice and market processes for the cultural consumption of art;
awareness of how our work intervenes in the greater lineage of Asian American literature and
experimental art, which includes recognition of existing tropes, voices, perspectives, styles,
traditions, and discourse; and finally, the willingness to challenge the existing social grammars
of Asian American identity, such that race, gender, sexuality, and other intersecting markers of
identity receive the full breadth of their complexity in recognition. In other words, Asian
American hybrid literature always carries traces of self-reflexivity—for as much as it looks
outward to the examine the political folds of one’s experience and the literary traditions of which
they are a part, it also looks inward into one’s psyche.
The writers I discuss in the following essays embody these virtues in various profound
ways, challenging the conventional tropes of what it means to portray “authentic” Asian
American experiences, oftentimes tackling the issue sideways. These writers include Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Bhanu Kapil, Brandon Shimoda, Jennifer S. Cheng, Kai
Cheng Thom, to name a few from an ever-expanding list. In their writing, their themes are just as
wide-ranging, touching upon the catastrophic aftereffects of atomic warfare on multiple
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communities over time to the rendering of language into commodity under the workings of the
U.S. empire. The themes are noticeably global, unflinchingly aware of transnational tensions
forged by the history of U.S. foreign political decision-making, and often possesses a political
and economic critique even if not outrightly stated. The hybridity of their writing permits this
toggling between explicit critique and the subtlety of deep, long exploration through the content
of Asian American experiences. This plurality, I believe, is what lends the critique its enduring
power.

Years after my father passed away from pancreatic cancer, Bone Confetti, my first book
of writing was selected for publication by Noemi Press. To say the book is about grief is an
understatement. Somewhere in its painting of a speculative landscape that lives between myth
and reality, Orpheus retrieving his lover Eurydice from the world to lose her once more, my own
deep plunge into the wreckage of my father’s passing, and everything that unfolded thereafter—
there was the beginning of a hybrid project, a crossing. I wrote, “MOURN YOU BETTER”
several times across a formerly blank page, and it became the anchoring phrase that punctuated
different moments throughout the book. A poem could be disassembled, I learned, just as we are
too.
“Terrifying,” my aunt once described the work, having picked it up once and put it down,
shaking her head. She was the only one in the family with enough written English language
fluency to parse out verse.
It is not just the horror of the death and grief content of the work that my aunt was
responding to, but the macabre display of language as it splays itself across the page, its elliptical
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fragments, the appearance of bones upon a shore. There are moments in which the writing is
gloriously excessive, but I find it is the only way to capture grief in its truest form.
A hybrid experimental work, I had expected its reception to be automatically included in
the fold of Asian American literature, but that was not so much the case. As it is often with
experimental work by Asian American writers, the binary association of experimental literature
with white conceptual artists and narrative or confessional writing with writers of color is a
persisting tension today, even despite the long history of Asian American experimental writing.
Still, it is an indicator of how the notion of hybridity remains elusive, hard-to-define, and yet also
prevalent at the same time.
The struggle for legibility may not be exclusive to Asian American experiences, but the
positioning of hybrid literature for Asian Americans certainly has implications for the future of
canonization, of how or not to recognize Asian American literature as a genre in of itself. For
me, as the contents of the hybrid essays of Wild Grammars go on to explore, the gravity of this
issue disperses in multiple ways. For as much as I write about death and grief, I am also invested
in impressions, in what stays.
For instance, Bone Confetti’s publication was a surprise to my mother. During a recent
visit to her in New York City, she struggled to find the words to describe the feeling, just as I had
struggled with words during my younger life.
“There’s a Chinese word for it,” she said. “Its meaning is like ‘legend,’ but it also means
‘to not be forgotten.’”
“What is it?” I asked.
What she said next, she enunciated. It is this.
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OBSESSED, UNBOUND
In nearly every creative writing class I have ever taken, the opening advice has always
been this: Write your obsessions. In other words, write from the place where you repeatedly
return to, the most haunted caverns of your life, whatever feels perpetually swollen with noise.
For how banal this instruction seems to be, it also appears to demand so much—its muchness,
where the writing is said to thrive.
Obsession is an understatement. In my life, I have obsessed over things, people, logical
spellings of the universe, objects without consequence but which through inexplicable reasons,
still possess me, questions someone asked once that punctured the air between us and which have
left me forever upended, the ways in which a faulty love consumes me wholly, absolutely, and
begs me to be obliterated. To be obsessed, I believe, is to abandon all of yourself just to be close.

I had always known the bright intimacy of letters, which was a type of abandonment.
Someone once said that when I wrote, I looked lost. I blushed at this image returned to myself, as
if someone had seen the rush of blood and guts in me and described their textures and sounds
aloud.
I was 12 when I had my crush on the poet, Jane who came to our Language Arts
classroom weekly to teach us about the difference between collaging and extended metaphors.
She invited us to write to her, long after her sessions ended with us, and so I found her website,
which featured a forum for anyone to ask her anything they wanted. She would always post her
response, exquisite letters that exploded the questions, made each inquiry feel like they had
always intended to balloon out into their full majesty.
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I wrote her: “Dear Jane, what are teeth?” Another time: “Dear Jane, why are people so
mean?” And once more, “Dear Jane, why does Hello Kitty not have a mouth?” Always, she
would respond, “Because animal.” “Because hurt.” “Because the accidental color red is another
type of resistance.”
It was she who told me once that after having her heart broken, she dived off the
lifeguard station in Coney Island onto a pile of glass. She sustained no physical injury, but the
devastation of the heartbreak—that stayed.
I thought that love felt ordinary to me. At 12, life felt unbearable. I was full of desire but
convinced that no one desired me. We often joke that being queer is like living a second
adolescence, which means that we endure these aches and pains twofold… and always there are
the letters.

*

When D and I first met, we wrote each other constantly. Thirteen miles may mean
nothing to some, but in Los Angeles geographical terms, we were essentially a long-distance
relationship. The emails were long and sprawling, intensely intimate, not because of what was
expressed about our feelings for each other explicitly but the deepening affections we danced
around. We wrote to each other about the noises that surrounded us, my distaste for puns/their
love of them, of water and cellular memory, how devastated I was about my friend’s recent
hospitalization, how good they were at soothing. There was a deep sadness to our writing, which
meant, for us poor trauma bonded fools, that it was also sensual and erotically charged.
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When we would finally see each other, we would watch the sun set and rise from bed,
touching, yes, but mostly, the passage of time was fueled by my questions: Who were you when
you were younger? What do you fear most in your life? What gives you hope? What do you have
in plenty to give to others? I would ask the questions and they would answer, the hours sliding
past us that we would forget to eat, delay going to the bathroom until our bladders became
uncomfortably full and sink ourselves deeper into the mattress.
I forgot myself there.
What comprises queer Asian American psychic life, I’m convinced, is a state of constant
deferral of self until our total abandonment. I had spent most of my life being good, so much so
that it began to accrue a special pain.
At the age of four, my parents told me a lie that I would believe to be true for several
years after. “Did you know that in every family, the daughter marries her brother?” my mother
began. My father, her co-conspirator added, “So it’s your job to marry your brother and take care
of him.”
For a whole night, I laid awake in bed thinking about what it meant to marry, which was
akin to a promise to a perpetual life of care for another. That notion of love bore very little
evidence of romance, but its duty felt sacred to me. I resolved to be the best wife I could,
relinquishing at that young age, any possibility of a future in which I could move through the
world happy and alone, the two states of which could not coexist.
This deferral of self would happen in various stages over the years, in quiet rapidity. It
was easy, after the first abandonment, for the other losses to come. This conditioning
accompanies a particular familial pain, and additionally, its tender ties to the ways in which the
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social scripting of queer Asian Americans across race, gender, and sexuality color our
experiences, only serves to make our psychic lives most legible to everyone else but ourselves.
With so much of ourselves deferred, what is left behind?
Out of the sheer volume of losses accumulated over time, obsession blooms as an
insistent counter. I saw D any moment I could, delirious and in love. I memorized the shape of
their face, the square of their jaw, how they hated the feminine shape of their hips but loved the
softness of their skin. I discovered how to touch them in such a way that their breath fell down
their spine and crept back up again, their forehead pricked with sweat. When I would rest my
face between their legs, lost in the wet dark, I thought, I leave all of myself here.
Rarely do we speak of obsession and queer Asian American psychic life, how this
wanting shapes our interior architecture. How appropriate that Raymond Williams calls this
affective consciousness the “structure of feeling,” referring to the ways in which our
understanding of history is never fully aligned with our emotional and psychic comprehension of
what transpires in real-time.
How could I not see it—the sun setting over D’s face time and time again? And where
did my body go after I hurled myself onto the surface of theirs? Lost, I thought the pool of them
would catch me, but in the end, the veil lifted—everything was glass.
Always, affect is about delay, of experiencing sensations after the fact. Of course, then, it
is always building within us, and always it arrives too late—we are already rearranged.

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D and I spoke of mothers. In a futile attempt at flirting, they had purchased a gallon jar of
kimchi, which they left behind in the summer heat of their car after agreeing to come into my
apartment. They explained later that the purchase was mostly just to buy time, but it was also a
delicious probiotic. I would joke later that only queer Asians would flag interest through
spontaneous H-Mart dates. (Pick up a box of pickled mackerel? They’re a top. Try a lychee
candy sample? Clearly, a bottom.) That night, the tension between us was palpable. I sweated
into the cushions.
Earlier that season, the Pixar animated short, Bao (2018), directed by Domee Shi, had just
come out, and flocks of Asian American friends purchased tickets to the Incredibles 2 just to
watch the eight-minute film. Many said that they watched it multiple times and emerged, in
every instance, weeping. When I asked D about their mother, they spoke about Bao instead,
which was about a Chinese-Canadian mother and her relationship to her steamed bun child who
grew up, as many of us did, moving away from the values and habits our parents so diligently
instilled in us. That individuation could feel like betrayal. In a desperate attempt to possess her
son after he had left home, married someone of another race, and refused her cooking, she ate
him. Though D did not say it aloud then, I knew the point they were trying to make.
Obsession almost does not belong to Asian Americans, let alone its queers, and when it
does, it is often affiliated with a drive towards social ascendency that would make us exceptional
above the rest. The hardworking Asian body, disciplined and without complaint. The studious
and obedient Asian, a compliant cog in the workforce machine. In the racialization of sentiment
in the U.S., Asian Americans are considered unfeeling, robotic, and somehow also futuristic in
this supposed lack of affect. Considered void of positive feelings, Asian Americans have
ascended the emotional murk that others have found themselves mired in—that is, in contrast to
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Black and Latinx communities, marked as hyper-sensual or overloaded with affective substance,
and further removed from white bodies that occupy a more normative emotional range, the
barometer by which everyone nonwhite are to measure themselves accordingly. And though the
racialized conditions of feeling are different among Asian Americans, Black, Latinx, and other
communities of color, Amber Jamilla Musser notes one commonality, which is “the underlying
assumption that black and brown people do not feel, they merely react.”
In Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, she writes about
the archetype of the Asian insensate, how the racialization of Asians and Asian Americans
compels a different engagement with feelings and sensations. At the white ashen heart of this
racialization is the belief that Asians are assimilable, porous as we are to take on everything that
is needed of us by whatever dominant social modalities preside over us at the time.
It is also these dominant social modalities that decided that Asians are heavily repressed,
full of affective backlog. While these ideas pertained mostly to East Asians, the social scripting
for Southeast Asians, South Asians, Filipinx communities, and Pacific Islanders vacillate
between varying degrees of associations with primitivity, the wildness of uncontained feeling.
Despite these variations of associative feelings and their repression, the coalitional identity of
Asian and Pacific Islander as a formalized U.S. census group would suggest a nationalized sense
of our collective affect. Yet, just as our experiences of racialization are dispersed, so our
associative affects do not cohere. Regardless, if this is the script with which we are given, then
how else can we move or feel in spite of them? And are these feelings ever our own?
In trying to console a former white friend who had gotten herself mixed up with yet
another underwhelming white man who, to no one’s surprise, failed to appear before her
emotionally, I asked her questions, trying to create space for her to lay out her feelings about the
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ordeal, which had grown muddier through further description. I could tell she was getting
increasingly agitated, so I stopped talking altogether.
Finally, she blurted out, “You know, you don’t have to be so clinical sometimes.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “I didn’t think I was.”
Looking back, it made sense that our friendship was full of such gaps in understanding.
“What do you need?” I asked her frequently. It was a question that I heard echoed throughout all
my relationships with queer Asian women and femmes. We must have known that our
porousness meant that we were constantly being pried open, projected upon, and so we always
asked first. Indeed, what do you need? But the former white friend could not comprehend the
weight of it, of questions meant to hold and keep open the window of possibilities to decide, to
err, to forgive oneself. And so, it resembled something else.

Musser refers to Patty Chang’s video performance, “In Love” as an example of how
automaticity for Asians and Asian Americans, which is the idea of the “body as mechanical”—
that is, unfeeling or robotic—rather than foreclosing all feeling or sensation, poses a “cleavage
between authenticity and acting.” In her performance, Chang recruits her mother and father as
fellow performers in the intimate act of sharing an onion between them—Chang kissing the
onion in her mother’s mouth, her father biting into the onion in hers. Played in reverse, the onion
is not immediately apparent until the very end where it appears as if the white bulb is being pried
out of them. The video is supposed to incite discomfort as the intimate act of being mouth-to-
mouth with your own parent ignites uncertainty about whether this performance might be
incestuous or something else. The perversion of normative familial roles, Musser argues, is what
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the automaticity of the performance leans into, which begs us to consider what that something
else might be. The performance is anything but clinical—each performer joined in the painful act
of eating a raw onion together, crying involuntarily as they kissed its pungency into each other.
That something once considered sexual could also cause pain and what is at least visually
to the viewer, regarded as sadness in the form of tear shed, is a confusing combination of
feelings, but when we examine the ebbs and flows of our affective life, does this not feel also
familiar?
My mother, for instance, in my early years, would often find me doubled over in tears,
wracked with constipation pain. She became an expert in wrestling me down and sticking a tube
of liquid cold enema up that tender orifice, and though I can recall little of the sensation, I
remember most our closeness, how strange it felt when someone else touched me there for the
first time many years later.
As an adult, I declared that I was going to put a tattoo on my body, to which my mother
decried in return, “Why are you doing this to me?” As if the needle was piercing her body
instead.
It can sometimes feel like there is no separation—a single flesh stretched across a pair of
skeletal forms. When we speak of Asian and Asian American love, let it be known that it moves
beyond duty; the performance of it is no diminutive act. The fingers across my body, pulling me
out; the hands plunging themselves in. All my orifices covered tenderly, achingly. I am not
erased but willfully committing myself. Inevitably, I abandon myself time after time.

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*

The last time I saw D, I thought about the sharpness of obsession, that it could hone a
way of looking at its most brutal particulars. We were laying in my bed, facing each other. For a
while, we were quiet, and then it occurred to us that we were both studying the changes in each
other’s faces. I touched them and allowed them to touch me back—in hindsight, a foolish move,
but I had wanted to remember their softness then and for them to be reminded of mine.
It had been weeks since D called our relationship to an end and flustered and confused
from months of their threats to end us, to tearfully rescind it, and then doubling down on leaving
the next, I waited for what was to follow in the pattern of their dysregulation. I had become so
good at predicting the next upheaval that when the pattern redrew itself, became ever so knotted,
I blamed myself for missing the cues. What good was my deep attention, my devotion to the
pendulum swing of affections from D, if I were to eventually guess wrong?
In the period following my error in assessment, the nightmares came in pulsing waves
that I feared sleeping though I could hardly keep my eyes open when I was awake. I dreamed
about walking through underground mazes, feeling my way through the darkness until finally
arriving at an opening. Once, the dream took me to the center of a meadow where I looked
before me at an empty Earth where everybody I had ever loved had vanished. That one, I woke
up sobbing.
I refused food, felt the bones in my body grow sharp against my skin, which drew so
much concern that a friend, upon seeing my exposed collarbone, gently asked if I had been
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eating lately, nudging a plate of runny eggs my way, and all I could do in response was let my
stomach turn and shake my head.
Being apart from D unearthed many things—the struggle with food and agency over my
body being only one of them. In one of the many instances in which they had tried to end our
relationship, they insisted, “When I imagine my ideal partner, I imagine someone who actually
likes going to the gym.” For weeks after, I went to the gym with a religiosity reserved for the
highest devotees, feeling every part of me harden. Even after their apology, I still wanted to be
near as one would pray for closeness, redemption. Please, God, make me into the version of
someone they could wholly desire. My wants were so meager yet so starved, and I convinced
myself I was not hungry.
Loving them was a reminder of a familiar feeling of uncomfortable fullness within me, in
which I was always brimming with digestive matter and noise, none of which moved.
“It is not good,” a friend counseled, “to love someone so much you’d be willing to sever
a piece of yourself.”
I was tired too of being and feeling victim.
Julietta Singh argues that this idea of the bounded body is a Eurocentric concept in which
body and mind occupies the Cartesian split—two entities that operate along separate paths. How
could it be when our bodies are so leaky, so full of the pain and rattling ecstasy of life that any of
it could stay put? She writes:
In the end, we are not bounded, contained subjects, but ones filled up with foreign
feelings and vibes that linger and circulate in space, that enter us as we move through our
lives. We likewise leave traces of ourselves and our own affective states (which are never
really just our own) behind us when we go… I am fully invested in the conviction that
our bodies and minds are less discrete than we have been led to believe. Bodies and
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minds: I confess, I have already lost the difference between them.”

Perhaps in our porousness, queer Asian American bodies have always known the illusion of our
containers. If we are repressed then perhaps it is a matter of our being too much to begin with, all
the affective vibrancy swimming within us, pouring out.

Without even touching, D and I knew that even the slightest exchange between us had
erased any lines. I could feel it in the way the room shuddered that last day, and the passage of
air. Their mouth, one tight line, full of regret. I knew I loved them desperately, with my whole
body vanquished into them. We made love one last time, our twinned frames, both familiar and
foreign, no longer searching, just lost.
They said wistfully, “You are so beautiful” as if I were already gone.
Laying side by side D, I held two beliefs—one, that mired in catastrophe, the pattern of
us could only mean that we would not last, and the other, recklessly holding on despite that.
Something had altered within me, and I wanted D to see it one last time.
Look at me, I said with my whole body. Look at what you have done. I held myself open
and let them crash into me once more, the reverberations of which I can still feel, even now.

*

It is not good to be obsessed, or so we are cautioned against reveling in excesses. Not
good to want too much or to linger in that want. Obsession begets obsession, the more wanting
more, unsatiated. The best writers, I believed, found themselves unable to turn away from their
feverish subjects; they endured the path, knowing there may never be any resolution.
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Though it sounded like a warning, I heard only this: They endured.

According to Freud and other early psychoanalytic thinkers, obsession precedes you; it
comprises the latent fabrics of your entire being—fixation on mother, on father, genitalia, your
own literal shit. The datedness of these ideas aside, this link between family, the corporeal, and
the erotic life has become central, pervasive even across Western psychology. Within queer
studies, there is a recent reparative turn to psychoanalytic theory, to return to these fraught
concepts and remake them into something that is not injurious. What Heather Love, in
conversation with Sarah E. Chinn refers to as the “dark, tender thrills” of queer life that often
gets unaccounted for. In practice, as you can imagine, this is no easy feat, and the work, still
contentious even among scholars in the field.
Why reinvest in these notions about all the tenuous parts of our psychic life, those of us
prone to misguided diagnoses, coded deviant throughout time? A teacher, Neetu Khanna once
asked what it would mean for us to approach something unfamiliar without immediately
categorizing it as bad or good. “To hold it steady,” she says, is an exercise in studying an object
for all the ways in which it can be mined for its many lives and afterlives. To say, yes, we can
regard this problematic, but then what of it if it intends to stay? What happens if you look away?
It is true then, what they say—can we really know the political utility of an object until we are
ready to consider the full breadth of its impact?
I did not think it would be so hard to withhold, momentarily, vocabulary around social
justice that I had relied on so dutifully for the ease in which I could call violence a violence, the
systems of harm mapped meticulously through language. It is so easy to say, “This hurts me,
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because ___” and refer to the inventory of language around violence that I had amassed over the
years. Not because there is any lightness to this pain but because I have spent so much of my life
without the adequate words that even now, I want to be so absolutely clear.

I have revisited the relationship with D with the same obsession that a writer would take
to revising a manuscript many years in the making. Despite the brevity of the affair, the afterlife
of it carried such volatile intensity that it felt as if the tumult of the relationship had not ended at
all. Obsession has this pallor, of course, concealing beginning and end. The fixation on the object
of desire with complete disregard of oneself.
One day, a friend who also happens to be a therapist asked, “What brought you into the
relationship? What need did D fill?”
I thought about this for a long while, and finally, through sobbing admission, responded,
“I’m scared of being abandoned.” It occurred to me then that D had promised not to abandon me,
an oath, I know now, no one can ensure—its vow already suspect upon delivery. They had
promised this because they needed it too. Upon recognizing this shared fear, the magnitude of
their betrayal felt smaller over time though the fear itself remained.
How thoroughly disconcerting it is then to be told to withhold—to pause and consider my
learned compulsions. To regard obsession as a type of pouring out, not out of recklessness, but to
hone the way in which my words spill into your life, and yours into mine. Withholding, not as a
disavowal of descriptions of violence, but as attunement. I wonder in what ways obsession can
be just that—not turning away but holding someone or something so closely that it sears. In other
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words, a willingness to see beyond the pain, to locate a pathway to something resembling
freedom.
What lies beyond the path of obsession? If it is loss, then let it be so.

*

Once, in a poetry workshop, the instructor assigned us a semester-long writing prompt
based on the documentary, The Five Obstructions (2003) in which controversial filmmaker, Lars
Von Trier tasked his mentor and fellow filmmaker, Jørgen Leth, with remaking one of his short
films, The Perfect Human, five different times, each one with a different constraint issued by
Von Trier that would push Leth to shift his filmic perspective. For his first remake, for instance,
Leth was tasked with setting the film in Cuba with no shot lasting more than twelve frames. In
another, he must make his film into a cartoon. Drawing from this pedagogy of constraints as a
creative exercise, my instructor partnered everyone up and had us issue obstructions for another
writer in the workshop. Each of us, given our set of obstructions, had to rewrite a single poem
several times.
For my first obstruction, I was given the following constraint: Write this poem without
any metaphors. In this early prose poem about birds, threads and bobbins, the slippages of
memory, it was a piece with many metaphorical objects, all that came colliding into one
cacophonous sound. To write it without metaphor was the most difficult obstruction. I had grown
attached to the raucous quality of multiple metaphors, yet as my obstructor pointed out, “To what
extent are the metaphors serving the poem or eliding what’s truly at stake?” It was true that as
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much as I loved the plenitude, the sheer number of superfluous objects, I did not really know
what was emotionally true.
In many beginning poetry workshops, we are taught to excise declarative statements that
plainly stated our feelings: “I feel” or “I want” or “I need.” They are too forward, too naked in
their expressions of desire. Yet these are the statements that I am left with when the metaphors
are plucked clean from the original poem. Undressed, I saw that the poem was not about the
molting of wings but the desire to be my own maker and to undo myself all at once.
I felt small. I wanted to be big. I needed the ability to choose.
The final obstruction was to turn the poem into something else—a not-poem, the opposite
of what it was. After some deliberation, I decided to make a hundred birds—white paper cut into
the same exact winged pattern, sewn into a long scroll of fabric hanging ceiling to floor. From
the fabric, the birds flew out, threaded into the light from which they hung. If you looked closely,
you could see the remainders of the poem printed on the birds, but it did not matter. Every day, I
sewed a new bird, weaving a sorrow I could not name into the softest cover. I was younger then,
so alone, and thought art was all I needed. When I loved, I heaved my whole body into the whirl.
Every day, I thought of dying, and then, through the fury of needle and thread, I revised myself
once more. Nearing the project’s end, I was obsessed with the repetition of the sewing act,
thinking that if I could suture my life just like that, what could I not make or let go? It was the
audacity of the flock that pulled me close. They covered me, and because they stayed, I
surrendered to them too.

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OF OTHER GENRES I MOVE TO FEEL
Although you never asked me to, I did. I wrote.
You. All the women of my very short life. You who raised me. You who came before
her. You who traveled and was lost. You who love so deeply and full of blunders. For you, I
knew I would always be writing.
In a morning writing exercise, Soham Patel asked us to respond to the prompt, “Who do
you write for?” Not what but who. I wrote in the center of my notebook, “YOU” and drew a
circle around it. Is this not what it means to write? To constantly address someone other than
ourselves?
I saw you once, rushing towards me, a gathering of yellow mangoes in your arms. You
would cut those mangoes on newsprint, their sticky pulp amassing on different corners of the
spread. How their juices soaked into everything. I loved the mango sleeves, those cross-
hatchings when sliced one way and then another would offer up square mouthfuls of the fruit.
Love was the cutting of fruit, the presentation of it, however splayed out on floor or porcelain
dish, and the years that followed would give me starfruit, lychee, longan, papaya, apples,
Chinese pears. Because of you, I was never hungry.
In this assemblage of many objects, to write or to gather fruit, I reach towards you, and
when you are not there, your absence gently coursing through and then eventually flooding me, I
let the residue of you pool into a narrative that might relieve me of my grief, its haphazard form
moving between states of coherence.
We do not belong. In every genre of mourning, this reckoning has been tried and true.
Often, I am told that I do not make any sense, and so, the genres in which I write are always
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shape-shifting. I write this to you, because I think you know this too, and we are bound forever
by the moment in which I can no longer imagine first the fruit but the knife that cuts it. This has
always been the texture of my fear. I know this to be yours too.
There was once a time when I thought that the fruits you peeled and sliced for me would
always taste as sweet, and then that day vanished. It then took on the form of a familiar tale.
You might remember. Once, there was a disappearance—Quin-Rong Wu, a girl. She was
eleven years old when I was eight. At P.S.2, my elementary school in New York City Chinatown
where most of my classmates were Chinese, Quin-Rong was part of a new wave of Fujianese
immigrants who had arrived in the city just a year before. She was the middle child of three, and
she attended separate bilingual classes on the upper floors.
I can recall her face in the papers even now, her blunt bowl cut and the smallness of her
teeth when she smiled. The photograph used was recent, taken during one of the mandatory
photo days at school, which no one enjoyed. She had looked so much older to me then, and her
age was so inconceivable, just as my imagination had no way of placing death and dying yet.
The whole story unfolded, day by day. Quin-Rong was last seen by her parents after
being dropped off at school, which was only a block away from where they lived. Witnesses said
they saw her with a white man who, to this day, remains unidentified. He led her away from the
school, strangled her, and left her body in the East River, just two blocks from the school and
right next to your apartment.
The newspapers, both American and Chinese, mostly carefully elided mention of rape,
but from what I could gather from the whispers of school parents and authorities, I learned
gradually of this other tragedy though the how of it was beyond me at that point. To be killed—I
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knew of that horror from my parents’ stories of evading death during the Cultural Revolution in
China though I was several steps removed. To be raped then was an unbearable fact of life.
For a while, I lived with you in the apartment overlooking the East River, and I would
think about Quin-Rong sinking so deep in those waters before being fished out. In the papers,
eyewitnesses reported that the man and the girl were spotted together on a train, that she seemed
in distress and was crying. Although the pairing was notably strange, no one moved to ask
questions or thought it suspicious that a white man would be riding the train with a young
Chinese girl during a school day. It was as if she were to blame for not saying something to alert
the people around her. I wonder who would believe her too, so accustomed, I imagine, to not
being believed or taken seriously, just as I had been disbelieved during my earlier years when I
spoke little English and sometimes was too scared to speak at all. Some hollow part of me knew
with great certainty that had I been where she was, I too would have been frozen shut. I would
have become a pale fish in the water.
All my life, the women have told me to be careful of my body and what it means to be
constantly in danger of violation. Everything I have to tell—slant, by the mere fact of my being.
Sometimes I am told that I lie, cannot keep the through line of a story straight. Even now, in
conveying this to you, I feel the form of my telling become porous with the inexactness of my
memory, not for the details in themselves, but the sensory lives of these past objects through
which I grew to love you.
When I think about the genre in which I speak to you, I mean the container by which the
forms of this writing coagulate, bringing forth the vibrancy of these memories as we leap
together through forgetting and unforgetting, the incongruous truths. There are too the injury-
bearing legacies of one and many, the bloodletting of our assorted histories. There is no lightness
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to genre for us, no fixity by which one category can delineate an absolute account that this or that
happened in such a way. I believe too that when the forms change, just as the waywardness of
our narratives permit them, that the genres that hold them become less defined as well.
In Jacques Derrida’s writing about genre, he toys with the concept of the boundedness of
genre to propose that rather than being inherently susceptible to being altered, they are, by their
own design, “a law of impurity.” That is, that genre’s limits are coupled by the eventual
leakiness of their borders. He argues further, “With the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks
membership, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger
than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is
limitless.” It is this translation from French to English of the statement too, by Avita Ronell, that
conjures this image of the vaginal opening as only one part of the genital organ; the
expansiveness of its interior also comprises the vagina’s whole.
How impossible it is to think of genres and not of bodies, the permeability of our parts.
Years ago, at the park by your apartment, I played until there was dirt on my knees and dress,
tossing my body back and forth through the monkey bars that I did not realize I had to pee until I
let go of the bars, landed, and felt my bladder balloon with new urgency. You were watching my
and cousin too, so when I came to you, my hands pinching my crotch, you sighed loudly and said
I should have gone earlier. You took me to the thin patch of green beyond the chain link fence, to
where the view of children pelting towards the metal dome was slightly obscured. You held my
hands, told me to squat, and relieve myself, and because my aim was less true then, I let the urine
trickle down my legs and into my underwear that was dangling at my ankles.
I looked down when I finished, seeing the whole of my body for the first time.
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“What is that?!” I said incredulously. In all my short life, it did not occur to me to look
down, to probe the pink folds of me, the elaborateness of its design.
You called it my “she she,” which I found out later was the diminutive name in our
family for vagina, used only in the company of children, and it has become the only name I know
for it in Cantonese. It sounded like hush, hush, be quiet though everything poured out of me
loudly and seemingly without end.
To be touched there, for the first time, years later, was a confirmation of all things I
suspected then to be true, which was that some bodies were simply made to be invaded, and that
included mine. This rattling notion was not your fault; warnings about the vulnerability of our
bodies, so Asian and pliable, were what accrued over the years and became lodged so deep in me
that every intimacy felt bright with special pain.
First violation. When a boy first slid his finger inside me—against every repulsion in my
body—there was no sense that any part of me could grow. It was night. The blinds were shut. I
felt myself shrink against him, and his one middle finger, which remained inside for the longest
part of the night, insisted on a greater opening that was not there. When he could not pry me
open, he hovered above me and tried to enter another way, and that pain had a new sharpness to
it too. I suppose I could have opened for him, but then I felt my spirit leave me for a while,
unclear how long it traveled away from me. While I, the stuck part of me, remained there, I
thought of Quin-Rong, the fish in the river, and the silver of water in the darkest part of night. I
knew I was not going to die, though in the moment, I could think of only the sadness of her
passing. I called to her.
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In the stories you told me as a child, of ghosts and spirits of people whose deaths defied
the natural order of the universe, I knew she haunted the living with that awful gift of being part
of the all-seeing, all-knowing afterlife. How I wanted her to witness me, not to save me, but to
mourn together in the silence of knowing that beyond this point, my life would be completely
altered. I don’t know how I knew. I just did. I remember the blood after, but it barely registers as
a fact necessary for this telling. The important thing is this: She did not answer.
I wanted to write to you because I thought the reconciliation of these forms of violation
would make the genre of us clear. Genre, after all, as a means of organizing by similarities in
form, content, and style, suggests that something clearly defined awaits us. The awful truth of
violation is that it transforms the very nature of these contents, and as the vessel for it all, the
genre becomes altered too.
In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong shares her frustration with trying to find the right
form and genre to discuss the subject of racial trauma. She writes, “I never felt comfortable
writing about personal racial trauma, because I wasn’t satisfied with the conventional forms in
which racial trauma is framed.” The problem is this—how to speak to an individual experience
and all its painful particularities while also joining voices with a disparate but occasionally
unified collective identity. For Cathy, the confessional lyric made her pain felt too “singled out,
exceptional” while the realist narrative fiction threatens to “injection-mold my thoughts into an
anthropological experience.” It would seem that there can be no middle ground.
What I garnered from Cathy’s dissatisfaction with form is that the emotional residue of
our experiences plays a major role in the aestheticization of our pain, and that a transgression as
vile as sexual violence layered onto racial trauma would always factor into our artmaking in
some way beyond simply the content of our writing.
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Are we the essay of our collective silence? The poem that mines our self-erasure,
recognizing that some acts of violence are beyond repair? To call this a fiction would be to
suggest that I made all of this up, that you too are a mythological rendering of all these aches and
tender parts of my story. We call any lyrical aestheticization of pain as poetry these days, the
prose poem block eventually, in its insurgency, becoming simply both poetry and prose, and yet,
we know this is an oversimplification for what feels difficult to categorize. To say nothing of it
all then is to let all things die, and I want to be here, insisting with you.
When my friend T and I had lunch with Cathy several years after studying poetry under
her instruction at Sarah Lawrence College, she told us she was working on the essay, “Portrait of
an Artist” on Korean American multimedia writer and filmmaker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
which was part of her then forthcoming book, Minor Feelings.
“Just out of curiosity, what do you know about Cha’s work?” Cathy asked.
“I mean, she’s considered the literary vanguard for Asian American experimental work,
right?” I expressed, and then thinking about the circumstances surrounding the artist’s death,
remarked, “And she is also regarded almost… like a martyr… after what happened to her.”
I had read Cha’s Dictée during my last year of college at Cathy’s recommendation, the
book’s layered play with historical memory and documentation eliding me at the time. It took
years of rereading before I could even begin to understand the reasoning behind the book’s
constellated usage of French and English dictation exercises, Greek mythology, Korean War
accounts, autobiographical content, and more, the references rich and ever abundant. Perhaps
most surprising was that she had done what no other Asian American writer I had seen do before
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at the time, which was to draw from everything and everywhere as if, by consequence of her
assemblage, she made everything fit.
Dictée is Cha’s best-known work for reasons that would become deeply personal to so
many Asian American writers, but her life and career was cut short by her heinous rape and
murder, the account of which Cathy writes about in Minor Feelings. In 1982, security guard and
serial rapist Joey Sanza raped and killed Cha at the Puck Building in New York City, and though
the police were notified of her disappearance, it was not until Cha’s own family embarked on
their search that they were able to find her body. The trial too was prolonged as Sanza was not
indicted for Cha’s murder until 1983 when he was already facing other sexual battery charges in
Florida. The trial did not conclude until 1987 when Sanza was finally found guilty of Cha’s
murder.
It was the discomfort surrounding discussions of her rape and murder that propelled
Cathy to write at length about Cha. For her, the scholarly and artistic merit of Cha’s work had
been taken up by many, but there was a strange silence that overtook the room when the nature
of her passing entered the conversation. Cathy spoke about this in frustration that day we met up,
stating, “You know, I started this essay, thinking about why, of all the scholarship and writing
about Cha’s life, in all the curated exhibits and performances and screenings, no one talks about
her rape and murder.”
It is true that Cha’s Dictée had taken over Asian American literary scholarship over the
past several decades as an experimental and hybrid genre work that became emblematic of a
movement in Asian American and women of color cultural production of the 1980s. Yet despite
the work’s alignment with major radical developments in gender and race discussions of the
time, the circumstances of Cha’s death, as Cathy noted, always seemed to evade critical
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engagement. When Cathy sought answers as to why Cha’s rape and murder was never discussed,
she was offered different reasons ranging from a desire “not to sensationalize her story” from
Berkeley Art Museum curator, Constance M. Lewallen and another scholar’s desire “to
accommodate the personal in her work in a different way than a traditional biographical read.”
While Cathy acknowledged that all of these responses were valid, one had to wonder then what
would make this tragic part of Cha’s story relevant to the discussion of her art. To what point
was personal removal preserving the sanctity of her art? When does it become a means of
omission?
It is difficult to read Dictée without the specter of her rape and murder informing the
interpretation of her work. Perhaps this is my own insistence to say that the biography of Black
women and women of color—in this case, an Asian American woman—becomes a part of their
work by product of their omission. There is a power to haunting, to being haunted, as if
providing witness to their violation, to our collective grief, even beyond death.
In one segment, Cha describes through sentence and line fragments, the intimate
relationship between history, language, and the body. While this discourse is not exceptional to
Dictée, Cha’s rumination on silence, not as a void but as an insurgent practice, seems to eerily
foreshadow the length of her life and haunting over these pages. She writes, “Rain dreams the
sounds. The pauses. Exhalation.” And then denoting the passage of time, “There. Then. Years
after.” There is no specific context to this segment though the earlier mentions of Cha’s
relationship to the Korean War and the brutalities of racism, xenophobia, and sexism echo
throughout the book (another haunting). The fragments alone offer pieces of a scene—the rain,
the static of an image, the punctuation and spaces of a page. “Bite the tongue,” Cha commands,
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“Until there would be no more organ./ No organ. Anymore.” And then she instructs by means of
describing a noise: “Cries,” and upon my fourth or fifth reading of this, I wept.
What has stayed with me when it comes to this passage is the resonance of silence—as
once connected to audible human speech, to virtual noise and the digitized sound, to language on
the page. Here, Cha seems to be alluding to the capabilities of multiple forms and genres as a
means of foreshadowing one’s fate, to transcend the bounds of silence as merely dead noise. I
think of how static is not merely silence but a perpetual stream of noise despite its wordlessness,
and how the digitization of sound, through playback, loops, and reverberations seem to only
highlight the beginning of what is capable through multimedia forms of artmaking. This passage
is the analog interpretation of the various media in which Cha works, a translation of her many
source materials under this discussion of what constitutes silence.
In concluding this segment, she indicates these imperatives: “Void the words” and then
“Void the silence.” I imagine this juxtaposition of words and silence is meant to betray their
opposition. In the event of her death and the horrific circumstances surrounding it, these
imperatives seem to transcend the bounds of the forms and genres of the text and reverberate
through what we know of her life and her art, the two necessarily intertwined. If the sequence of
the imperatives implies that the emptying of everything, even silence itself, can yield a third
option, then what else can we surmise but that Cha has been figuring a path beyond death, which
includes unknowingly perhaps, at the time of her writing, her own.
What has felt especially evocative about Cha’s writing on language and silence is
something that I sense all Asian women and femmes know, which is that silence has body and
rushes with blood. That this lesson first began with you is no coincidence—we who are bound
forever by these marks of transgression.
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While squatting on the ground, I heard your voice say, “You must not let anyone touch
you there.”
The sun broke out from the trees that day, and as I looked up, I felt the swirl of my body
beneath it. Where I once thought I was impenetrable, the warning, upon delivery, eroded that last
sanctity of touch. I wanted to void myself then and there.
That my first reading of Dictée coincided with my politicization in college was no
coincidence. While the conversations around identity-based organizing flourished in student of
color spaces that I was part of, the classroom was a different matter. At Sarah Lawrence College
where the campus was predominantly white, the classroom was always a place of deep
negotiation—how to express one’s fury and when, to say nothing at all to preserve one’s energy
in response to an offensive comment, to search the room for commiseration and recognition, and
more often than not, feeling absolutely alone. The writing workshop was no exception as it
continues to be thought of as a politically neutral space in which all experiences are easily
collapsible into a singular, universal whole. In other words, every poem, flash fiction, or short
story passing through there was to be filtered through a white and U.S. centric lens. If it does not
fit through this narrow scope, then it simply could not be.
In Cathy’s poetry workshop, to my relief, we encountered something different. We read
Black writers and writers of color whose aesthetics ranged from the confessional lyric to more
experimental forms such as Wanda Coleman, Robert Hayden, Patricia Smith, Myung Mi Kim,
M. NourbeSe Phillips, and many more. In our very first class, she had us read Reginald
Shepherd’s essay, “On Difficulty in Poetry” and challenged us to think about the different modes
in which poetry can operate—how some of us may choose to elucidate a truth while others
believe in its instability and thus may choose another means of conveying their message. Like
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every good undergraduate workshop, the driving force of Cathy’s pedagogy was to try, and as
such, I was always frustrated when the same effort to read and comment on my work was not
returned to me by my other white classmates, a complaint I shared with other Black students and
classmates of color. It made me sharp and brutal at times when it came to written feedback. All
over my dorm bed were often pages overflowing with black inked comments. However, as
verbose as I was on page, I often seethed quietly throughout the course of the workshop.
At the same time, I was also grieving many parts of my life though I did not recognize it
as mourning then. At the start of my first year of college, my father was just months from dying
from Stage IV pancreatic cancer. That year, you drove me to Yonkers where you helped me
move into my dorm room, my brother Kent holding my rolled-up comforter in the backseat.
Looking around at the happy white faces of the campus, the families all gathered on the
lawn spanning across multiple dorms, to haul large pieces of Ikea furniture into the old buildings,
we felt small, out of place, and alarmingly Asian. Before you left, you held me close and planted
a kiss on my cheek. We did this so infrequently and yet the hardness of your back felt so
familiar, the sharpness of your cheekbone as it brushed against mine. You said, “It’s going to be
just us now.”
In the years following Quin-Rong’s death, the memory of her murder seemingly seemed
to fade from public memory. In the few accounts I have read about her homicide, some even
speculated that Quin-Rong’s parents could have been lying about their daughter’s disappearance,
that they were behind their daughter’s death after all. One commenter made note of a New York
Times article that stated that Quin-Rong’s mother walked her daughter to school that morning
and kissed her before parting. They said that it was very unlikely because Chinese mothers just
do not kiss their children.
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Second, third, fourth, and the many after—I have lost count of the number of violations.
At the start of college, I parted ways with my then boyfriend. Before I knew what it meant to be
sexually abused, I was simply “not okay” in my body or my head. Often, I would feel sick when
with him. Sometimes I thought I wanted to die. And sometimes I tried to. These were the
experiences that preceded language, lodged so deep inside me until it became an illness. No
language but an absence. What did you warn me of? Did I listen? All I knew was the relief I felt
when he and I finally parted.
Still. The compounding of this assorted grief tumbled into a reckoning with both my
voice and my silence. Cathy’s workshop came and went, my rage solidified into stone. In the
student evaluation for my final workshop with Cathy, she wrote a very supportive review of my
performance in her class, thoughtfully recapping my early writing about familial strife in her
feedback. She also wrote that while I had a lot of incisive ideas in my critical writing, she wished
that I had “spoken up more in class.”
The evaluation was more than fair, but I recall a visceral reaction to Cathy’s words. I felt
that I was singled out for critique, which seemed personal at the time, even if conveyed towards
the tail-end of a document that was largely complimentary. I had presumed a number of things
too based upon our shared recognition as Asian women in an academic space. Surely, Cathy
must have known what I knew, being one of the few faculty of color on campus, how difficult it
was to speak up, that we always had to seek other means of expression. It did not occur to me
until later that perhaps that critique was intended to be intimately conveyed as I suspected, but
also that rather than reprimand, it was a cautionary message about the double-bind of my silence.
Do not opt out, she seemed to be saying. Speak up. Do not get trampled.
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Years later, Cathy and I would be sitting outside the Pub on campus as I sought her
advice about applying for graduate school in creative writing. When I asked her about the
University of Iowa, her graduate school alma mater with a notoriously competitive creative
writing program, she counseled that she would not recommend it for students of color due to her
own difficult experience there. “But you’re tough,” she considered after some thought. “You
could do it.”
Perhaps I aim to argue here that the question of genre is more about a desire to know how
much it can bear. Every genre, abundant in its forms that it possesses the history of its every
making. I wonder sometimes if a poet upon completing a poem ever thinks of their work this
way, that by calling it a poem, it now belongs in a legacy of other poems, the standards by which
future poems would always compare, draw from, and cite. Each poem, slightly shifting the
notion of a poem until generations later, it becomes the most significant drop in the sea of
everlasting poems that no longer resemble each other but which we recognize immediately as
water.
A friend used to say, “Who are we if we are not destined to forever be changing?” And I
think the same with this impulse to embrace the full weight of a genre, to demand the utmost of
its forms. It is the destiny of a genre—to learn, adapt.
My first therapist as a teenager about to head to college insisted often on this ability to
adapt. Carol, a soft-spoken white woman with a home office in Forest Hills, was an early internet
find, one of the few who worked with youth nearby and offered a sliding scale fee. I admit that I
spent very little time searching, not knowing what I was looking for, except that several days
before, I had told you that I wanted to end my life based on something that I can barely
remember in hindsight.
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You asked me, “Is this really necessary?”
I told you, “Yes.”
In the sessions that followed, I would always tell Carol about my frustration with the
notion of adaptation. I was frustrated with the world and wanted to know why the onus should
fall on me to adapt to it.
“How can you manage?” she asked often until the question became almost a trigger.
Traditional therapy models that center individual actions and consequences have this way
of limiting the social scope by which one lives and which a genre comes to be made. Why alter
myself? And could the question instead be, What the fuck is wrong with this world?
To bear depression, the paleness of self-harm, and the weight of sexual trauma unspoken.
What vessel deserves this? What genre can possess the dispersal of these injuries, which seem
only to shapeshift across time into something new, unrecognizable, and sometimes just as
devastating as the original site of violence?
While the sessions offered more frustration than balm, I stayed, at a loss of what else to
do though Carol insisted on the plenty. One day, I was pummeling model clay on her coffee
table. Another, I wiped charcoal across a white page. At the end of each session, I would pull a
crumpled twenty-dollar bill out of my backpack, savings from many Lunar New Years passed.
I stopped seeing Carol abruptly. A flurry of flimsy excuses. I was too busy. I was no
longer sad. In fact, I was cured, or so I led myself to believe. To admit that I failed at the one job
I had, which was to be happy and healed felt too much at the time.
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The last thing I sent her was a packet of my poems, all which she praised for their clarity
and depth. There was no more clay to pound, no more oil pastels waiting for me at her home
office. It was just talk now. Again, “How are you managing?” I sent her poems because I was
not.
“I’d love to talk with you about them,” she said over the phone.
I thought about it for a while before sharing, “I’m… okay.” Carol and I never spoke again
after that.
You never asked about each session though you knew that Tuesdays and sometimes
Wednesdays would come, and I would arrive home a little later. When I announced that I was no
longer seeing Carol, the relief on your face could not be mistaken for anything else.
“So, you’re feeling better?” you asked cautiously.
“Yes,” I lied.
If you asked me how I came to writing, I would joke that like most writers, I was
compelled by a certain misery and a desire to make it emotionally legible. The specificity of this
design did not become clear until college when the language of race and gender politics gave a
more expansive vocabulary for this pain, but even so, the doubt of these earlier experiences still
linger.
Some years later, I would see a new therapist, Susan. With the rare gift of graduate
student insurance, I had viable access to a therapist for the first time without worrying about how
to pay for each session. I found Susan from a short list of women of color therapists I asked for
from the school’s health resources department and was drawn to her after reading an article she
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penned for a project for and by survivors of intimate partner violence. It was not only the
familiarity of her personal experiences that drew me but what she shared of her experience by the
article’s end in which she declares, upon leaving a violent relationship, that she realized “there is
something that is so beautiful about pain because it transforms you.”
During one session, I asked her, “What do you do, in fact, when things become
unbearable?”
Susan has a kind face that seemingly never seems to reveal any bias or judgment.
Sometimes I look at her and wonder what it would be like to hear her talk about her pain instead
of listening to mine. That day, she responded to my question with another, “Do you feel that
things are unbearable now?”
I considered. “No.”
In fact, I remember that day was warm, and in her office in Pasadena, I knew my car
would be sun-baked. I would drive home after, bathed in desert light. Earlier, Whitney Houston
played on the radio, and as my personal superstitions went—anytime Whitney played, it was a
guaranteed good day.
Susan rarely offered more directed advice, usually opting for questions and attention to
mindfulness, a concept with which I struggled. That day though, she said to me, “We never know
what we can bear until we arrive there.”
She spoke it so softly and with a look of utter sweetness that I nearly missed its
despairing message. If she intended to say that we have only the uncertainty of this life, then it
barely feels sufficient. Yet these were also the words that buoyed me. I would wait for that
moment to arrive, when my body could no longer hold the weight of its histories, but this
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attention to the particularities of my pain only clarified what once persisted in the murk. It was
not perfect, but it would do for now.
It is a privilege to consider yourself in the present with the anticipation of a future. Years
would go by and Quin-Rong’s death remains unsolved though the specter of her passing looms
over all of us who bore witness. When I start to lose sight of where my pain would begin and
end, I think of ghost girls who would give anything to feel their thighs stick to the seats of their
car, to drive with the window down, feeling the dry wind of this other coast. I imagine Quin-
Rong’s yearning for her life, and what I feel is something far from gratitude for mine, but that
our proximity means I am forever indebted to her, my life and her life, the perpetual and
irreconcilable audacity of our Asian American existence.
Our wants are so simple—we do not want to belong; we only want to be.
I write this to you so you can understand, and because without this, it would only appear
as blame. In fact, blame consists of many forms, directed inward and out. I do not want you think
that the contours of my shame necessitate your failure. I only want you to think of the
boundedness of our fates, that even when our genres split, I hold you close as you do with me.
Every strife demands the capaciousness of a genre and its forms with the gumption that it
can possess them all. This lie that we tell ourselves about the ability to control, to write and make
art within the confines of some predetermined limits, holds only for a moment until the porous
matter of our grief inevitably leaks out.
Who we are and what comprises the genre of our telling as Asian American women and
femmes seem always to fall into a pattern of denial, this disbelief that this art can do anything at
all. This attention to genre and its forms, particularly the confusion of genres, the disorientation
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of their composition and elisions, is at once part of an old question about the political
responsibilities of art and the vitality of Asian American women and femme cultural workers, the
storytellers and story keepers among us.
It is no coincidence that hybrid genre work has found a new resurgence, wearing a
proudly declarative label in recent years, with the majority of its efforts advanced by artists of
color. The relationship between history and art movement compels us to imagine new methods to
respond to the chaos of our century. Hybrid genre work, in particular, is a way of naming the
inexactness of each genre’s borders just as the borders of our world become increasingly
contested, these notions of nationhood growing fraught under the auspices of neoliberal
capitalism and globalization. What this means for Asian American women and femmes who are
makers, activists, and artists is hard to trace without generalization of a whole body of
experiences, but the hybrid genre echoes enough of that shared strife that it begins to offer some
framing.
For Jenny Boully in Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, the notion of the
hybrid offers a third option beyond the material consequences of having to identify with a single
genre. She compares the pressure to “choose” a genre as one that seems to inflict the same
conflict as the Equal Opportunity Employment sheet she had to complete as part of the academic
job market process. She describes the uncanny similarity between hybrid genre work and being a
mixed-race person. Checking a single box on a form that is supposed to indicate your race and
ethnicity when you embody multiple can only get you partway to the truth and selecting the
option for “Other” removes the possibility that you can be many identities at once.
Boully argues, “The term ‘other’ also immediately connotes an agenda: if you don’t fit
into one of our predetermined categories, well, you aren’t playing the game correctly. You are an
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other. You will always be an other.” To defy categorization is also to defy the set expectations
for how one behaves at any given time. The same goes for the work of genre in which we
suppose of it many formal standards, sorely disappointed when our notions are challenged.
Boully’s point also illuminates what artists of color already know, which is that genres
and forms are always raced and gendered. That mainstream craft discussions still try to divorce
these social concerns from the practice of art is mind boggling against the mountain of proof that
we exist as we are, and we must write as such. Perhaps this effort to separate the two is, in
reality, an attempt to dilute the potency of artists of color, particularly those who are queer,
transgender, disabled, and most susceptible to state and everyday violence, and the value of the
work we make with our vulnerable bodies.
This insistence—that we must insist at all—on the ways in which genres and forms are
raced and gendered come with the consequences of judgment. Any discussion of identity politics
in the realm of craft is often considered too much already, superfluous even, and a defiance of
this belief is to present as less knowing, amateurish even, for suggesting that the substance of
one’s life, the imagination of it, deeply informs the technical execution of one’s art. In the
introduction to an issue on queer forms for ASAP Journal, Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser,
and Roy Pêrez codes this supposed tension between identity politics and aesthetics as the
assumption of naivety. They express that on the contrary, this connection provides a necessary
gateway for social change: “To speak of the world-making capacity of aesthetic forms is not a
willful act of naivety (though such acts of unknowing have their own value), but a way to keep
critical practice vital and resist the downward pull of political surrender.”
Once, I laid down beside a friend who had tried to end her life more than once. I held her
hands and I brushed her hair, wanting the essence of my life to pour into hers that she might
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regain some will to keep on. It felt hypocritical after contemplating similar thoughts about my
own life, how selfish it seemed to force my own life-insistent agenda onto hers, but there is no
greater sense of urgency of one’s life than the moments you are trying to convince someone else
to live.
“Do you want to list with me?” I asked her. I rubbed her back. “What would you miss
most if you were gone?”
She did not answer, so I listed mine for her.
Mine: the deep orange ripeness of mangoes, sex, the water, the colors inside a dream,
salsa verde, honey and salt, petting the soft pink lower belly of a dog, a well-executed joke,
laughter that stifles the saliva in your throat, the aliveness of being held moments before falling
asleep, stories, cutting garlic, the 7 train as it slowly crawls past Five Points, Lucille Clifton’s
“won’t you celebrate with me?,” Faiz Ahmed Faiz who wrote, “Don't leave now that you're
here— /Stay. So the world may become like itself again,” my love wearing the shirt I made for
him, my love keeping my letters safe inside a box, my love making a makeshift tables out of
cardboard boxes when we had no furniture to eat on and packing the books inside them the next
day, the end of that love and beginning another, the ability to love again at all, being able to write
this to you, you calling at odd hours of the day, you pretending to have read this, you never
saying “Good job” but only “I worry about you,” your worry, you.
I see the field of genre, its wide expanse, which is not to say that at times, the lines do not
close in on me.
In Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir,
Kai Cheng Thom’s fabulist take on the conventional memoir, the book’s traversal of many
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genres disrupts the socially normative expectations of narratives from transgender writers,
particularly that which seeks out the telling of pain and trauma from trans femmes. An unnamed
protagonist, a young trans girl leaves the city of Gloom for the City of Smoke and Lights where
she encounters a new community of transwomen to help her navigate the treacherous terrains of
a racist and transphobic society. The speculative quality of the plot and characterization bears a
close resemblance to reality, and that proximity suggests that what we know about fiction,
memoir, fairytale, the bildungsroman, the novel, all of which is both suspect and vital.
In the City of Smoke and Lights, the protagonist is listening to Rapunzelle, another
transwoman, who tells her about her first encounter with her lover, Kimaya. Rapunzelle relays to
the protagonist the time she injected herself with Lost, a drug akin to heroin by its dizzying
descriptions, which sent her into a bad spell. The trip sent her stumbling through the club where
her flesh felt as if it was melding into different shapes. Suddenly, Kimaya intervened from the
crowd and held on despite Rapunzelle’s flailing. When Rapunzelle finally came to, she asked
Kimaya why she held on, to which her love replied, “because you’re worth holding onto.”
In this resonant moment of kinship, two transwomen reach for each other in the crowd in
a gesture known intimately through the constant striving for survival. While shared identity and
experiences of vulnerability make the basis of a connection, what follows is just as important,
which is how one decides to hold the other and for how long.
To declare a genre as fact, as if it bears no other histories and inflections, is a denial of
the ways in which we create and transform a genre through affinity. Before we have language for
it, feelings of affinity—why we move towards some, are wary of others—root us in ways of
existing that may be trivialized through the oppressive mechanisms of the world. To want to be
close, to pursue it without certainty of what it may bring, is affective knowledge that constitutes
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any part of genre making—an amalgam of material realities and the compulsion to make sense of
it through the creative vehicle most available to us. It is never vacuous; it is merely a way out.
Although you never asked me to, I write this to you, what you may already suspect to be
true. What I know about my life, I learn through the pursuit of a genre that will carry me for a
while. And through my engagement with it, I leave these imprints of you and me, and beyond
that, nothing is certain. I know the bounds of a genre, its ecstatic life. Everything it can possibly
hold. And there, I find you, in the hopes that you can find me too.

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BETWEEN THE GHOST AND HER GRAMMAR

What haunts me is not always apparent. When I first learned of the word “apparition,” I
remembered it through the way it sounded like “appear,” and then I would conjure its opposite.
To make a ghost is always a lesson in grammar. And despite having studied its ghastly lexicon, I
admit there is still so much that eludes me.
My first ghosts were pale, white; we call them jiangshi, hopping corpses dressed in Qing
dynasty mandarin garb, their hair braided down their backs. As the dead, they remain in rigor
mortis even in their reanimated state, their limbs locked so that they cannot bend, can only hop,
their arms outstretched stiffly before them, directing their way. After my aunt told me stories
about them as a cautionary tale, I dreamed of them constantly—the shuffle of their cloth shoes
hitting the gravel when their feet landed with each hop, somehow still outpacing me at every
turn. Then I was cornered, their long, sharp nails lengthening against my throat.
My mother shook her head when I told her about those nightmares. “What’s there to be
afraid of?” she said. “They’re just trying to find their way home.”
There are multiple versions of the origin story behind the jiangshi. Some say they were
born out of a time when migrant workers passed away far from home and had to be reanimated
so that their corpses could return for proper burial. Another version of this involved tales of
grave robbers and thieves. Each a morbid construction of how a body can will itself beyond the
veil of this life.
It is often this in-betweenness that lies at the basis of our fears, I believe. Not the shape of
the ghosts themselves, but that they belong neither to this life nor the realm of afterlife far
removed from this plane. Cast out.
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When I learned to stop being afraid, my ghosts simply became the sad embodiments of
once-people who stalked the earth, seeking reprieve. In this way, I recognize that the flesh and
breath and waking of us also live in this in-between—sometimes unwilling conduits between the
restless afterlife and the quiet belly of a long passing. And so, when asked if I believe in ghosts, I
always reply affirmatively, “Of course.” It is the least I can do.
It is not a far stretch to say then that as writers, the work we do bears a strong
resemblance to that of mediums. To conjure forth something from the in-between. Which is to
say that it is not easy. Which is also to say that one has to, through the sheer force of their belief,
reach across the linguistic folds, to sift through the many worlds of structure and meaning, to
find the ghost waiting there.
In the prose poem, I often find the ghosts within the sentences of the hybrid form. It
should come as no surprise that the prose poem, itself a form that exists in the in-between, is a
place that glows bright with spectral substance.
The prose poem, which goes by many definitions, possesses at some points the parataxis,
a linguistic term derived from the Greek word that means “arranged side by side.” As its origin
implies, the parataxis arrives in the prose poem often as a series of sentences, fragments, or
images that follow one after the other, seemingly unaffiliated with the content of the one
preceding it. Yet, read next to each other, they total into a sum meaning, of which the reader
derives by looking at the prose poem in full. For instance, “I erase” alone means something is
done once without object. Followed by statements like “I regret” and “I steal it back” and the
totality of the stacking motion suggests that the sentiments of erasing, regret, and having stolen
back something which has been lost to you, are all conjoined sentiments.
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In fact, I do erase. I regret it all the time. Perhaps you know of this instinct too. Perhaps I
lost some part of myself in the process of erasing. In the face of some immeasurable loss, it can
feel like something has been taken from me. In my grief, I wish there was something to retrieve.
Even as I write all of this, I am gesturing to the ways in which three statements can conjure a
lifetime of interpretations.
However, it is not just the accumulation of sentences that helps us arrive at the sum
meaning. The space between the sentences haunts too. These ghostly sutures between
sentences—the accidental product of poetic and prosaic elements colliding. If parataxis refers to
the cognitive leaps we make between sentences, fragments, and images, then it also means that
something is crossed, or passed over.
In reading Jennifer S. Cheng’s House A, the crossing is both literal and metaphorical. A
hybrid collection comprised of three parts, the first being a set of epistolary prose poems
addressed to former Chinese Communist leader and founder of the People’s Republic of China,
Chairman Mao Zedong, House A echoes Gaston Bachelard’s idea of “A house of dream-
memory” in its framing—prose poems that shapeshift between a body of water, another land, a
house, a memory, a dream. It may not be immediately apparent why Cheng opens the book with
familiar address to “Dear Mao” as if he was a friend and not a historical Communist figurehead
whose politics continue to transform China and much of the world to this day. As the letters
progress, it becomes gradually clearer that while Mao has certainly impacted the speaker’s
relationship to China and her family’s immigration to the U.S., the narrative extends beyond him.
Within these letters, the speaker speaks of her body, her relationship to mythology and the
violence of men, bodies of water and the mimicry of them through language, the memory of her
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mother, a house that exists as a set of peopled memories, a longing for a home that exists as this
very set of peopled memories.
The epistolary prose poems addressed to Mao are perhaps the most haunted pieces in
House A as they course through multiple moments in history, geographical space, and time.
Within them, Cheng spells out the purpose of this project’s hybrid form:

Narrative, as we know it, is an essential marker in childhood development. A
child achieves story grammar around the same age that she learns her body as
her own; before that, people are an interconnected sea. We all long for
narrative.
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In this assertion, the longing for a narrative precedes us. It is no coincidence that our relationship
to our identity, our body, and our ability to create a story out of all of this existed as an impulse
long before we arrived at our ability to do so. This longing, Cheng argues, is something we still
long for, especially those of us tethered to a diasporic narrative, an immigrant one, any
fragmented plot of historical or political upheaval that has brought us here.
This definition of narrative also brings us to where the gaps exist within the prose poem.
The prose poem is rarely linear, and even when it is, the linguistic and emotional disruptions
within it creates an unexpected turn that delivers us into something unfamiliar, but which opens
us up to something new. I suppose this is the potency of narrative that Cheng speaks of, which is
specifically the power of pre-narrative longing that drives us here.
Perhaps it is that Mao himself is a ghostly figure throughout these prose poems—he is
both there and not there. His image and his ideology, dubbed Maoism, persist long after his
passing, after all, rendering his impact appropriately haunting, from the ideas that led to the

53
Cheng, Jennifer S. House A. (Omnidawn, 2016): 20
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formation of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge to the Nepalese revolutionary movement, the many trails
of violence in their wake. For Cheng, the proliferation of his image has this ripple effect on her.
His most explicit appearance comes at the end of the section, a memory of having “traveled
northward one summer to an unnamed place and stood staring at a portrait of a man.” Given the
social and historical contexts that Cheng has offered in flashes, it is safe to assume that the
unnamed place is China, and that the portrait is of Mao presiding over Tiananmen Square. It is a
politically loaded site, chockful of symbolic and literal violence, still radiating with the aftermath
of the student protests of 1988 that led to Chinese army tanks running over a protestor. It
happened here, where Cheng does not name, and this anonymity that gains its recognition
through sideways gestures allude to the affective weight of such sites; the specifics do not matter,
only that the event’s aftermath still permeates. In this way, the prose poems are about and not
about Mao at all.
In fact, the prose poems beam with the most vibrancy in the gaps that parataxis creates. In
one of the prose poems, Cheng opens, “For we each live within our own language, some more
literally than others, and mine is fractured into categories of intimate or functional, hard-pressed
or textured, but never something without knots and gaps.” It seems Cheng’s speaker is aware that
the formal practices of the prose poem provide something that allows her to elucidate her own
language, precisely for their “knots and gaps,” what is necessarily complicated and what is
omitted from the purview. As if to enact these moments of complexity and omission, she goes on
to provide a series of seemingly unconnected images: sewing shadows to make a home, brother
napping on the couch, the speaker talking and dreaming to herself, the father putting up wood
beams around the houseplants. Between each of these images, a gap exists, relying on the
weighted symbols of each moment to relay the prose poem’s principal assertation, which is that
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some of our experiences compel an unconventional inventory of our lives, just as she had to do
with hers.
If parataxis is this quiet opening through which these prose poems’ sideways
contemplation of a life after immigration, diasporic longing, and the looming gaze of history
emerge, then is it safe to say that something within the prose poem pierces the veil between
worlds, such that we are led to believe that our lives, as much as our afterlives, are more porous
than they seem? To make an inventory of this porous matter then is to provide a temporary sense
of order through which we can look at each of these passing items in sequence.
If I am to make an inventory of my hauntings as Cheng does, then it will look like this:
1. Before my grandfather passed away, I saw it happen. Years before his death, he
disappeared from the house where he was watching over me. I searched for him in every
room. Finally, I stepped outside to the garage, its door left open. I called to him. No
answer. A sharp panic pulsed through my body. I made my way up the ladder to the attic,
which were flimsy pieces of wood that wobbled. As I ascended the steps, I felt the cold
rush of a wind that nearly knocked me down. It was my grandfather’s voice that pulled
me up. There he was, sitting cross-legged in the attic. “I thought I lost you!” I cried out.
He shook his head as if to say, Where else would I be? Content with myself, I eventually
made my way back to the house. It was summer and sticky hot, so I took my sweet time.
When I shut the screen door behind me, I was shocked to see my grandfather there in the
kitchen, preparing dinner. “Where have you been?” he said, annoyed. I told him I was
looking for him in the garage. He was there, was he not? He insisted that he had been in
the house the whole time.
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2. Once, as a young child, I felt my bladder fill up to the point of discomfort during a long
drive home with my family. When my parents pulled into the driveway of our house, I
rushed to a covered part of our garden where nothing grew. With my pants at my ankle
and my parents in the near distance, I looked up. There was a wooden and metal awning
overhead with enough of an opening to reveal a bright and clear moon. On nights like
these, the fireflies glowed exceptionally bright. They surrounded me. When I finished
relieving myself, I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The air grew especially
cold. I felt the presence of a squatting shadow mimicking me from behind, its familiar
shape wanting to be close. Something told me not to look back, and so, I bolted out of the
garden and into my house. That summer, the covered garden grew lush and green for the
first time in years, and tiny sour grapes hung over the awning. I would pluck the grapes
from their vines to taste them, and each time, my mother slapped them out of my hand.
“Dirty,” she said. “Don’t eat them.” One day, I walked to the spot where I had pissed, and
there was a white flower growing among the green. No sign of the crouching shadow.
Just me in the slices of yellow light pouring through the awning cracks. What a strange
gift. I whispered to myself, but perhaps someone else was listening, “I did that.”
3. A year after my father’s passing, I found a disposable camera hidden in the back of my
closet where I had stored my high school ex-boyfriend’s paraphernalia. It took me a
while to remember what it was used for, and then I recalled the day he made me strip
down and took pictures me of me in the nude, all flesh and dripping from the bath water
where I emerged. Suffice it to say, I was unhappy throughout it all, and unwilling, but
that was of no consequence to him. I took a hammer to the camera. I swept those shards
into the trash. Feeling somewhat victorious over my past, I left the house to pick up my
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brother at my cousin’s place where he had mastered three levels of Dance Dance
Revolution and was soon ready to leave. When I returned home, the files and papers from
the locked closet of our house spilled out into the hallway. The drawers from every
bedroom were yanked out, some angry ghost searching for something lost. Sensing
something was wrong, I told my brother to wait outside but he stormed ahead to the
basement. “Come back here!” I yelled. I followed him to the top of the stairs. There was a
brief silence before he came rushing back up. I grabbed his shoulders. “What did you
see?” He held up three fingers. “I see… three men.” Taking his hand, I yanked him back
into the car where we drove around the block, my fingers dialing one number after the
other. As it turned out, the backdoor was broken open, the wood splintered around the
locks. The police would not consider the testimony of an autistic boy. They turned to me
instead. “Do you have a boyfriend?” they questioned. “Could it be an ex-boyfriend who
did this?” In my shame, I thought of the plastic shards of the camera still sitting in the
trash. I could not excise him after all.
4. As is Chinese Buddhist custom when someone dies, we open the doors to our home
where the departed once lived, letting their spirit go free. Before my father’s burial, we
opened our front door and waited in the car. In the silence, I heard the soft footsteps of
someone reluctantly making their way home.
5. “I’d like to leave the country,” Monica said. “Paris, Cambodia, anywhere but here.” It
had been a year of many losses. On a park bench, the sun melted the ice of our drinks.
We had barely broken a sweat from our hike, throughout which she had expressed that
academia does not know how to handle grief. I listened and wholeheartedly agreed. “I
don’t know what to do,” she continued. “I’ve done everything I can. I’m trying.” On her
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face, I saw the signs of fury and exhaustion. I told her, “I don’t think the point is that any
of this means we forget our grief. How can we forget? It outlives us. I think it just means
we go on, and hope that something shifts. Something is shifting. You must know that.”
She touched her heart, and without saying anything, I knew she was expressing, “Yes.”
Just then, a butterfly flew overhead and settled between us. I pointed. “Butterflies are
visitations from the dead, I think.” Monica nodded, “I think so too.”

If parataxis refers to the disconnection of sentences and ideas that compound, then its
opposite, hypotaxis, follows a sense of sequential order by contrast. Hypotaxis hinges upon a
main clause upon which subsequent ideas and sentences follow. By comparison, hypotaxis
occurs more frequently than parataxis, but like all grammatical structures, each serves a distinct
purpose of which a user will knowingly or unknowingly carry out or reinvigorate. There is
nothing inherently radical about parataxis, but its usage here and here, imbued with meaning by
the user, suggests that all grammatical forms can be reinvented, repurposed, and made anew.
This renewal of possibility seems to be the antithesis of being ghost. If haunting
presumes a stuckness, an inability to move on, then experimentations with grammar seem to
trouble the order of the languaging world; that is, what has felt immovable is perhaps a little
uprooted now. And perhaps this is precisely the definition of haunting—it has always been a
portal elsewhere.
Cheng’s House A, for all its traversal on the page, its preoccupation with the geographies
of a childhood home in Texas all the way to Tiananmen Square, has very little account of actual
physical movement. If anything, her recollection of specific memories propels these shifts across
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time and space, amplified by the paratactical arrangement of the epistolary prose poems to Mao.
In their list-like profundity, the prose poems take us through the ebb and flow of not just
diasporic longing, but the complications of that longing.
How do you miss something that no longer belongs to you? The juxtaposition of one
memory of state violence against another?
Perhaps the haunting means a distillation of time—the collision of past, present, and
future in a landscape that has known unspeakable violence. It becomes increasingly apparent that
the connection between violence and ghosts is an intimate one, forged by the horror of
circumstance, so atrocious that it forces this collapsing of time into itself. So often we think of
ghosts as passive, victim to circumstance, but the details of their haunting carry narratives of
lives unmoored.
What if haunting becomes a way in which ghosts retake possession of their former lives?
Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters writes, “Ghosts are never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the
modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their
sheets and chains.” That is, to recognize the ghost and its haunting is to acknowledge the violent
circumstances that made them, their spectral unlife inextricable from a violence so heinous that it
becomes a permanent curse.

In all my encounters with ghosts, there have always been a profound connection to place.
The most haunted places, I am convinced, vibrate with the energy of something lost to it.
The day after our house was broken into, my mother, brother, and I got on a plane to
Hong Kong. In the late hours of the night, I had woken up to my mother standing over me,
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hammering my bedroom window shut. Her eyes were wide and wild, and her legs wobbled as
they bridged overhead. She had always been fearful of intruders, masked men who would steal
their way into our house, pinning our arms and legs down, doing the vilest things to our bodies.
The break-in, undoubtedly, reminded her of the fragility of our flesh, and all the while, I knew
too she was thinking of Hong Kong.
It had been years since my mother had returned to the city in which she grew up from the
age of two and onward. Separated from her family in Guangzhou at this early age, she had
always wondered why it had to be her, the one to be sent away. Later, she would learn that it was
the unshakeable sense of worry that the political unrest making its way through the countryside
would soon overtake the country. Seeing as Hong Kong was still a British colony at the time, it
was the logical move to send their then oldest child there in their slow and gradual migration to
the colonial city—she who would be the likeliest to survive in her solitude.
I had always felt that my mother’s loneliness was something I inherited, in the same way
I matched her taste for condensed milk in tea and fresh from the oven egg custard tarts, all
Cantonese staples, I eventually realized, that made up my mother’s childhood in Hong Kong.
Her awkwardness, too, I shared upon our arrival to the city. As people pooled through the
airport, she felt more like a tourist than a former resident. In previous years, these return trips to
Hong Kong included my father, making this the first trip she would be going without him. How
foreign it must have felt, to return only to realize that it was not so much a coming home as it is a
visitation. Over the phone, she had told my uncle, with whom we would be staying, that she had
boarded all our windows shut before flying out. I could not tell what he said in response.
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After we landed in Hong Kong, I was stranded in bed for three days straight, waiting out
the effects of dehydration, all the water having left my body. I would learn years later that my
body would always pucker up this way when I move too quickly from place to place. From the
sleeplessness of the last night in New York to a day of flying over water, I felt wrung out. During
those feverish first days, I dreamt of the city, which was mostly made of water. Prior to the trip, I
had only known of the city through slapstick Stephen Chow comedies, Anita Mui pop ballads,
her voice bursting out of an elaborate sequined number, Maggie Cheung walking languidly down
a dark stairwell with a container full of hot noodles, wearing the greatest assortment of qipaos. It
seemed from the vicinity of my uncle’s guest bedroom, the swirl of these sound and image
memories came to life in my delirium. Between them and my mother’s stories, I felt the city
illuminated for me from within the walls of my uncle’s small apartment.
My illness was a convenient reason for my mother’s procrastination from leaving the
apartment. I sensed her nervousness from her endless pacing—rummaging through her purse for
calling cards to phone the landline back at our house, trying to get a hold of my aunt who had
offered to housesit in our absence. I suspected too that the vibrations of this version of the city
she once knew unnerved her. Everything came to a head one night when my brother, on a whim,
decided to shave his eyebrows, and having nowhere for the energy to go, my mother forged a
ring of a fire in the apartment.
“How can you do this to me?”
“And here!”
“What is the matter with you?”
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A litany of cries besieged the living room, a square box that my mother paced while my
brother pleaded with her. We would laugh about this years later but not right then. Finally, after
having had enough of the shouting, my great-aunt insisted we all finally start venturing out of the
apartment at long last. I could tell there was more my mother wanted to say about the bald
patches above my brother’s eyes, but ultimately, she agreed that it was time too.
On one of our first ventures out, we took a ferry through Victoria Harbor, surrounded by
a cloud of mist. The heat stuck to our flesh in the form of a film of permanent water, and my
mother peeled her shirt from her neck repeatedly, fanning herself without success. We were
headed to her old home in Hong Kong where she grew up, and sensing her nervousness, I
touched her arm.
“Are you nervous, Ma?”
She narrowed her eyes. “No, just trying to remember how to get there. Let’s see if I do.”
After the ferry, there was one bus and then another. A quick stop at 7-11 for water, which
continued to pour out of us in the heat, and then to another bus again. My mother counted the
stops, glancing at a sheet of paper in which she had scrawled the instructions.
“I’m going to call your auntie again to make sure the house is okay.”
“Pretty sure it’s fine, considering all the nails you put through all the windows…”
She looked unsure, as if the ghost of this most recent transgression had followed us here.
Before we knew it, the bus doors flew open with a gushing sound, and my mother, glancing out
the window, pointed “It’s this one!” We bounced out of the top floor of the double decker as if
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we were racing against time, the line of people rushing in, jabbing elbows into our backs as we
exited.
My mother often told this story about immigrating to the U.S. in which she wore white
go-go boots and flew on a plane for the very first time. The very fact of missing someone was
drilled into her from the get-go, and so, many miles away, she learned to miss the family left
behind, the friends, the rapidly modernizing architecture of a city shifting through different
notions of its own identity—once colonial, now folded back into a national project that could no
longer recognize the city that once was. Like a child sent away to school and returning after
years of education in another land, Hong Kong came back as a tri-lingual city with a growing
migrant population and burgeoning political identity that could no longer recognize China as
home.
When we made our way down a long stretch of road after exiting the bus, I thought of
how my mother would always be in this place of searching, and as consequence of that, so would
I. Heading further down a road that turned from concrete to dirt path, my mother made a sudden
turn into high grass. The blades reached high above our necks, and we pushed past them, trying
to see before us.
I had envisioned my mother’s old home in Hong Kong as an old apartment with white
peeling paint and a too-small room where she slept beside my great-grandmother, dime-sized
flies buzzing overhead. Instead, when we finally waded through the grass and made our way to a
clearing, there before us was a short row of tiny houses, only two of which were made entirely of
concrete; the others, held together by paneling, wood, and not-so-carefully laid brick. We arrived
at a green door, which guarded a courtyard area that would open into a house with many rooms,
each one occupied by a different family. Once, my mother resided in one of those rooms with my
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great-grandparents, joined later by my grandparents and four siblings. At that moment of arrival,
she raised her fist to knock on the door that would be the bridge between her past and present.
Before her fist fell against the wood, she backed away and said, “Nobody’s home. Let’s go.”
Ackbar Abbas in Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance describes Hong
Kong as such: “The city is not so much a place as a space of transit. It has always been, and will
perhaps always be, a port in the most literal sense—a doorway, a point in between—even though
the nature of the port has changed.”
54
I imagine the rapidity of such transit is the perfect machine
for making ghosts, why my mother could not bring herself to proceed ahead, staring at the green
door, sensing the imminent collision of space and time. I think of this moment often, how I wish
I could hold the universe together, if only momentarily, so that she could get the answer she
needed, whatever question lingered in her heart. She had looked the ghost in the eye. A thick veil
of fog cast over the city that was no longer home. Each time she thought she remembered
something true about the place, the path would move itself once again.

Suppose this is true: The in-between places of prose poems—quite literally the gap
between sentences—is a doorway. Of misrecognition.
In 2014, the doorway between Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity and its Chinese
belonging was lit aflame in teargas and police batons bearing down on dissenters. The Standing
Committee of the National People’s Congress had proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral

54
Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. (University of
Minnesota Press, 1997): 4
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process, which would ostensibly challenge the autonomy that Hong Kong governance have had
outside of China. Outraged student protestors led strikes in front of government headquarters,
filling the already-packed city streets with the noise of their dissent. It would be the start of what
they would call the Umbrella Movement, the fight to locate oneself in an uncertain future. To
claim oneself.
In Wawa’s prose poem “ 維多利亞港天台建國/Rooftop Nation of Victoria Harbour,” the
Hong Kong poet envisions a future on rooftops in response to the escalating violence against her
people during the protests. In a city of such small land mass, Hong Kong has known only to
build up. The rooftops offer a speculative freedom from the unceasing brutality of military and
police forces on the grounds below—a pale and somber dream that straddles the line between
death and hope. “ 放眼望去高高低低的天台上全都站著人，一望無際,” she writes, or “I cast
my gaze ahead at high and low rooftops, each with people standing on them, a sight without
horizons.” The sentiment is neither hopeful nor entirely defeatist, its ending just as open-ended
as Hong Kong’s future.
Perhaps another definition of the doorway is this: the future of political rupture, an
unceasing struggle for autonomy.
The land mass that is Hong Kong had served as a port city for British colonial forces for
centuries, so much so that its people identify not with the British nor the Chinese, but an identity
that is wholly other, and it is always this tertiary choice that seems to pose a grave threat to the
state. Wawa’s prose poem disrupts the preconditions of a “return” to a precolonial state,
expressing in an interview with me once that “Hong Kong has been colonized a second time by
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Communist China.”
55
This declaration of which Wawa expresses as part of the last generation to
have known British colonial rule over Hong Kong, is in fact a statement of refusal to go back—
that to go back implies a violence in of itself.
This lesson of the unreturnable is a profound part of haunting, the condition of which
requires some denial of the irretrievable. What has happened has happened, and so it goes.
But where to place our sympathies? Our allegiances? I have spent so long afraid of
ghosts, and only now have I considered the alternative frame: Who and what makes a ghost a
ghost? And how should we greet them?

The ghosts I have grown up knowing have always haunted the fringes of my memory, but
it does not mean that they do not speak. The prose poem, in the Asian American imagination,
seems to be an appropriate vessel as a ghost talking box. Through the paratactical arrangement of
its parts, there is enough space for the ghost voice to come through. Its speech is not like that of
the living, if living requires a sense of hyper-clarity that ghosts are no longer beholden to. In fact,
the very nature of haunting refuses linear narration. Ghosts as stand-in for affective matter,
something that lies beyond immediate comprehension.
Brandon Shimoda in his hybrid collection The Desert describes this type of haunting as a
compounding of pressure, or so he writes, “I think I’m being pressured by ghosts. Not haunted or
inhabited, but pressured.”
56
If Cheng’s House A collects ghosts via the psychological traversal

55
Wawa. “An Interview with Wawa, Issue 09 Contributor.” Interviewed by Muriel Leung,
Apogee Journal, 8 July 2017, www.apogeejournal.org/2017/06/08/interview-wawa-issue-09-
contributor/
56
Shimoda, Brandon. The Desert. (The Song Cave, 2018): 101
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between her family home in Texas and Tiananmen Square, then The Desert contends with ghosts
through multiple dessert terrains. Between Shimoda’s grandfather’s incarceration in a Salt Lake
City internment camp and Tucson, Arizona, the site of the Gila River War Relocation Camp,
where the author wrote and lived between the years of 2011 and 2014, he is surrounded by desert
and the historical memory of U.S. targeted violence against Japanese Americans through its
issuance of Executive Order 9066, which legalized the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese
Americans. It is a violence that is grossly intimate—regardless of citizenship, the state rounded
up Japanese Americans of every age and class, required them to relinquish their property and
assets, and placed them in remote desert areas across the Southwest. Targeted for suspicion of
treason to the U.S. due to Japan’s involvement with WWII, the incarceration of Japanese
Americans was an example of the conflation of nationality and ethnicity, in which it no longer
mattered how or what a community of Asian Americans contributed to the making of the U.S.—
at any given moment, they would be cast out.
The profundity of this violence is something which Shimoda contemplates in his letters to
friends during his years in Tucson, Arizona, the excerpts of which are published in The Desert.
These excerpted letters become prose poems by process of their rearrangement. In these letters,
Shimoda’s observations of the mundanity of the desert’s daily violence start to stack upon
themselves, each sentence like a layer of sediment that relays a sustained tension that he notes
throughout his environment. These observations vary from witnessing a coyote tearing a cat
apart to the death of homeless men to the incessant rain that seems to cast a wide net of doom
across the landscape. Across the desert, it seemed, people suffered quietly within the terrain’s
undulating roar. The tension that Shimoda gestures to is not only a product of the present-day
horror that he remarks upon but the historical remnants of the desert that permeate the scene,
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specifically the history of Japanese American internment and the usurpation of land from
indigenous peoples. The land need not placards or commemorative design to make this history
apparent—it reverberates through the place, with or without memorialization.
This reverberation takes place through the paratactical arrangement of thoughts in these
letter excerpts. In a short entry dated April 1, Shimoda notes a day filled with two seemingly
incongruent details: “Fresh off a day with blind teenagers. I’m beginning to understand our
biological connection to atomic bombs and coelenterates.” Yet upon further consideration, the
dailiness of Shimoda’s role as a teacher to blind students forces a sharp attention to the various
permutations of life and death that are at the root of our collective biology. For Shimoda, the
connection between our humanity, coelenterates (aquatic life such as jellyfish, corals, and sea
anemone), and nuclear weapons is a shared relationship to chemical warfare. Coelenterates can
project toxins onto their targets from their bodies when threatened, and similarly, the atomic
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan have left a debilitating effect on the
environment and its people many years later. This emphasis on the biological connection is more
than about the devastation that such attacks leave behind, but about the impulse to harm,
claiming self-defense as the U.S. and the United Kingdom did in their decision to bomb Japan. In
truth, the claim of self-defense obfuscates the damage left behind, how chemical warfare alters a
people and their land from their very genetic makeup, such that surviving means bearing the
proximity to death always.
There is such a deadly power to obfuscation—the state’s justification of the killing of
over 110,000 Japanese people as a means of preventing greater death tolls. What they mean is
that some lives are more worthy of saving than others.
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Unrelentingly, Shimoda’s letters remind us of the brutality of this history, which is
inscribed in the quotidian ways of the desert. It is an indescribable ghost that orbits these letters,
but its presence can be felt the same way a body becomes a fossil pressed into rock, its afterlife
insistence shaping the surrounding sediments with its hard truth.
Perhaps the hardest thing about history is the state compulsion towards amnesia, a
deliberate misremembering of the past that holds such unbearable tales of violence. It is not just
the history of the atomic bomb—which has to date, been only used in non-testing capacities on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but the events of Japanese American internment that has been swept
under the rug of U.S. history. With relocation centers scattered across the U.S. Southwest, this
history is easily lost to the expanse of the desert though not to the Japanese American survivors
and descendants who carry the burden of this memory. Thus is the legacy of racism in the U.S.,
one through which David L. Eng remarks as part of “the traces of this modern humanist
forgetting.” That is, that the public impetus to forget is part of a modern project, one galvanized
by the drive towards individual freedom. This freedom, however enticing its supposed end goal,
comes at the expense of a community of people. Perhaps it may be a way that the U.S. wants to
move on, but in its erasure of Japanese American internment, leaves behind the very traces that
Eng points out.
This is a complicated grief of which The Desert contemplates through daily observations:
The history of U.S. brutality need not a site or place; its essence, regardless of whatever effort to
erase it, would always persist through someone else’s memory. The power of memory and
imagination over site specificity is something that Shimoda remarks upon in a talk that he gave at
the Holocaust History Center at the Jewish History Museum for Inauguration Day of former U.S.
President Donald Trump:
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One defense of internment was that it kept the Japanese safe during the war. There is an
element of truth in this otherwise dubious defense, but only because it exposes a much
darker truth. If the treatment of the Japanese Americans outside the camps was more
hostile, more reactionary, more openly threatening than their treatment inside the camps,
then where exactly was internment located? Internment was a facet of an even more
pervasive and more barbarous national disposition. Which is why I locate the mass
incarceration of Japanese Americans in the heart—conceived and constructed, in the end,
by the human heart, which is superlatively, endlessly capable of manifesting, out of
inexpressible, often corrosive feeling, the longest, most convoluted, yet most
comprehensive path to the grave.
57

In these remarks, Shimoda reframes the horror of internment as not just a matter of the event
itself—the placing of Japanese Americans in barracks, removed from their possessions, assets,
and human dignity—but situates it as part of the larger racist and xenophobic framework that
persists through U.S. racial imagination. His demarcation of “outside” and “inside” emphasizes
how the specificity of the site of violence is not the essential focus here, but rather that
internment itself is at once grown through sentiments of people and then dispersed everywhere.
The “superlatively, endlessly capable of manifesting, out of inexpressible, often corrosive
feeling” that he describes indicates the debilitating quality of racist and xenophobic imagination,
such that the “comprehensive path to the grave” is the inevitable fate of such violence. The doom
that he indicates mark the affective steps of dehumanization in which the subjugation of a people
could be justified in the name of war and fealty to a nation.
In the context of present-day U.S. political workings, the subject of Japanese American
internment feels part of a distant past. The public disassociation with this history—which
Shimoda would likely dub a misrecognition of the human heart in its propensity to repeat what it

57
Shimoda, Brandon. “State of Erasure: Arizona’s Place, and the Place of Arizona, in the Mass
Incarceration of Japanese Americans.” The Margins, 20 January 2017, https://aaww.org/state-
erasure-arizona/
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cannot face in its complicity to violence—has ramifications in the form of recent manifestations
of internment: the detainment of migrants from Mexico and Central America at the U.S.-Mexico
border, many of whom make up a mass of young bodies crowded into cages; this is just one of
many instances of collective forgetting.
The dissociation with this history is as much an issue of language and form as it is a
matter of politics. Jonathan Monroe argues that the prose poem addresses this very aesthetic and
political concern. In Poverty of Objects, he argues that the prose poem represents a
“paradigmatic genre of concentrated dialogical struggle” wherein its purpose is a “self-conscious
attempt to offer imaginary/aesthetic resolutions to real contradictions and conflicts.” Shimoda’s
letters in The Desert take on a similar attempt to engage with the imaginary/aesthetic field of his
surroundings, which often yields contemplations about the relationship between nature and
humanity, the softness as well as the indignities of human courses of action. Perhaps the
distinction here is that resolution is never full something he arrives upon, only through brief
understanding before the next entry offers some refrain of the violence of the landscape and its
history. Yet the letters continue to unfold anyway in the very dialogical struggle that Monroe
describes, as much as through its placement as a genre (between the letter and the prose poem
form) as through their content. In Shimoda’s case, the content becomes an evolving question of
the relationship between land, mortality, and the ability to narrate what will not stop stirring
outside of and within the heart.
In an entry dated November 13, Shimoda reflects on that very relationship, noting the
prevalence of this legacy of racial trauma in his work. In this entry, the prose poem form
becomes more immediately utilized through its sentence-by-sentence navigation between
ruminations on death, violence, and aesthetics:
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I realized, again, that all my writing is addressed to the dead, if not death itself. The
apocalypse might necessarily be assumed, as with physical decay greeting a young body
in the first quarter of its life, at least; to be born, etc. Narrative, song-making, meter, then
into the lyric, ornament, guitar solos, orthotics: furnishing the eye of the storm, while
drawing from its multi-pronged winds. We’re either building our tombs or consoling
ourselves by poking tiny holes in an enormous lead vest, to let a sample of light in, while
the apocalypse presses with the fervor of 5000 fingers.
58

The prose poem offers superlatives of death and decay. Under the sheer weight of the
apocalyptic forces that besiege us, Shimoda notes that the attempt to write of and through the
inevitability of our doom is merely a “furnishing [of] the eye of the storm.” It is not so much a
critique of the role of the political when it comes to aesthetics as much as it is a moment in which
hands are thrown in the air, exasperated by the constant propulsion of ghosts. Just as death is an
assured fate, so is the compulsion to arrest it through the writing of it. Regardless of effort, this
writing has the effect of pouring everything into the centrifuge, spun out until every artistic
technique gets rendered ornament—form as simply form, separated from its content. It is a
despairing letter, but I love it nonetheless, for what this distillation of form and content allows us
to see, which is the inarguable truth of death.
None of this is resolution for the lingering history of internment—its forms preceding and
following—and yet the universalizing of the very human condition of doing everything we can to
thwart our eventual death widens our understanding of suffering beyond the specificity of
historical event, place, and time; it demands that we consider the ways in which internment is, in
a sense, a rupture of the very idea of what is humane. As much as we seek an answer beyond
that, it is this bare fact that remains.

58
Shimoda, Brandon. The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018): 95
140

The first time someone wished me dead, I was not thinking about the quality of my
humanity. It never occurred to me that it was a matter of question. My mother told me when I
was four that what we were was called Chinese, and it filled me with a great sense of fortune that
we could each possess an identity as singular and collective as that. I wondered what else was
there beyond me. Then I became not older than nine, possibly younger, when my identity and
mortality were both called into question. I was walking home with my cousin Jenny, two months
younger than me, and we held a large pizza pie between us, the box bottom piping hot. In this
residential part of Richmond Hills, the streets were quiet during the day, and it was a far walk to
the nearest bodega, but the pizza place was just a few blocks away.
After some begging, both my parents and Jenny’s relented, and allowed us to go
unaccompanied to the pizza place, a twenty-dollar bill in hand, to pick up the pizza for dinner.
Along the way, Jenny and I debated which Spice Girls member we would be. I really did not
want to be Mel C or Sporty Spice because that was what people said you were if you were even a
little bit gay, and at the time, I denied it most adamantly. She was Baby Spice, of course, because
everybody wanted to be Baby Spice, and so, I relented and agreed that I was Mel C and no one
else.
That day, I wore a hand-me-down white T-shirt with a faded Giorgio Armani logo in the
front, which must have been silkscreened in the back room of some shop in Hong Kong, and
which like most designer label clothing we owned, was a clumsy knockoff of the original
brought back from overseas. Still, I loved that shirt, and in the frenzy of our heated conversation,
nearly missed a young man walking past us. To this day, I cannot remember what he looked like,
except his eyes widened when he passed us, and I heard the rising shrill of his voice as he
muttered an indecipherable chant, which Jenny and I eventually realized was a mimicry of
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assorted Asian languages. But it was the shirt that he homed in on when he finally said audibly,
“Giorgio Armani! Armani! That is not for fucking Chinese bitches. If I see you with that shirt
again, I’ll kill you.”
Jenny and I quickened our pace even when it became clear that he was walking away,
still shouting, but the shouting had become nonsensical again. When we came back to my house
and told our parents what had happened, they looked at each other in a silent exchange of words,
and said to us, “Neither of you are going out alone again.”
Years after, I would think back on that day and wonder if I would ever know such hatred
for someone that it would stir in me that instinct for deep violence. Perhaps that violence does
not have any reasoning, the way racism can disperse itself into the most perverse parts of one’s
imagination. I have seen it take the form of high praise and exaltation as much as it can propel
people to murder. And while these acts are not comparable, their infinite gestures have this
ability to injure across every level of experience.
As for me, I never wore that T-shirt again.
The link between death or ghostliness and racism, as the prose poem would have us
understand it, lies between the cracks of sentences. It beckons our attention to the spaces in
between, that which left unattended to, can appear as if they never existed at all. When asked
why the prose poem over any other form, I cannot say that there are always that many sharp
distinctions, the many possibilities of which this one form possesses. The parataxis, which is
only just one function that emerges from this form, highlights these gaps while also gesturing to
our ability to create a bridge.
142

In the final letter of The Desert, Shimoda makes a last remark on the persistence of death
and ghosts: “It keeps going BECAUSE it vanishes.”
59
I would like to think that the prose poem
draws us towards this alignment between endurance and disappearance. Every potential
vanishing compels a remembrance. In this extraordinary act, I can see the cascading parts of a
collective history unfolding, that which weaves itself through a singular imagination. I am
surprised to find, always, that even when I do not understand, I eventually do. The traces are
already there, after all, waiting for me, for us.

59
Ibid, 101
143

ONCE UPON A FISH ON VIRTUAL WATERS

When Wai Mo was a boy, he dreamt his body into water.
It is summer again in Zhongshan, and outside his home, the blue of the sky pools
seemingly without end, not a single ink of white cloud besmirching it. He reaches out to touch it,
the air passing through his hand just then, humid and hot with swept-up salt, that it is easy to
imagine for a moment that he is by a dock, scooping water into his palms.
What would it like to be a fish? A turtle, all shiny back and huddled into its cavernous
interior? He stands up onto the front step of his tiny home, his younger brothers and sisters still
asleep inside, and folds his body into the shape of each watery creature.
Practice, he tells himself. Flaps his arms against his sides like tiny fins.
When he grows up, his body will become an eel—a long, wiry stretch of muscle and
bone, coursing through water, constantly trying to beat its own time. It will happen slowly, and
then, one day, he will touch his own slick body made anew, lithe and coursing through the water
with Olympian ease.
Wai Mo is a boy who will soon become a father, a migrant, a refugee. There is so much
magic in a promise, in a future already foretold. He will tell me later that he had always had a
stormy feeling about his fate. No god, just this one superstition, bound by land and water.
“This is your inheritance,” he says. Which is to say, this is my body too.

*

144

There is a slowness to the way I move that profoundly frustrates me. Legend has it that I
was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my head as I was headed out the maternal
channel. The birth took longer than anticipated, my tiny body floating in the murky water of my
mother’s body, refusing or unable to tumble out. My body would not turn. The incision scar on
my mother’s stomach, a painful reminder of the time I took inside her.
As my mother often jokes, “And that’s how you came to move through your life—always
trying to come out butt first.”
That slowness often indicates a lack of decisiveness is never something I want to be
associated with, and yet the uncertainty has characterized much of my life. In conflict, being
slow means constantly being at a disadvantage—the comeback stuck in the throat, no voice loud
enough to interrupt when being talked over.
To be Asian and slow, then, is doubly damning. The Asian body already reads as passive,
a pliable surface for others’ projections. It is not a fabrication of my own or any of our making
but the product of elaborations of race and its associative qualities forged throughout time and
historical events. I am befuddled by people who say they do not see race, as pervasive as it is in
our time. It is not that I wish I could unsee it either but that these projections of our racial
identity have a way of shaping our internal reality as much as it does how we are perceived or
treated on the outside. It is this internal reality that I am most concerned about—a coagulation of
perceptions of me that are not my own, the ways in which I have interpellated these views, and
what exists intrinsically, unfiltered through anything else. It is no wonder that the interlacing of
these many forces make for languid movement.
It is also a recipe for becoming a sight unseen. Once, at an airport, a white woman walked
past me, rolling her luggage over my feet. She looked behind her, and for a moment, we stared
145

right at each other, both aware that the wheels of her suitcase had stumbled over something very
human. Despite this, she turned around and walked away. I stood there, flabbergasted. It was
apparently very easy to disappear by manner of race and simply being. Before I could open my
mouth to say anything at all, she had already boarded her plane.
This slowness matters little against the speed of the world as it churns in ever-spinning
rapidity. Call it the capitalist machine warping itself in hyper-speed such that the flow of capital
and goods in an increasingly complicated web of exchange has changed the face of this power so
much so that it has become almost unrecognizable from its beginnings in industrialization.
With the rise of digital technological advancement, the notion of slowness itself is an
interpellated form of digital speed. In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell describes our developing
relationship with digital technology, particularly social media platforms, as a form of
participating in an attention economy in which all things including time become commerce. She
writes, “In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our
living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and
Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the
ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no
longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’”
60
That is, time as a resource has a finite quality to it, and
that when spent, can no longer get back. I wonder what this means for our bodies, especially
those of us who are nonwhite, as we navigate this exchange of our limited energy.
The role of time as our body and the world processes it became even more emphasized
throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. During the span of several years, the escalating pace of the
world according to digital forms ceased to change despite the prevalence of chronic and sudden

60
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing. (Melville House, 2019): 28
146

illness, the disturbance of everyday social and economic routines, and widespread fatigue. Out of
this time came a sharpness too through which everything seemed to carry an intense pallor, and
with good reason: The circulation of death and grief seemed never-ending. If time, through this
experience, had shown both its exhaustion and painful extenuation, then the body too took and
continues to take this on.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic wears an Asian countenance in the eyes of the
world. The racialization of epidemics has a long and sordid history, worsened by the associations
between disease and race forged on the policy level. In multiple speeches and public
appearances, former U.S. President Donald Trump had repeatedly referenced the “Chinese virus”
to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite multiple protests for Trump to refer to the virus by
its scientifically sanctioned names, he refused, claiming that “It’s not racist at all” and “It comes
from China, that’s why.” The perpetuation of the Asian affiliation with the virus has arguably led
to more explicit forms of racist and xenophobic violence to play out against Asians in the U.S.
In March 2021, security footage from a luxury apartment building in New York City
showed a 65-year-old Asian woman being assaulted by a man on the street. Despite being mere
feet away, the security guards of the building closed the doors on her. The footage shows,
cringingly, the attack continuing while the security guards looked away. The brutality of this
violence circulated throughout the media, incessantly playing a horrific scene on repeat, as all
digital platforms enable images of violence to do: Anti-Asian racism piled on top of harm against
an older woman, a cascading set of social and economic inequities that include the homelessness
of the attacker and the building’s display of wealth playing out in the foreground of the video.
The effect is a compounding of myriad social and economic factors that barely had time to
register before the video would play again.
147

Against the circulatory effect of such violent racist and xenophobic images, this
dissonance between the body on the screen and the embodied experience of one’s being becomes
exacerbated with each replay. It is the feeling of being at once hyper-visible in the digital media
landscape and invisible in the flesh that I often wonder what happens to how race is read back
into digital forms. And then the terrifying question: If a body is cast over and over and yet still
unseen, what happens to a body over time?

*

Wai Mo’s first word was “Ma.” Mine was “Da.” One means mother and the other means
to hit. Everyone thought I was going to grow up a brutal person but in fact, it was my father who
lost his softness.
The day it happened, he could not have been more than sixteen years old, already a fish
boy but not yet an eel. As young as he was, he walked with a hunched back. As he grew longer
and taller, his body only continued to fold into itself. And so, he was teased for all the reasons a
child would be teased, which is easily for anything and everything. Whether it was because of
this or just his natural disposition (which could also have fueled the teasing), he was a serious
kid. Every punchline, every funny quip soared past him.
My father’s father was a flailing stone, his son’s cold opposite. Whereas Wai Mo yearned
to reach out, become clear as water, his father wanted the land. He held tight to the earth,
demanded that everyone around him do the same. When he spoke, rocks would fall at first as
pebbles from the sky. When angered, his words jutted out from the ground, sharp and imposing.
After a particularly drunk evening, he had let out a lungful of smoke and debris, and the result
148

the next morning was a ragged pillar of stone poking out from the middle of Wai Mo’s cot. This,
my father learned to sleep around, hugging the pillar with every limb of him, trying to make the
stone soft.
The night my father lost his softness, he had returned home from a long day of hauling
wood piles and pipes, one job among many. Every night, he had a routine of checking the rice
cannisters, measuring the levels to make sure they all had enough to eat. When he went to
examine it that night, he saw the levels were lower than usual.
To his mother, he went. Before he could even begin to express his concerns, she said to
him, “Listen, my son. I have to tell you something.”
Wai Mo kneeled by her feet to listen.
His mother touched her belly. “You are going to have another sibling soon.”
My father counted in his mind the siblings he had thus far—a brother, a sister, and now
another along the way. How much wood would he have to haul to make more rice for all of
them?
Piles of rock surrounded the living room, a ridge cutting through the line of cots in a
crowded home. They stacked high, all of them teetering on the edge of falling. Lamenting rocks,
rocks of a myriad of melancholic colors. All forged from the heft of my grandfather’s fist
pounding a heavy glass against the table.
My father, eying the rice, which sat so quietly in its sad corner of their home, took a
minute to consider the news. His mother, expecting something more elated. My father, very
much not so. The weight of responsibility, as heavy as the rocks that surrounded them.
Finally, he shook his head. “I think you should abort it, Ma. We can’t afford it.”
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His mother stared. Her eyes became the color of a rough granite, turbulent and steely in
their gaze.
That night, Wai Mo’s mother waited for her husband to come home. She told him what
their oldest son had said. She had barely finished her account of a very brief conversation before
large pieces of rock rained down from the sky, punching holes in their ceiling. Wai Mo, who was
asleep in his cot at the time, woke up with a start. He gathered his brother and sister to shelter,
but not before his father barged in, shoving him to the ground.
“Who do you think you are?” he thundered.
Above Wai Mo, the rocks split and became shards that struck him against the head, torso,
his bare legs. He should have said something at the moment, he knew, but at what cost?
“Get up!” urged Wai Mo’s father. He said this while placing his foot on his son’s chest.
“Are you the man of this house or a little tadpole?”
Wai Mo sunk into himself then. What fish would he become if this version of himself
was not enough? He called out “Ma!” and heard nothing in return. Still, the rocks rained down,
heavier with each blow. He could not breathe. He envisioned the water, the tender light across
the current, some place to lay out, to float, beneath an empty and stoneless sky. The vision
blurred, spliced with scenes of rock pummeling his body.
He looked at his father who looked back at him. Suddenly, he understood. From then
moving forward, he too could make rocks fall from anywhere he pleased.

*

150

“Do you ever think about the past?” I asked my father once.
From the grave, he shook his head a solemn no.
“I don’t know why you lie.”

*

Metaphors serve a purpose here: To relieve the material body of the external pressures to
perform as something other than itself. Metaphor is tricky, however. By drawing comparison to
other like objects, qualities, or actions, it has a metonymic effect over time. With repetition of
metaphor, the space between the object of comparison and its originating subject slowly becomes
increasingly narrow, and eventually, the two become one and the same.
In Wendy Chun’s introduction to Camera Obscura, she discusses the utility of metaphor
in understanding the relationship between race and technology. Race and technology, she argues,
is already something that has its fair share of discussion, but it is the social and technological
logic of “Race and/as technology”
61
that we struggle with. The idea itself is an exercise in the
literalization of metaphor, where race exists not just in conjunction with technological forms. It
is also an acknowledgment of race as a type of technology that has a historical basis, and which
is attached not only to a flesh body but a virtual one.
Race has always been a technological tool to delineate difference across racial categories
and those means of taxonomizing have a lasting impact on how we think of race today. In

61
Chun, Wendy. “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race.”
(Camera Obscura, 2009): 7
151

Chun’s historicization of racial taxonomy, she notes how the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a
time of Western exploration of other continents, first introduced the characterization of groups of
foreign people by shared physical traits. From the eighteenth century onward, which solidified
the racial categorization of racial difference according to different physical traits through natural
science, to the nineteenth century, which extended this understanding of race to cultural
attributes and shared behaviors, Chun argues that “race became an even more important means
by which the visible and the invisible were linked.” She further states, “The modern value of race
stemmed from its ability to link somatic differences to innate physical and mental
characteristics.”
62
This linkage between the physical, mental, and the somatic is the lingering
impact of race as technology, its literalization.
Chun’s discussion of race and/as technology includes the context of the transatlantic
slave trade of Black people as part of a global exploitation of labor and Black people’s bodies. If
race and/as technology has been used to justify the export of human bodies under the pretext of
racial standards of superiority and inferiority towards Black people, then its power also carries to
the treatment of other racialized nonwhite bodies.
In the case of Asian American labor, the transport of people in the name of capitalist
development has been part of the U.S. nation-building plan since the early nineteenth century
with the mass arrival of Chinese migrants to the country to take part in the construction of the
transcontinental railroad. Propelled by political unrest and economic circumstances in their home
country, Chinese migrants sought opportunities in the U.S., with labor on the transcontinental
railroad being one of the few types of work they are allowed to do. Other forms of work that

62
Ibid, 9
152

early Chinese migrants took on included domestic work such as laundering, restaurant work,
farming, and performance of select sanctioned types of cheap labor.
The racial technology of this time aligned Chinese migrants with cheap labor—their
fungibility, their perpetual otherness that prevents their formal recognition in American citizenry,
their inability to assimilate into the U.S. determination of whiteness. The Chinese were
unwanted, but they performed a necessary economic purpose. It would always be this
contentious back-and-forth for white Americans to recognize the labor utility of Chinese
migrants while also desiring their removal. The racial mechanisms of the time existed to justify
this contentious dance.
In an exploration of nineteenth century trade cards, Yuko Matsukawa presents an
example of an advertisement from the period that showcases the tension between white
American consumers and Chinese migrants. The advertisement for Celluloid Collar and Cuff, a
brand of waterproof linen, features several white American men dressed in white shirts standing
proudly waist to knee deep in water. They are gesturing to their clothes, illustrating their relative
cleanliness to the saddened Chinese workers descending to shore. As Chinese workers had been
primarily associated with laundering as one of the few socially sanctioned labors they were
permitted to perform, the triumphant white American men displaying this new product intends to
show that the inauguration of waterproof linen would eliminate the need for Chinese labor once
and for all. In the advertising image, the Chinese laborers—drawn in racist caricature with their
hair in traditional queue, their eyes as two narrow slits—appear forlorn as they drifted away in
laundry baskets turned rafts. One of these baskets features a sail with the words “Off for China”
on it. The caption for the image reads in mock Chinese accented voice: “No More Washee
Washee, Melican Man Wear Celluloid Collar and Cuff.”
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It is an image that carries the weight of anti-Chinese sentiments of the time—the notion
that Chinese migrants serve only a temporary industrial purpose, and it is the white American
invention that will render Chinese labor obsolete. It is fascinating to see how much this sentiment
continues to linger in its modern iterations, the ongoing tension between American industry and
China. Despite U.S. companies outsourcing much of their labor to other countries, one of which
is China, the sentiment of American superiority remains. At the site of this tension are Chinese
laboring bodies, which despite being economically essential, were also disposable at the same
time.

The Asian body as an automaton, thus, has a far reach in history and into the present.
According to modern racial taxonomy, which attempts to collapse racial difference while
simultaneously upholding it, race does not exist. Which is to also say: The nonwhite body does
not exist. The automaton, then, is an archetype that conveniently allows for the denial of the
racial categorization of Asians while neutralizing our political and economic threat at the same
time.
By definition, an automaton is both a description of a machine that imitates a human as
well as a simile that illustrates the likeness of a human to a machine. Under modern-day post-
identity racial taxonomy, the Asian laboring body must assume the simile in order to be both
seen and not. Yet to straddle this fine line between visibility and invisibility is a question of the
relationship of the human and the machine altogether, an inquiry that has become ever more
prescient with the rapidly developing technology of our time, especially in the digital realm.
In Inhuman Figures (2022), a film essay produced by director CA Davis and writer and
scholar Michelle N. Huang, Huang proposes that from the very beginning of Chinese American
154

migration to the U.S. in the nineteenth century, Asian American workers have always operated
as somewhere between subhuman and superhuman in the American imagination. The Asian
automaton is an output of such positioning.
This tension plays out in the plot of the film essay when the protagonist Emi, an Asian
American young woman on the verge of racial consciousness, encounters The Robot, a
representation of the ideal worker whose unflappable devotion to efficiency and productivity is a
stand-in for the quiet and obedient Asian laborer. The Robot is flanked by The Clones, a
metaphoric depiction of the fungibility of Asians, deemed interchangeable through their
supposed ability to passive participation in the global economy, and The Alien, a seemingly non-
human figure shrouded in a brown robe, an extension of the perpetual foreigner, the
irreconcilable Other that is the Asian body. Emi’s confrontation with these assorted figures in a
dark alleyway is at first colored by fear—the figures approach menacingly, as if ready to absorb
Emi in their corrupted fold. Yet, once Emi recognizes the truth behind The Robot’s makeup, she
begins to tear the robotic body apart, bit by bit, until finally, upon removing its head, reveals the
human underneath it, emerging from a cloud of smoke. The reveal indicates Emi’s coming to
political consciousness about her racial identity, and she realizes that in order to dismantle these
notions of what constitutes the fungible, disposable, and Othered Asian, she has to literalize that
deconstruction—she must physically take apart their robotic armor, their shackles, and push back
the shroud.
This rite of passage for Emi is a metaphoric rendering of the process that Asian
Americans often undergo in their attempts to reconcile their place in the U.S. racial fabric. The
metaphor of the robot, the clone, and the alien have all served a purpose to organize Asians into
155

racial categories that allowed their presence to be understood in the U.S. though to be understood
would never correlate with being wanted.
In a reversal of the metaphor, Huang proposes in the film essay, “What if Asians aren’t
robots but robots are Asian?” By flipping the comparison, she forces us to reflect on the creative
possibilities of the robotic, of technological advancement that is not hinged upon an Orientalist
imagination—no cyberpunk futures modeled after Tokyo without Japanese people, no figures of
artificial intelligence with Asian faces. If we remove the notion of the fungibility of Asian
laboring bodies from the concept of the robot, then the robot can simply exist as a promise of a
different racial future.
Here is an instance of a metaphor closing the gap between the virtual body, one that is a
projection of ideas about Asian identities centering our disposability and Otherness, and the
material one, which we know by flesh and bone. The separation between the two has always
been the product of capitalist racial output, such that the language we have available to talk about
our experiences as Asians, whether Asian Americans or part of the larger diaspora, have been
limited to these terms. In closing this gap, however, we might approach other virtual spaces, such
as the digital one, with a curiosity about other racial grammars that allow for more room for
simply being.

*

I thought my father was the god of secrets. He held them close like animals in the deep
sea gather their treasures.
156

It was my mother who first presented the idea. They were together for ten years before
marrying, and still, she would insist that he remained a mystery.
“You know, there are things he still won’t tell me about,” she told me once.
“Like what?”
My mother leaned in conspiratorially. “Like the time he was arrested.”
I scrunched up my face. “Nuh uh. That didn’t happen.”
She waved her hands as if to wash the doubts away. “He did the same thing as your
grandpa. He swam to Hong Kong, got caught. Early in our dating, he told me he was arrested and
was taken away to work in the fields for a while as punishment. That’s all that he said.”
I must have looked stunned. She said finally, “Don’t tell him I told you.”

Which of course I did.
Under a full moon, my father and I dressed in the colors of the water, immersed in its
murky sheen. We had this ritual every night of swimming in silence, each of us turning flesh to
scale, arm to fin. It was a transformation I knew by birthright, and the rest was taught.
“Watch me,” my father always urged. He would leap first into the water, belting across
its wild ridges, and come back to shore without break. When it would be my turn, I always ran
the water ragged—too slow, too many points of stopping, and sinking faster than I could move. I
plummeted so far down once, he had to fish me out. He would not look at me the whole day
after.
In the wide cavernous hold of the water, we shimmered in the moonlight, not speaking,
never speaking. The silence echoed between us, a lapping of waves. I thought of how, when
157

submerged, there could be no telling between one’s tears and the water. If my father was capable
of crying, then surely this would be the place to do it, and beside him, I would never know.
At a certain point, when we had reached the water’s center, we looked up at the moon, its
wide and open face. I thought, How brave, and imagined a night when my father must have
fought the water to get to safer land. The searchlights, the roaring sound of sirens overhead.
With our heads bobbing above water, I said to him, “Mom told me you went to jail once.”
His back turned to me, I could not see his face. When he did not answer, I tapped the silk
of his fin, watched as he stiffened.
“Is it true?”
His face, still hidden from me. He finally spoke. “Why would she tell you that?”
I pressed on. “Were you scared? How long were you in the fields? How did you swim
across that water? How many miles was it? Did you go to sleep in the water too? How did you
make it through the second time?”
Overhead, the moon twitched, a piece of static running through. The water we floated in,
electric to the touch. Out of the corner of my eye, it appeared as if the sky had turned into
fractals, but only for a moment. I blinked and everything restored its original order.
Still, my father did not speak. His back turned to me, I felt him turn into a wall. Without
him saying anything at all, I knew I had made a grave mistake.
“Daddy?” The voice came out hoarse, far away.
In the water, he turned. Back to human skeletal order, he rose tall and sinewy, and I saw
the muscles in his back tell his story instead. Naked in the moonlight, the scene scrambled itself
again. A twitch of the screen, as if someone had shaken the monitor, loosened the power cord. I
158

saw his body pixelated and moving against not only the current of the water but the sky and the
sheen of the moon as well.
So, I understood, this was the human avatar.
When he was not fish, he was a man.
That’s all.

*

It is the endurance of his body that I remember.
In the hours that move so slowly after midnight, my father would finally make his way
home. The restaurant was a longstanding establishment in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, a part of
New York that I thought resembled so much of its name. My father, standing over a large orange
flame, moving a huge pot of steaming broth with just a towel and his bare forearms. Over the
years, he worked his way up to executive chef, a title he held onto proudly for as long as he
lived.
His return was always signaled by the same sequence of events—his footsteps marching
up the plastic sheeting over our carpet, the hallway’s flickering light, the smell of leather and
tobacco.
On one of these nights, I saw the ritual a couple of steps further—his body slumped in the
corner of the kitchen, a swirl of white smoke winding above his thin frame. Shedding his jacket
and neat button-down, he was left with a sheer white undershirt, stretched and sullied from
overwear, and a gold chain rested across his neck. He had started wearing the chain, I noticed,
some days after a mugging left him in the hospital with a gaping wound at his side.
159

I asked him that night, “What’s the chain for?”
He pointed to his flesh and replied, “It makes me invincible.”

Years later, I would touch the inside of my body where I thought a hole had lived. If I
inherited everything else—the bump on my nose, my hands, the gift and curse of turning fish in
the water—then I too held onto the memory of that violence.
Once, I woke from a dream in which I was making my way through water, passing
through someone who had stuck a knife into my left side. I barely noticed it at first, but then
bright puffs of red started to swarm in the water, and then there was the ache. When I awoke, the
sliver of a buried memory appeared of my father redressing his wound, a band of white gauze
wrapping around his sides. Small enough that it is still uncertain whether I had imagined it or
remembered something that fell through the crevices of my memory.
Because memory always had trouble fixing itself, a flurry of emotional truths and
conflicting facts, it would be just as possible that in one of these past moments, I had walked into
the hospital room where he was bleeding out. The hole in his side, a siren flag. He might have
been scared. He might have thought that his next words could be his last. Perhaps, in his
uncertainty, he had turned to me and said, “Remember the water.”

*

The metaphor is not always sound, however. Its unwieldiness, perhaps, is where we try to
locate the corporeal, what feels apt to the touch.
160

In Truong Tran’s book of the other, the author writes about the ways in which metaphor
can conceal:

abstraction is a luxury you can no longer afford. it is a space to hide in shapes and colors
and the labyrinth of language. safe. perhaps. but hiding is a luxury.

and just like that. the metaphor is obsolete. it cannot hold. it is not whole. it will not hold
up beneath the weight. of. and of. being. afraid.
63

In so many ways, I understand the suspicion around metaphor. In the context of Tran’s
wariness, the use of metaphor in poetry and in the languaging of poetry in the academy in
particular has rendered its usage fraught. Metaphor as an obfuscation of power, as a way of
erasing the racialized labor performed by an Asian body in a space that has historically rendered
people of color invisible. Tran’s notion of the metaphor reminds us that this redirection through
abstraction is neither good nor bad.
In critiquing the metaphor though, Tran finds himself in the bind of its pervasiveness. His
declaration of the metaphor as “obsolete” is not quite so as he inevitably finds himself returning
to it again and again in the book, even as much as he avoids it. book of the other, a collection
about the author’s racial discrimination lawsuit against an academic institution, takes on the task
of writing about an experience as literally as possible while avoiding the legal repercussions of
naming explicitly who and what was involved. The metaphor becomes a stand-in for what cannot

63
Tran, Truong. book of the other: small in comparison. (Kaya Press, 2021): 47
161

be said in a longstanding period of silence during the legal process and fear of accusation of libel
following.
Fear of retribution as an Asian laboring body that refuses to match the expectations of
their mainstream social and economic rendering is indeed a weight to behold. The weight of fear
is as much an antagonist in Tran’s counter-narrative as it is the force of academic racism. It is not
metaphor though that Tran ultimately abandons but silence in favor of forcing an audience to
witness. Look at the silence, he seems to say. As if the silence is a menace with distinct contours
and folds. An agonizing shape. Let it be excruciatingly bodied.

*

Sometimes the metaphor introduces something other than the pain of racialized labor.
In OHYUNG’s short film “Care for You,” the essence of queer Asian desire becomes a
vehicle for exploring that other. If the field of our experiences in the majority are limited to the
political and economic utility of our bodies, then “Care for You” seems to wonder what lies
beyond the surface of arduous labor. By featuring an Asian restaurant run by a cast of queer
nonbinary Asians, actor Hye Yun Park and drag performance artist and poet Wo Chan, “Care for
You” becomes an homage to a different notion of labor, one that comments on the history of
racialized work while also recognizing the kinship forged through these shared experiences.
Set in a restaurant dream-lit in blue, purple, and pink lights, “Care for You” is a queer
Asian love story that is as much about the love between two people as it is about the love for the
place where that love was forged. Throughout the film, Hye Yun moves through colorful
memories of their lover Wo. Together, they cut scallions, linger above the rising steam from a
162

pot of freshly cooked rice. Wordless, they exchange expressions of deep pleasure and glee. The
alternating blue, purple, and pink lighting form a connective thread through this montage, in
which restaurant work and queer romance become interchangeable. With the sensuality of
restaurant labor also comes its inevitable loss, however—Wo eventually departs from the
restaurant, Hye Yun left to reflect on their absence.
In one scene, Wo dances with a rotisserie chicken, raising its end to their lips, and with
their teeth, pulls out a string of pearls from its interior. Erotic and playful, the performance elicits
glee from Hye Yun as a viewer. Later, while reflecting on the loss of their lover, Hye Yun will
come back to this moment, pantomiming that same drag performance but without any objects in
hand. The dance is an elucidation of mourning, composed of gestures that are not quite empty,
but which gesture to the heft of the loss in their life. There are no tears, and the scene is not quite
melancholic, as the saturation of colors seems to celebrate the moments that have passed rather
than allow them to dwell in despair.
In the final kiss, a close-up of Hye Yun and the ghost of Wo shows their two lips moving
apart, and in between them, a string of pearls pull between them. In this harkening back to Wo’s
original drag performance, the rotisserie chicken, their lips, and their intimate connection
become metonymic subjects of one another. Each a metaphor for longing, for the wishful
extension of joy in the window of loss.
This proximity between loss and joy is a tension that queer communities know so well.
Coupled with the racial grief of Asian historical affiliation to labor, the circumstances for
mourning certainly are mounted. This accumulation is marked by the recurring appearance of a
projected video in the restaurant in which a blue sky and its clouds seem to be moving quickly.
In the closing moments of “Care for You,” the video appears one last time with Hye Yun
163

standing before it, their back to us. They hold the string of pearls from Wo in their hand. The
clouds move with shuddering speed. Despite the many movements within the fantasy, Hye Yun
and Wo’s ghost are contained in the restaurant, the image of the outside existing only as a
projection within it.
If the metaphor reminds us of the dissonance between the virtual and more material
existence, then this moment gestures to the bind of fantasy that the virtual allots. In the case of
“Care for You,” it seems to allow every excess of feeling to move through the restaurant, but just
like the rules of haunting, the condition is that one cannot leave it without departing from the
fantasy.
In another sense, the effort of racialized labor presents a similar bind in which pleasure
from work cannot be extricated from its affliction of pain on the body. It is also a matter of speed
as well in very much the same way the projected video reminds us that digital speed operates at a
quicker pace than real time. The clouds do not relent. They remind us of what lies beyond, and
when we remember them, we are already too late.

*

After my father died, I went with my mother to Hong Kong and stared out into the water
where I imagined he once swam to shore. After catching me scanning the water at Victoria
Harbour, my mother wanted to know what was on my mind, and I told her about how I
envisioned my father’s emergence from the water many years ago.
164

She looked at me incredulously. “You think he swam here? Have you opened a map?
No.” She pointed in the direction north. “He came from Shenzhen through the Deep Bay to Lau
Fau Shan. Honestly—” She waved her hand, Nevermind.
The myth of him would always be bigger than the reality, and yet, it was all I had left.
Everywhere I went in Hong Kong was an opportunity for the fiction of him. Where he worked,
where he ate fish balls on skewers through the night market. At night, when he sat under a
fluorescent light, he wrote letters that he would never send. That was the kind of man he was.
Still, when I finally had the opportunity to walk the city alone, I came back to the water at
night. The moon was a sliver of a heart, so thin and washed back with dark clouds that the water
would have appeared black had it not been for the loud lights of the city behind me. Victoria
Harbour was not the Deep Bay water that lapped up the shores of Lau Fau Shan, but I let myself
believe that eventually all water flowed through each other and shared some particles of the same
life.
It had been said that Lau Fau Shan was famed for its large oysters though the culture of
gathering them had since died out. We had visited there, my mother and I, only briefly, to visit
her old childhood friend, and while there, we sat at the dock where walls of oyster shells stacked
upon one another. I almost did not recognize what they were at first, their piles so high up and
brushed white by water and time. If I squinted, they looked like human skulls. Later, I would
learn that the water fed the oysters so well that they grew large enough in size to cut the feet of
those men who swam from mainland China to Hong Kong.
The night I visited the water alone though, the water traveled from the Deep Bay to
Victoria Harbour. One rush of current, propelled by the current of history. There, below the
railing where I stood, a swarm of eels gathered, their slick bodies winding through the water.
165

“Hello,” I waved.
They did not say anything back.
I felt my tongue seize up, the way sliding into Cantonese from English became more
stilted over time. Let me try, I wanted to say, and yet, nothing came out.
“I’m sorry.” The words fell out English.
The eels moved frantically, searching, and trying to understand.
I looked up to where the moon was fully hidden. It would be the ideal time to swim
undetected. The eels must have known this too, having once been men who memorized moon
phases.
The memory of turning fish was an old one, one I had not done in years. Even now, the
effort is laughable at best. I come out molly fish, bug-eyed and bloated head.
That day, I tried though. I urged my spine to lengthen, for the rest of me to grow thin,
pliable. A single muscle moving through water. When I looked down at my body though,
nothing had changed.
What could the fish have told me anyway? Seeing nothing else I could do for them, they
swam away. Perhaps they had met my father somewhere, had seen him in his infancy, and could
tell me more than what I knew then. Or they were there for me, a lament. I felt the call of grief so
strongly. I often sent it out to water.
If the eels could speak, I would want them to say, Invent yourself. Which was I did,
anyway, with the holes in my history, the ghost tether reaching across the water and through me.

*

166

I could not stop taking pictures of my family when they were sleeping for a large stretch
of time. After my father’s diagnosis with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, he could not sleep with his
mouth closed anymore. The chemotherapy made many bodily functions hard to do without great
effort, and one of those was breathing. When he slept at night, his breath came out rattled,
gasping. His door kept ajar so that any one of us could rush to resuscitate him if need be. My
mother, fearing her proximity to his death, had already moved into my bed.
At that time, we had just purchased a Nikon Coolpix digital camera though the occasion
for taking photographs were slim for obvious reasons. I grew a fascination with it, the way it
allowed me to zoom into objects that my own eyes could not see with such clarity. I had known
then that digital technology had the gift to enhance, but this felt superhuman.
Each night, before bed, I would take photographs of my brother, mother, and father in
their respective rooms, surprised to find that other than me, they all slept in similar ways—on
their backs, their mouths ajar to fully open, arms across them or to their sides. I would go
through the photographs, zooming into each slumbering face, searching for signs of what? I did
not know why exactly, only that I wanted some assurance that an alive face at rest could look the
same as one close to death.
When my mother went through the camera one day, she yelped with surprise. “Who did
this?” she yelled. Then, at me. “Did you do this?”
I nodded, probably too nonchalantly. “Yes.”
Although by then she had known me to be capable of far worse, she still insisted, “Delete
them. It’s creepy.”
“No. It’s a project. I like it.”
“Well, I’m not comfortable with it. Delete them.”
167

I looked down at the camera, sad to let my inventory go.

Race, when it emerges most clearly in technological forms, often coincides with
violation—a different sort of visibility, one which is defined by virtue of a wound being seen.
The concept of being post-racial only seems to undermine this wound, presenting an illegibility
bind in which somehow race, as a person of color, does not matter, and which also requires proof
that the wound is large enough that it would warrant some attention.
Digital technological advancement had promised the enhancement of real-life
interactions, and yet, the illegibility bind somehow could not translate. This could be the
dilemma of ill-fitting metaphors too, in which the ideology did not match the virtual and material
embodiment.
In the early days of digital cameras, for instance, the once popular Nikon Coolpix S630
came under fire when its facial detection software failed to recognize Asian faces. When users
attempted to take photographs of Asian faces, the camera would insist that the faces had blinked,
an egregious technological error that more than implied that the size of Asian eyes is
undetectable. Users admonished Nikon for surprisingly overlooking this feature despite being a
Japanese company. At the same time, the transnational stakeholders of the corporation make
these concerns a global one, traversing racialized normative values perpetuated by one Asian
country alone.
The globalizing forces of technological development cannot be divorced from the ways in
which race and other overlapping identities emerge from their very platforms. Yet, at the same
time, there is a sense of dissonance between technological platform and the very mechanisms of
racism itself, in such a way that blame for such racist incidents as a digital camera’s
168

misrecognition of Asian faces can be construed as the failure of a larger entity rather than the
specific forces and ideas that led to its construction and distribution. The blame of a corporation,
while accurate, still elides the public understanding of how the coalescing of actors and actions
have contributed to this injury.
Amid rapidly developing forms of digital technology, the question of where to locate race
then, specifically Asian American identity, persists. This accelerated pace of production is no
coincidence, and is in fact, a reflection of the changing rules of governmentality and social
taxonomies of our time. If race is not recognizable in our embodied reality until more explicit
forms of racial violence exists, then the mediation of digital technology both amplifies and
desensitizes our relationship to recognizing race virtually.
This virtual recognition has become especially paramount upon the rise of anti-Asian
attacks as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. The circulation of surveillance footage featuring
elderly Asians being attacked became a social phenomenon in media dissemination. Following
the viral sharing of candid footage of police violence towards Black communities, particularly
the murders of George Floyd and Philando Castile that incited the Black Lives Matter
movements of the summer of 2020, surveillance footage capturing anti-Asian attacks became the
new tool for identifying attackers. However, the attacks captured on film did not feature images
of police brutality but seemingly randomized acts of violence.
Jane Hu reports on this phenomenon in “The Unsettling Surveillance of Anti-Asian
Racism” for The Verge, remarking upon how the digital technological tool of video has been
used to galvanize around issues of anti-Asian violence. She notes that in contrast to footage of
police violence towards Black communities, her findings on security footage of Asians being
attacked have largely featured unidentifiable perpetrators. In response to the anonymity of the
169

attackers, the videos have received attention from Asian American celebrities like Daniel Dae
Kim of Lost fame who issued a cash reward to their following to identify the perpetrators. In
Kim’s instance, the Oakland-based victim turned out to not be an Asian man at all, but a Latino
man named Gilbert Diaz. It was revealed later that the attacker struggled with mental health
issues and was dismissed from charges of a hate crime. Despite the nuance of these
circumstances, which included increasing wealth disparity and lack of mental health resources,
all of which became exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the video of the attack was
still evidence enough of the lack of state response to anti-Asian violence.
This lack of state response led Carl Chan, a representative of the Oakland Chinatown
Chamber of Commerce, to call for the installment of more surveillance cameras in Oakland
Chinatown where the attack took place. In an interview with CBSN Bay Area, Chan stated,
“They were saying that ‘we don’t see it.’ So with these videos, people are finally seeing that it’s
actually happening.” He added, “The videos are doing justice.”
64
Hu argues that the call for
increased policing undermines the longstanding history of racial violence against Asians and
other people of color in the U.S. In this instance, the misidentification of the victim as an Asian
man does not take away from the gravity of anti-Asian violence in the country, but it does
overlook the issues of poverty, mental health access, and interracial relations as they are in
Oakland.
Hu’s critique of Chan’s community response invites a larger question of the efficacy of
digital technological tools to render anti-Asian violence visible. If Chan’s concern is that “we
don’t see it,” then the argument is that the use of digital technological tools by Oakland police

64
Hu, Jane. “The Unsettling Surveillance of Anti-Asian Racism.” The Verge, 31 March 2021,
The unsettling surveillance of anti-Asian racism - The Verge
170

would add much needed visibility to a longstanding history of racial erasure in the U.S. Yet,
Hu’s complication of this logic is also an interrogation of the uses of digital technology, its
effectiveness in providing visibility for Asians.
Perhaps it is also a question of what visibility this entails and the conditions upon which
we are seen. The state-issued surveillance camera, as a tool of showcasing racial violence, is by
its operative definition, intended to identify a hate crime and to put a perpetrator to justice. Its
purpose is not preventative, nor does it acknowledge the racial pain and suffering of Asians in
the U.S., the state role in forging racist and xenophobic policies that have contributed to present-
day attitudes and actions towards Asians. The legibility we crave, hinged upon a wound that is
still not treated. How can any of our circumstances change if our desire for legibility relies on
surveillance technology that only zooms in on an instance when the montage reel of anti-Asian
racism still will not play?

I lied to my mother when I said that I would delete all the pictures of my family members
sleeping. I kept the photograph of my father for as long as I held onto that camera, which
eventually became my own by default of being the only one who could operate it confidently.
Morally, I told myself, my greatest offense would be transgressing the consent of the dead.
“We do not take pictures of the sick or dying,” my mother said.
I blinked at her. “Why not?”
I was not lost to the fact that in some cultural cases, photographs taken without consent
are considered a violation of one’s essence, that the camera’s shudder could possess the soul. I
had no desire for ownership, however. I wanted only to retain the spectrum of grief and joy,
elated celebration and being hollowed out. It was as important to me as being alive, the wanting
171

of it. In a sense, this affective range is what I desire more than anything, and while it cannot be
contained by a single set of words at all, the closest I can manage is “truly being seen.”

*
The day the rocks fell onto my young father’s body was the day he saw his destiny. He
saw that he could go on, and that was good enough for him then.
It was always assumed that he did not want to die, but no one ever asked him what he
would do if he lived. I imagine he would want to be a fish once more with the tenacity of his
swimming muscles of his youth. As for joy, there was very little left for him. The years had worn
down his body, even beyond the day of falling rocks. Around my childhood home, he had left
those same rocks piled neatly in the corners, and even now, they remain unmoved.
It is impossible to talk about racial pain without the body, and even in the absence of one,
the technology of our time has paved a way for the body to be both alive and memorialized at the
same time. It is neither gift nor curse, but a matter of digital technological pervasiveness, the
ways in which it has altered our relationship to our bodies, our personal and social identities, and
the ways in which we process the world—a circulatory movement of digital screen to flesh body
back to the keyboard, and so on and so forth. The accrual of energy and information becomes a
language in which the gap between us and the tools of our making gradually becomes smaller.
And in that crack, I find the alternatives that these tools can provide, the various selves in which
we can embody, both virtual and corporeal, real and hyperreal, and which the consequences of
all spaces would one day matter just as much.

172

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Creator Leung, Muriel (author)

Core Title Wild grammars

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/20/2024

Defense Date 05/11/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag affect,Asian American,Asian diaspora,essay,feminist,gender,gender violence,lyric essay,Memory,nonfiction,OAI-PMH Harvest,Poetry,Trauma,Women

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Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Duong, Lan (committee member), Khanna, Neetu (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member)

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