A Lyric of My Racial Awakening
I dedicate this essay to my sister scholars Lum and Olu, who were there for me throughout this journey of racial self-work.
The twin pandemics of racism and COVID-19, with the former made patently visible in the climate of the coronavirus crisis, had forced me to pause, turn inward, interrogate my positionality as an Asian American woman, and reckon with the depth, complexity, and history of my racial identity. This was identity work that I so desperately wanted to do alongside my parents, but dealings with race were never an explicit part of my upbringing. Race talks tended to be downplayed, supplanted by discussions of social class and lectures on the importance of working hard in school and persevering in the face of hardships to move up the societal ladder. Given the residual anti-Asian sentiments from earlier in the year and then the Black Lives Matter protests across the country surrounding the George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade murders, I thought an opportune moment had presented itself for engaging in this work together.
I couldn’t have been more mistaken.
A dinner table discussion via FaceTime in early June quickly escalated into hot emotions and distress on both sides. My father demanded that we immediately end the call so that my “emotional outbursts” would not permanently damage family relations. And so, there was radio silence for nearly a month.
There is an exchange early on in Cathy Park Hong’s most recent book Minor Feelings that resonated with me during my second read through this creative nonfiction. In the chapter titled “United,” Hong—an Asian American author, poet, artist, and professor—briefly describes her encounter with an older white woman who attended a reading of her book. This woman approached Hong to share her own story connected with the internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S. in the early 1940s. In the exchange, the woman commented, “I wish you’d read your poems…we need poems to heal,” to which Hong responded, “I’m not ready to heal” (Hong, 2020, p. 30)
Those words, we need poems to heal, clustered together on the page in my proximity spoke to me at that very moment and moved me so profoundly that I put the book down, reached for my notebook, and wrote out that line in full. I didn’t know what I would do with those words at the time, only that I felt them and that I knew I would return to them. I was ready to do some healing work.
Not even a full week later, I returned to that same notebook to do some self-work and to release, with the hope to heal. It was early July and I had been sitting at home in my apartment in New York City, my body immobile but my mind racing at 100 mph. Emotions were bubbling inside me and I could barely contain the buildup of tears. For a month, I had been sitting with words, swirling emotions, stories, and memories distilled into truths that I had a hard time swallowing. Even though my husband was in the adjacent room and had a track record of being able to comfort me in a matter of minutes, this time was different. As a white European man, he wouldn’t get it, I thought to myself. He would try to listen empathetically but then proceed to lecture, not recognizing the unintentional harm he causes by his use of language, particularly his fixation with “logic” and “rational” debates. In that way, my husband has too much in common with my father, who prefers facts over feelings, reason over emotion. Who ever said it had to be one or the other? Whoever determined logic and emotion to be mutually exclusive? But I felt too tired to have to explain and justify my feelings this time.
In an attempt to make sense of the myriad of feelings that I had been sitting with and working through since that family FaceTime call, I scribbled words into my notebook that ultimately became this poem:
I’ve moved on
but you haven’t caught up
or don’t wish to join me in my reckoning.
Not ready to move the way I move
Not ready to talk
about who we are in this country.
But you’ve been with me all my life.
This isn’t the time to let go
to leave me to work through my identity
all by myself.
Wait.
Maybe you’ve already let me go
years ago
when you made the choice
to start a new life in a new world.
Let me grow up in what felt like too many worlds
that were neither yours
not mine
to make our own.
You let me go
play with the other kids
do what the other kids do
except I saw they belonged in the world
and I had to grow into the world
appreciate it
and not push against it.
You let me grow up too fast
with classical piano lessons
and Princeton Review classes
that you funded out of love
so I could be part
of an “educated class.”
But I grew up alone
with false models
and illusions
and then disappointments
from becoming too independent, too fast, too soon.
from choosing my own world to enter on my own terms
I’ve moved on.
I’ve grown up.
Where are you?
Not too long after composing this poem, I came across a flyer for a writer’s workshop with Cathy Park Hong. In it was the following description: “if poetry is how to see and prose is how you build, we will look at forms that use poetry to open up the genre-possibilities of prose.” I was immediately hooked. Might my poem—words poured onto a page in a moment of desperation (or was it illumination?)—help me better see and shift from a mindset of harm and disappointment to one of care and healing? Taking up the framing of poetry is how to see and prose is how you build, I use my poem as a portal to transport me to brief moments of my childhood when I felt like more-than-child, revisiting them anew through both my childish (but neither naïve nor innocent) and adult (more seasoned but not superior) eyes. If poetry provides a way to heal, then (re)membering and narrative might allow for a reconstruction of my childhood memories that attends to present moments of tensions with regard to my relationship with my parents (Dillard, 2012). In short, with this essay I aim to trace the contours of my poem and recollect fragments of memories that live near and are in conversation with the poem.
I wish to begin this tracing with a meditation on emotions. Growing up, next to my father’s “rationality,” my emotions were consistently deemed “irrational” and, thus, counterproductive to any discussion, especially those deemed “controversial” for the dinner table. Emotions take away from the argument and weaken its legitimacy, my father would instruct me. Claiming that I was getting “too emotional,” I realize today, functioned as a disciplining tool. I highly doubt my father intended this, but the phrase effectively silenced me. “Too emotional” made it clear to young Yanan (my Chinese name) that emotions are to be contained, regulated, hid. Negative emotions are private matters; they do not belong in open spaces and definitely do not flow from child to parent.
Still today, my father would justify the suppression of my emotions by stating that our discussions were getting “too heated” to be beneficial when I pushed back against something either he or my mother said. On this particular June day, my desire to talk openly and frankly about race relations in the U.S. was making everyone in my family uncomfortable, where “everyone” meant my father and my mother. To my parents, by asserting my voice—one they were not expecting to hear in this capacity—I was disrupting the peace and unity of the family.
Did I come off too strong?
Was my voice a threat because it challenged cultural norms of “respect your elder”?
Did speaking up (not even loudly) become associated with “too emotional”?
In her book, Hong (2020) writes the following:
Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be
difficult…when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized,
they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects
ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are
overreactions…” (p. 57).
To my Chinese immigrant parents, my minor feelings crossed their line of respectful interactions between elders and children. What’s more, my minor feelings transgressed their line of acceptable topics. From that experience, I quickly learned that unwelcomed topics included anything that touched on the subjects of race and politics, particularly when they involved grappling with relational thinking—that is, when Asians are not purely victims but are complicit in the oppressions of other racialized minorities. These topics appeared to trigger a deeply visceral, somatic, even guttural reaction in my parents. Dare I say that my minor feelings made them feel ashamed? A shame veiled by their defensiveness; a shame they hid under their callused skin, weathered by decades of silence and silencing; a shame originating from their own unpreparedness in engaging in race talks with me.
Do my parents have their own minor feelings that never saw daylight?
I think I already know the answer.
Like most Chinese immigrant families, my parents brought me to the U.S. with the “American Dream” intact and placed on a pedestal. They bought into the whole meritocratic ideology, as I did, perhaps because this dominant ideology was so pervasive and readily accessible among immigrant communities, or maybe it was out of a hopeful promise that functioned more as a cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011). Life as first-generation immigrants was tough enough, so when it came to raising their daughter, it made sense to “stage happy memories for her” (Hong, 2020, p. 67). It was more straightforward to present to 9-year-old me this rose-colored Ellis Island narrative than to have to excavate, learn about, and then teach the hidden Asian American history not taught in school. By this history, I mean the Transcontinental Railroad narrative involving Chinese immigrant labor, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the stories surrounding the Angel Island Immigration Station, among other counternarratives.
I still remember those late-night history homework sessions with my father. I was in 4th grade and I struggled to keep up with reading the textbook and answering comprehension check questions about a history that didn’t include people like my family. In summer school, I was taught to speak English “properly” without an accent but I hadn’t learned to think critically about our omission in history texts. Neither had my father, who would dedicate his after-work hours to sit with me and diligently translate sentences from the text. Together, we read stories written by white people about exceptional white Americans (and the occasional person of Color highlighted in a textbox). We learned that we were guests in this country and indebted to white men fighting other white men for our opportunities. We did not learn how this country was founded on the genocide of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Black people (or at least, that is not how the textbook we used framed the beginnings of America).
It was simpler for my family to lean into the “model minority” racial stereotype, buy into individual minority excellence, and distance ourselves from Blackness because all of these actions made whiteness more accessible to us as Asian immigrants. As the perpetuation of the “model minority” myth hurt racial minorities collectively, we continued to benefit from it individually. I do not remember my family ever confronting our privilege as Asian Americans. To this day, as a family we haven’t examined how on a day-to-day basis, we “don’t have to be affected by race…[we] only choose to think about it” (Hong, 2020, p. 86) when the world around us is on fire. We haven’t talked about how our silence and complicity in maintaining that silence contribute to the ongoing violence against Black Americans in this country. We also haven’t paused to consider how, as light-skinned East Asians, we are fortunate to not live under the surveillance that our darker-skinned South Asians face. It is easier to focus on the very real but incomplete narrative of Asian Americans as victims rather than as both victims and perpetrators.
Likewise, it would have been harder work to unpack how this “model minority” myth, conceptualized in the 1960s, was strategically used by white Americans as a racial wedge—to generate fissure in the growing solidarity movements among people of Color, to pit the Asian community against the Black community, with whom we actually have more in common than the white community we aspire to have as our neighbors. We don’t remember—or rather, we learned to forget—the entangled histories of Black and Asian Americans: our parallel exploited labor, mass incarceration, lynching, exclusion, and other forms of dehumanization in this “country of the free.” My parents fought for and continue to work towards our belonging in this country, but what they are blinded to is how “belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave” (Hong, 2020, p. 202). This idea that our belonging is conditional and can be taken away—as the xenophobia at the height of the coronavirus crisis makes evident—is what Dr. Betina Hsieh describes as “provisional white proximity.”
What I have come to realize this past year is that, having been deprived of history, language, and critical lenses to examine my own racial identity, I’m now a 30-year-old playing catch up and doing this work with little support from my family. Our family might have “made it” as a first-generation immigrant family—living life in the suburbs to attend “good” (read: white) schools and being able to afford Ivy League education for my younger sibling—but we’ve lost a chance to really connect as a family. We’ve lost our roots as Asians in our striving to become Americans, which, to this day, still indexes a white identity among Asians.
During the month of radio silence, it was so easy for me to point fingers at my parents for not doing the harder work of teaching me our history in this country, blaming them for my lack of language to talk about my racial identity, reproaching them for my lack of confidence in taking up space. I fought the temptation to project my anger at my parents for not equipping me with racial consciousness. The truth is, this country and its white supremacist system has failed us all by deliberately leaving Asian Americans out of racial discourses, rendering Asian American activism invisible in most textbooks and mainstream media portrayals until recently, and perpetuating the “forever foreigner” (Yano & Akatsuka, 2018) status of Asian Americans. The consequence of these enduring efforts has been a silencing that we have internalized so deeply such that, to this day, many of us play into the quiet, passive, docile racial stereotype that is the “model minority.” In short, Asian immigrants like my parents have been socialized to stay silent; they are not inherently silent. But also, as the dutiful parents they are, in the name of self-preservation, they also passed this silence onto me.
My parents and I have more in common than I would like to admit—particularly my father, whose personality, demeanor, and stubbornness I inherited. My parents, too, continue to face a great deal of silencing, from holding this permanent in-betweenness: too westernized to be Chinese (even deemed so by my grandparents) and too Asian to be American (even as naturalized citizens speaking very decent English). Like me, they long to belong to this world, and are still growing into it, though perhaps more cautiously and less optimistically.
I actually believe my father is one of the most emotional people I know, and in a beautiful way, too, but he so rarely shows his emotions. He almost always manages to keep them in check and prides himself on his objectivity. But I have also witnessed his darker side: the hauntings from an arduous childhood, a traumatized adulthood ridden with guilt from the early passing of my grandparents, and an inability to bring his depression to the open, accompanied by an unwillingness to seek help, medical or otherwise. I have seen him suffer in silence, hide the anguish in his face, push away the pain of not being able to let others into his inner world. I, too, have seen him swallow his anger as a way to “save face” in the face of whiteness.
As a kid, I remember how actively my father had repressed his anger to prevent escalation of a conflict. It was a moment from the summer of 1999, so allow me to first paint the backdrop. Just months earlier, I had taken my first trans-Atlantic flight with my mother to the U.S. to join my father in Nashville, Tennessee. He had just acquired a post-doctoral position at Vanderbilt University to continue his biomedical research. When I arrived, I didn’t speak more than three words of English and so, my elementary school enrolled me in summer school with all the other “ESL students,” as we were called. It was a label I never understood and one I disliked because it did not capture who I was. English was, after all, my third not second language. Excuse you.
On that hot summer afternoon, it was my father’s turn to pick a bunch of us Chinese kids up from school. The three of us were huddled in the back of our second-hand Toyota Camry—a car that I endearingly called my “puppy” because of how the side mirrors drooped and resembled puppy ears. As the smallest but not the youngest, I sat in the middle. I forget what the three of us were doing but we were definitely playing some kind of verbal game, practicing the new vocabulary we had learned. Our car was stalled at a stoplight, waiting for the light to turn green when out of nowhere, a pick-up truck rammed into the rear of our car, jolting all of us forward. I remember feeling strangely animated at that very moment—curious about how my father would react, eager to witness the rightful anger he would project out of concern for us. My father calmly stepped out of the driver’s seat and walked towards the rear of the car. The person driving the pick-up truck also stepped out to meet him halfway. This muscular white man towered over my father by at least a foot. I couldn’t hear their exchange through the glass, and I doubt I would have understood the words, but I was capable of reading non-verbals. I saw the man gesturing at the rear bumper. My eyes shifted from him toward my father and remained fixated on him. He didn’t yell. In fact, I don’t recall him opening his mouth to speak at all. He just frowned at the man, took a hard look at the car, breathed what seemed like a deep sigh, and walked away.
When my father returned to the driver’s seat, we didn’t make a sound. I forget if later in the car ride I asked about the damage. Quite frankly, I was more perplexed by the interpersonal encounter between my father and the white man than by the physical collision of two cars. Why hadn’t my father spoken up, gestured at us kids, demanded an apology, and held the man accountable for his carelessness in broad daylight? I remember thinking at that moment, why is my father behaving like a child, taking it all in and afraid to push back? This memory recalls for me a line from Minor Feelings: “To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you” (Hong, 2020, p. 77). Today, I also wonder about the out-of-frame interactions I had missed from my position as a child in the backseat of the car. How might the muscular white man, and the many others before him, have treated my father like a child?
During my early years living in the U.S., I remember the lessons my parents, especially my father, taught me: to stay quiet, put my head down, focus on my own studies. Work hard, equip yourself with an envious education, and people will take you seriously. The problem was, however, that my parents were often not taken seriously. Despite graduating at the top of their classes, earning scholarships to study in Europe, and hopping from one prestigious institution to the next, they were treated as second-class citizens next to their white American counterparts. In the laboratory, they worked longer hours than everyone else, rarely took a vacation, and led the research studies that resulted in publications, but had to fight to be recognized as first author. They struggled to get promoted, despite being among the most experienced. I lacked the language to name what I was witnessing as racism, but it was through observing my parents’ interactions with and treatment by the many white Americans in their everyday lives that I came to recognize that my parents were different and, by extension, that I, too, was different. In other words, it was through my parents’ world that I came to see my racial identity. I witnessed how, as adults, they were spoken to as though they were children before I was teased by peers and called racial slurs. Through both overt and covert forms of racism in their day-to-day life, my parents continued to keep their heads down, their mouths shut, their hands busy, and instructed me to do the same. It is as though they thought, once you move up social classes, race issues will take care of themselves. After all, as “model minorities,” aren’t we “next in line to be white” (Hong, 2020, p. 19)?
I was feeling slightly terrified of writing about my evolving relationship with my parents alongside my own identity work because of how personal both are and how raw it feels to write about them. Then after this essay was written, I was feeling nervous about putting my story out there—out in the open, visible and vulnerable. Yet, I believe my fear and hesitation at least partly stem from not reading or hearing enough about intrafamilial tension and intergenerational healing in the context of Asian American families. I am afraid because I feel I do not yet have the full command of language to articulate my feelings and lived experiences—because for too long, I have kept words to myself, inked them into notebooks and tucked away, only for me to find. But recently, I have been reaching for the writings of Audre Lorde, and in Sister Outsider, she illuminates for me an important truth that I believe also applies to Asian Americans: “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior” (Lorde, 2007, p. 14). While my parents may not be ready to use their voice, I can begin to transform my silence into words that lead to action and change. Perhaps this public essay marks the beginning of my personal "becoming public" as an Asian American educator (Biesta, 2012). Perhaps, too, my personal story and my reckoning could be a "beginning" for others to take up and engage in their own self-work of transforming silence and reclaiming language.
And so, with that, I invite you, dear reader, on a journey of naming that which is felt but perhaps not yet formed and of embracing poetry as a mode of feeling through feelings towards illumination. I end by lifting up the words of Lorde (2007): “I speak these words… in an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken” (p. 44)
References
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
Biesta, G. (2012). Becoming public: Public pedagogy, citizenship and the public sphere. Social & Cultural Geography, 13(7), 683–697. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2012.723736
Dillard, C. B. (2012). Learning to (re)member the things we’ve learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms, spirituality, and the sacred nature of research and teaching (First printing edition). Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers.
Hong, C. P. (2020). Minor feelings: An Asian American reckoning. One World.
Lorde, A. (2007). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
Yano, C. R., & Akatsuka, N. K. A. (2018). Straight A’s: Asian American college students in their own words. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478002093
Catherine Cheng Stahl is an educator, researcher, and doctoral student living and working in New York City. She is in her 8th year of teaching, currently working with students at the college and graduate levels. Her research in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University explores in-between time-spaces of youth learning and belonging outside of official learning spaces. She engages in multimodal and ethnographic methodologies to elevate youth digital identities through exploring the complex ways young people perform self and negotiate belonging in technology-mediated worlds. This research interest stems from both her own experiences as a teenager immersed in the virtual world of Neopets and her 5 years of hanging out with high school students as a chemistry and biology teacher. Beyond all things academic, Catherine is multilingual and a foodie, enjoys taking photographs and scribbling notes for her personal blog “Book Smart Street Smart,” and can be found wandering the streets of the city to boost her creativity. As a perpetual “border-crosser,” she is inspired to find ways of merging the arts and sciences, of blurring disciplines, and of weaving together her varied interests into a lifelong endeavor.
