> on relations
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: the Blacksonian, Minari, and Asian American relationality.
Hello friend,
A few years ago, when I was in DC for a conference, I went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I booked my ticket in advance. Remember when the museum opened and tickets were sold out as soon as they were released, even though admission was free? That's how necessary I feel that the NMAAHC should always be.
The Blacksonian starts three floors underground, with the slave trade, and moves chronologically. To move through the museum is to witness Black history as American history.
"Witness" is not quite the right word. Walking through the museum, I felt like an outsider, looking at a history that did not belong to me, but I also felt like a participant in some ways, in the way that Asian Americans depend on Black history, in the sense that I felt responsible for my degrees of racism and ignorance.
I was thinking of the museum this week while listening to the podcast Code Switch. Last week's episode was an interview with Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the NMAAHC and the current Secretary of the Smithsonian.
I cried at so many moments in the museum. The timber from a slave ship. The cabin. Emmett Till. The quote on the wall. The clothes. The music. I wasn't crying because of individual artifacts; I was crying because of the continuity of the story, the interconnectedness within the past, between the past and the present.
My high school U.S. history class was a division of discrete units: colonization, industrialization, wars, etc. The NMAAHC felt like a counternarrative to all that. A series of long ramps connects each floor, serving as a reminder of that interconnectedness, a continuous narrative of Black history, the recognition of history as a series of consequences.
I found that continuity of narrative in my Asian American studies class, which I took during my last semester of college. We began with a documentary of the 1968 SF State student protests, which led to the creation of the first ethnic studies (and Asian American studies) programs ever. We read the 1966 article that created the model minority myth. We talked about Vincent Chin and Japanese internment. We studied the Page and Hart-Cellar Acts. We didn't move chronologically, but there was a similar sense of continuity, that the past built our present.
I avoided the Asian American community in college because I didn't want that to define who I was. My mistake. During my senior year, I went on a retreat with the Asian Culture Center. We constructed a timeline of Asian American history. I had never seen the past arranged like that before. The retreat was called "Retracing Our Roots." As a second-generation Chinese American, I thought my roots were with my Chinese ancestors. How could I have known that I also had a place in an Asian American history? I wish that I had known sooner.
When I heard about Atlanta, I was driving at night. I saw the wind turbines in the distance, blinking. I didn't cry. It wasn't a numbness, exactly. I wasn't surprised. I was sad, but not devastated. I felt guilty for what I wasn't feeling, when my friends were barely holding it together, when my friends were calling out authorities for their insufficient, passive responses. I thought, I don't want to be indignant and angry and sad all the time. I thought, I am just an inane, shallow person who is only superficially invested in social justice.
I hate the feeling that I have to post, or write, or donate, or protest, the feeling that I have to perform my support and love for my ever-complicated, ever-beautiful community.
I cried later, on the bus, when I read their names.
In an op-ed for NYT, Mihee Kim-Kort, a Presbyterian minister and doctoral candidate in religious studies, writes that:
When news about the Atlanta killings broke, I saw in Korean sources first that six of the dead were Asian women, four of Korean descent. I didn't yet know their names; I mourned them as Daughter, Big Sister, Mother, Aunt.
In Korean, we don't often call each other by given names. As I'm the eldest child in the family, for as long as I can remember, my mother and father have called each other "mi-omma" ("Mihee's mother") and "mi-appa" ("Mihee's father"). As a child I asked my parents why we did this. They explained that who we are is inseparable from who loves us and whom we love.
My Asian American studies professor, Dr. Cynthia Wu, pointed out that Korean women working in Asian-owned spas are the legacy of U.S. neocolonial control in Korea, from the Cold War, through the Korean War, to now.
I'm reminded again that Asian Americans are not a monolith, that there is tension within the Asian American community. I'm Chinese American, and there is plenty of geopolitical tension beetween China and Korea. Although I am Asian American, I also feel that this narrative is not entirely mine.
Cross-ethnic and cross-racial solidarity does not exclude this sense of outsiderhood. In a sense, outsiderhood is a necessity of being Asian American. Asian Americans aren't a monolith and there are a lot of Asian American experiences I can't claim as my own. But that doesn't preclude me from feeling a sense of kinship. Student organizers who created the term Asian American envisioned a radical pan-Asian, anti-imperialist, anti-racist movement.
In a recent interview, writer Cathy Park Hong said that:
The rhetoric has changed from We want more Asians in Hollywood. It’s not just about representational politics. It’s also about confronting class inequity among Asian Americans and trying to build solidarity with other people of color.
What I like to say about Asian Americans is that if we think of Asian Americans as less of an identity, and more as a coalition, then maybe Asians will feel more comfortable identifying with it, because it allows room for all of our kind of national, economic, and regional distinctions.
In what ways am I complicit in oppressive systems, in what ways am I passive, what is my way of doing the work? When do I stop feeling guilty?
adrienne marie brown writes that:
the faster we can forgive ourselves and others for what seems to be error, the more quickly we can be in the ease and playfulness of this game of life. i am fairly certain we each have roles to play—that there is some specific thing each of us can contribute. i am convinced that no one’s role is simply sacrifice, or suffering. i could be wrong, but i think the emphasis of our short randomized lived experiences has to be on the ‘play’, the creative and liberating challenge of finding joy in playing our roles.
Perhaps the first step is to listen. This week's Code Switch episode is all about Asian American organizers speaking out against racism and feeling like nobody has been listening.
Last week, I watched Minari. While watching, I felt the impulse to compare it to my experience as an Asian American. There was a recognition when Jacob's stubborness reminded me of my father's, or when the kids answered in English to their parents' Korean.
How do I seek out more of that relationality?
Cheers,
Tiffany