Discussion Forum

THE INDEBTED

NURSING MY DAUGHTER AT THE late blue hour when streetlights begin to pale, I saw a plane blinking across the sky. I wanted to be inside that plane, inside the white hush of a dimly lit cabin, white buds sunk into my ears, New York’s skyline fading from view until it was a baby’s breath of lights.

When I first became a mother, I resented how locked in I was to my local environs. No more traveling alone. No more taking off when I felt like it. Landlocked, I stole away to the Red Hook municipal pool as much as I could to swim a few laps by myself, because being underwater was freedom. I tried to write an essay about the pool, beginning with the Red Hook public pool as a genuine commons, massive as a football field, with space for every kind of kid, and gloriously free, with free sunblock that comes out of a dispenser.

And yet historically, the public pool was one of the most hotly contested spaces for desegregation. On the East Coast, urban planner Robert Moses built the WPA pools mostly on the white side of New York so they would be out of reach for black people. Southern towns filled their town pools in with concrete because they’d rather deprive everyone of the pool than share it with black people. I saw a photograph of one such concrete-filled pool, now part of a parking lot for a bus depot. The only evidence of it is a forlorn 4½ʹ depth marker delineating the perimeters of where swimmers once splashed; it now looks like a grave marker. In Pittsburgh, when black swimmers entered a newly integrated pool, a mob of white swimmers threw rocks and tried to drown them. When desegregation was unavoidable, white Americans fled to the suburbs to build their own private pools.

The public pool is such a stark example of how much this country has been hell-bent on keeping black and white bodies apart that I became unsure if it was my history to retell. My interest was sparked by a childhood incident but it

discomfited me to attach my experience to a history that, next to the black and white apartheid that has carved itself into the American infrastructure, felt anecdotal. I was thirteen. Deep in the pool I swam like a bottom feeder until I could no longer hold my breath. As I surfaced, I heard a grown-up voice boom “Get out!” Treading water, I squinted toward the source of that voice to a backlit man who sternly said the pool was for residents only. This was at my aunt’s apartment complex in Orange County. I told the man that my aunt and my little cousin, who was at the shallow end with my sister, lived here and I was babysitting. He didn’t let me finish and ordered us to leave. As I clicked the gate behind us, I heard him say, “They’re everywhere now.”

—

We’re everywhere now. We have taken over Orange County. Some of us are even rich housewives in Orange County. The takeaway from the crowd-pleasing opening scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: if you discriminate against us, we’ll make more money than you and buy your fancy hotel that wouldn’t let us in. Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn’t that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it’s through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?

—

I began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to see what throbbed beneath it. This was harder than I thought, like butterflying my brain out onto a dissection table to tweeze out the nerves that are my inhibitions. Moreover, I had to contend with this we. I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them. But I feared the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.

—

I never finished my father’s story about the war. After the interpreter recognized

my uncle as an old friend from school, the interpreter turned to the American soldiers and spoke to them in their strange language. Like magic, the GIs eased their guns. My father was astonished by the power of the English language. After they tried to shoot my grandfather in his own home, these giants dug into their rucksack to give my father a round blue tin of Charms Sour Balls. My father popped a sugar-crusted molecule of cherry, lemon, and lime balls into his mouth and was stunned by the firework of flavors.

The wretched of the earth know this candy. Hershey’s doled out after a firefight, M&Ms handed out before a raid. Americans sprayed Dum Dums lollies from a fighter helicopter and the children of Afghanistan ran after the chopper with their arms raised. Sometimes candy was used as a trick. In Vietnam, bored guards planted candy under barbed wire so they could watch street kids lacerate themselves trying to grab it. More recently, two U.S. marines were handing out sweets to four Iraqi kids when they were all killed, ambushed by a suicide bomber. In 2003, during the Iraq invasion, the U.S. marines threw out the Charms that came with their MREs because they believed they were a curse. A lemon Charm meant a vehicle breakdown; a raspberry Charm meant death. Abandoned packets of Charms scattered the roads of southern Iraq. No one would touch them.

But the hearts of South Koreans were won. Sow the cratered lands with candy and from its wrappers will rise Capitalism

and Christianity. About her homeland, the poet Emily Jungmin Yoon writes, “Our cities today glow with crosses like graveyards.”

—

Throughout my life, I had felt the weight of indebtedness. I was born into a deficit because I was a daughter rather than the son to replace my parents’ dead son. I continued to depreciate in value with each life decision I made that did not follow my parents’ expectations. Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted.

If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.

—

Indebtedness is not the same thing as gratitude. In his poetry, Ross Gay gives thanks to small moments in his life: tasting the “velvety heart” of a fig, drinking cold water cranked from a rusty red pump; he even gives thanks to his ugly feet, though when they’re bare, his feet make him so self-conscious he digs “his toes like twenty tiny ostriches into the sand.” To truly feel gratitude is to sprawl out into the light of the present. It is happiness, I think.

To be indebted is to fixate on the future. I tense up after good fortune has landed on my lap like a bag of tiny excitable lapdogs. But whose are these? Not mine, surely! I treat good fortune not as a gift but a loan that I will have to pay back in weekly installments of bad luck. I bet I’m like this because I was raised wrong—browbeaten to perform compulsory gratitude. Thank you for sacrificing your life for me! In return, I will sacrifice my life for you!

I have rebelled against all that. As a result, I have developed the worst human trait: I am ungrateful. This book too is ungrateful. In my defense, a writer who feels indebted often writes ingratiating stories. Indebted, that is, to this country— to whom I, on the other hand, will always be ungrateful.

—

The first time I saw the famous photograph of Yuri Kochiyama was only a few years ago. The black-and-white photograph was snapped right after Malcolm X was shot at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965. He is splayed out on the floor, surrounded by a crowd trying to revive him. She is the only person tending to him whose face isn’t cropped out. She is kneeling in her black coat, cradling Malcolm X’s head on her lap. Upon closer inspection, I notice that she is propping his head up with her two hands while another woman is undoing his tie to better see to his bullet wounds. She looks like she is in her forties, wearing cat-eye glasses that frame her thin angular features. Who is this Asian

woman? And why am I surprised to see an Asian woman in this photograph?

—

Kochiyama was born in San Pedro, California, in 1921 to a middle-class Japanese American family. She was a happy and devoutly Christian teenager who grew up on the white side of town, and her life there was uneventful—until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Soon afterwards, her father, whose health was already frail, was falsely accused of espionage and taken to prison, where he was detained and questioned for five weeks. He died in a hospital right after his release, hallucinating that Kochiyama’s brother was his interrogator because her brother, who had enlisted in the war, was wearing a U.S. army uniform at his bedside. When her ailing father turned his attention to Kochiyama, he asked in a panic, “Who beat you up?” But no one had touched her.

The rest of the family was evacuated to Jerome, a concentration camp that imprisoned 8,500 Japanese internees in the swamplands of Arkansas. Forced to give up all their property and life savings, which is now estimated at $6 billion, Japanese families were crowded into drafty barracks that were built like the living quarters of prisoner-of-war camps. Each person was issued a straw mattress and an army blanket. There was no heat during the harsh winters and no indoor plumbing, so that if someone had to go at night, they had to trudge out in the mud to the latrines while a guard tower’s search light was trained on them the whole way. And yet, even while interned, Kochiyama was almost delusionally upbeat, organizing letter-writing campaigns to fellow Nisei soldiers who had enlisted to prove they were American patriots, until letters began pouring back with the word “deceased.” According to her biographer Diane Fujino, Japanese American soldiers helped liberate thirty thousand survivors in Dachau, which was fairly ironic considering that their own families were still behind barbed wire in America.

—

Upon release, Kochiyama returned to San Pedro. She couldn’t find a waitressing job anywhere because no one wanted to hire a Jap. It wasn’t until she and her husband moved to Harlem that she began to understand what had happened to her. Until then, nothing deterred her patriotism, not the FBI whisking her father away to prison without reason, not his death, nor even her family’s internment.

She still clung to the myth she learned in her white church and school: that the United States was a land of liberty. What lay beyond the fault lines of her belief system was only fear. When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York, her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America’s racist history. Finally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to her wasn’t a nightmarish aberration but the norm.

Kochiyama’s optimism was also what made her an extraordinary activist. Since she was young, she’d had a preternatural gift for bringing people together. After befriending her black neighbors and coworkers, she became an ardent civil rights activist. She later met Malcolm X at a demonstration protesting the discriminatory hiring practices of a construction company. He was mobbed by fans but when he saw the lone Asian woman standing back, he reached out his arm to shake her hand. To his surprise, Kochiyama challenged him, asking him why he wasn’t an integrationist. Struck by her gumption, X invited her to the weekly Organization of Afro-American Unity meeting, where she became further radicalized, turning not only anti-racist but also anti-capitalist.

—

Kochiyama had a compulsion to help others, and was adamant that she not be the center of attention, which was admirable but also gave me pause; made me question if there was something inherently Asian and female about her selflessness, which probably betrays my own internalized chauvinism and my own rather predictable preference for the melancholic poet or the messianic hero rather than organizers, like Kochiyama, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes. In fact, at a time when identities can be walled off, it’s essential to lift up the life of Kochiyama, whose sense of we was porous and large, whose mission was to amplify the voices of others while amplifying hers. She fought tirelessly for prison rights reform; her home was known as “Grand Central” for black civil rights activists; and she was one of seven activists who occupied the Statue of Liberty in support of Puerto Rican independence in 1977. Later, in 1988, she helped lead the Japanese American activist movement that demanded and received a formal apology and reparations for the internment camps.

—

In 1968, students at UC Berkeley invented the term Asian American to inaugurate

a new political identity. Radicalized by the black power movement and anti- colonial movement, the students invented that name as a refusal to apologize for being who they were. It’s hard to imagine that the origin of Asian America came from a radical place, because the moniker is now flattened and emptied of any blazing political rhetoric. But there was nothing before it. Asians either identified by their nationality or were called Oriental. The activist Chris Iijima said, “It was less a marker for what one was and more for what one believed.” Some activists were so inspired by the Black Panthers that groups such as I Wor Kuen in New York City and the Red Guard Party in San Francisco downright copied the Black Panther signature style—their armbands, their berets—while initiating their own ten-point program where they gave out free breakfast to poor Chinese American children.

They were from Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese working-class backgrounds, from migrant farmers to restaurant waiters, fighting not just domestic racism but U.S. imperialism abroad. Many were disenchanted with the mainstream white anti-war movement because they cared not just about “bringing the troops home” but about the tens of thousands of Southeast Asians abroad who were being killed daily. That period of time, writes the historian Karen Ishizuka, was “an unholy alliance of racism and imperialism, like nothing before or since—the war united Asians in America who, regardless of our various ethnicities, looked more enemy than American.” According to the scholar Daryl J. Maeda, Asian American veterans reported being humiliated and dehumanized by their fellow GIs as “gooks” while their supposed enemies, the Vietnamese, often identified them as their own. In the 1977 play Honey Bucket by Melvyn Escueta, an old Vietnamese woman touches the black hair of an American soldier named Andy. She asks, “Same-same Viet-me?”

“Filipino. Uh, Philippines,” Andy says. “Same-same, Viet-me,” the peasant repeats confidently.

—

In college, I was more interested in art than activism, so I discovered our radical history rather late. My only exposure to it in school was scanning the row of faded books on Asian American social movements in the library, its death entombed in those dull dry textbooks that were never checked out. But I also recall how the anti-racist movements in the sixties and seventies were dismissed as failures. Marxists wrote off the fight for Chicano, Asian American, and Native

American rights as extravagantly specialized, atomizing the Left from thinking about the core issue of class, whereas the mainstream center dismissed it as overtly militant, an opinion shared not only by whites but by minorities as well.

In a 1996 New York Times interview, Yuri Kochiyama declared, “People have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back. And given what the United States and Western powers have done to the third world…these countries should fight back.” Right afterwards, the interviewer, Norimitsu Onishi, deflated her quote by saying that Kochiyama “clings to views now consigned to the political fringe.”

I embraced all these half-baked opinions without doing my homework. Whatever their politics were, I thought, they were now outdated. It concerns me how fast I dismissed the hard work of my activist predecessors after hearing enough “experts” spout off on the frivolity of identity politics when the international and interracial politics of Kochiyama was anything but frivolous. It makes me worried about the future, about this nation’s inborn capacity to forget, about the powers that be who always win and take over the narrative. Already, “woke” is a hashtag that’s now mocked, when being awake is not a singular revelation but a long-term commitment fueled by constant reevaluation. Ending this book, I think about what prognosis I can offer among the crowded field of experts who warn of our end times. What I can say is look back to that lost blade of history when activists like Kochiyama offered an alternate model of mutual aid and alliance. They offered an alternate model of us.

—

A thought experiment: what if every time white people yell at nonwhites to go back to [insert nation or continent], they are immediately granted their wish? Confusion will abound. Ecuadorians will find themselves in Mexico, or I could find myself in China. But what if they get it right and I find myself zapped to Seoul?

I haven’t returned since 2008, when I went to visit my grandmother who, at the age of one hundred, was slowly dying in an appalling nursing home that I still can’t think about without being upset at my family. That home was like some daycare from hell, with pink walls and a creepy recording of church songs sung by children playing all hours of the day. Elderly people, packed ten to a room, whimpered for their kids to come visit them. My sister was there for a year, caring for our grandmother, because the rest of my relatives were too old to manage her severe dementia. “I want to die before my family abandons me in old

age,” my grandmother used to say. I can’t live in Seoul. It is not a good place for women. Through cosmetic

surgery, many women shrink down their naturally wide Mongolian faces to whitened inverted teardrops. The education system is merciless. In 1997, the International Monetary Fund bailed out South Korea’s crippling financial crisis with a $58 billion loan upon the agreement that the nation open up its markets to foreign investors and relax labor market reforms, making it easier to hire and fire workers and loosen carbon emission standards so that American cars can be imported. Now real wages have stagnated. Unemployment is dire. College graduates call their country “Hell Chosun” after an oppressive dynasty with a feudal class system. A murky haze of micro-dust has settled over Seoul, dust which can’t be seen but is felt at the back of your throat, and which will cause long-term health problems, like cancer. During certain months, if Koreans have to go outside at all, they wear surgical masks, but even that isn’t enough to protect them.

—

Then be grateful that you live here.

—

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes, “Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her.” The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.

—

I had my twenty-eighth birthday party in Seoul, and celebrated it at my sister’s little apartment with four of our new Korean friends, who were noise musicians. My sister and I went to their shows in tiny back-alley clubs where onstage one of them would sit on a folding chair and click on their laptop while an ongoing buzzing sound, with occasional blips and screeches and snares, would emit from the stereo system. At my sister’s, when we were already drunk, they proposed a drinking game and I suggested we play “Never Have I Ever.” This is a game

where people take turns declaring an act they’ve never done before, and anyone who has done it has to drink. It’s a game that often starts with the mildly embarrassing (“Never have I ever peed in the shower,” for instance) before it drops off the precipice into the frank and sexual. I thought I would begin with a silly question so they would get the hang of it, before one of the musicians, the one who called himself Fish, with a hipster mid-aughts mullet and black plugs in his earlobes, announced that he’d start. He raised his shot glass of soju.

“I have never tried to kill myself,” he declared, and downed his glass. The other musicians clinked their glasses and also downed their drinks.

There was nowhere to go after that, so we stopped playing.

—

I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists used to say, “I am here because you were there.”

I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon, David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a double- eyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.

—

I was never satisfied with those immigrant talking points about “not belonging” and “the sense of in-betweenness.” It seemed rigid and rudimentary, like I just

need the right GPS coordinates to find myself. But I also understand the impulse to search for some origin myth of the self, even if it’s shaped by the stories told to us, which is why I keep returning to Seoul in my memories, to historical facts that are obscure to most and obvious to few, to try to find better vantage points to justify my feelings here. In Seoul, I still found myself cleaved, but at least it wasn’t reduced to broad American talking points. At least the “arsenal of complexes” that Frantz Fanon talks about was laid bare.

—

Upon my return to the United States, the air thinned; my breath shallowed. As the scholar Seo-Young Chu puts it, I was exiled back to the uncanny valley, where I was returned to my silicon mold and looked out of monolid eyes. To be a writer, then, is to fill myself in with content. To make myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human and a little more relevant to American culture. But that’s not enough for me.

Poetry is a forgiving medium for anyone who’s had a strained relationship with English. Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry. The poet Louise Glück called the lyric a ruin. The lyric as ruin is an optimal form to explore the racial condition, because our unspeakable losses can be captured through the silences built into the lyric fragment. I have relied on those silences, maybe too much, leaving a blank space for the sorrows that would otherwise be reduced by words. “It is horrible to be tangible inside capital,” said the poet Jos Charles. I used to think I’d rather leave a blank space for my pain than have it be easily summed up for consumption. But by turning to prose, I am cluttering that silence to try to anatomize my feelings about a racial identity that I still can’t examine as a writer without fretting that I have caved to my containment.

—

Our respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our thoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except others in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human is not enough for me. I want to destroy the universal. I want to rip it down. It is not whiteness but our contained condition that is universal, because we are the global majority. By we I mean nonwhites, the

formerly colonized; survivors, such as Native Americans, whose ancestors have already lived through end times; migrants and refugees living through end times currently, fleeing the droughts and floods and gang violence reaped by climate change that’s been brought on by Western empire.

In Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining themselves as slaves and refugees in the future. In Blade Runner 2049, the sequel, neon billboards flicker interchangeably in Japanese and Korean, villains wear deconstructed kimonos, but with the exception of a manicurist, there is no Asian soul in sight. We have finally vanished. The slaves, like Ryan Gosling, are all beautiful white replicants. The orphanage is full of young white boys who dismantle junked circuit boards, a scene taken straight out of present-day Delhi, where Indian child laborers break down mountains of electronic waste while being poisoned by mercury toxins. Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science fiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against black and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their own fall as a preventative measure to ensure that the white race will never fall.

—

In Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s eighteen-hour documentary The Vietnam War, they interviewed a Japanese American veteran, Vincent H. Okamoto, who served as a platoon leader. Like Kochiyama, Okamoto was imprisoned at a Japanese internment camp, in his case in his early youth. Since all six of his brothers served in the military, two during World War II and one during the Korean War, he followed his family’s footsteps by enlisting to go to Vietnam.

Okamoto’s first assignment was searching for Viet Cong soldiers supposedly hiding out in the countryside fourteen miles outside of Saigon. After hours of fruitless searching, he gave orders for his men to take a break for lunch at a nearby village. He found a hut where he smelled the familiar scent of steaming rice. He suddenly felt homesick for his mother’s cooking. He hadn’t had rice for months. Okamoto told his interpreter to ask the elderly woman who was cooking if he could have a bowl of rice in exchange for cigarettes and C-rations of canned turkey. She made a meal for him of rice and fish and vegetables. He wolfed it down. He asked for seconds.

“Ain’t they poor enough without you eating all their food?” a soldier chided him.

“They’ve got enough rice to feed a dozen men,” Okamoto responded. Then he stopped himself. Why was there all this rice for one elderly woman

and her grandchildren? He asked the woman, “Who’s all this rice for?” “I don’t know,” she kept repeating through the interpreter. He ordered his group to conduct a search around her home. Under a thatch of straw, they found a secret tunnel. Okamoto threw a phosphorescent grenade into the tunnel. After the explosion, they dragged out seven or eight dead bodies that were so charred they couldn’t be identified. “Atta boy,” the company commander said to him. The woman who fed him the rice crumpled to the ground and started wailing.

—

Traitor, I thought. That word kept ringing in my mind. I was disgusted with him, especially by

his flat neutral affectlessness as he told the story. But I was wrong. He wasn’t a traitor. He was fighting for the United States. He was doing his job. In fact, he was probably showing his remorse by telling that story for a documentary series that he knew would be seen by millions of viewers.

Ultimately, I was left dissatisfied with the documentary. The directors claimed that their series was going to show both sides of the war, but it still centralized the trauma of American veterans. No stories of loss by Vietnamese civilians. None by the Viet Cong female soldiers whom I was dying to know about. I had read that feminist Asian American activists in the sixties and seventies looked up to these female soldiers as models of resistance. The series also didn’t have much of anything on the foreign allies who helped the United States, not that I expected it would. I’m thinking specifically of South Korea, who deployed more than three hundred thousand soldiers to Vietnam during the nine years of the war. At the time, South Korea was one of the poorest nations in the world and they wanted aid money to boost their economy. They were also indebted to America for rescuing them from their Communist enemy during the Korean War. At the time, the dictator Park Chung-Hee said, “We are making a moral repayment of our historical debt to the Free World.”

—

I could begin writing about buying flowers from the corner deli, but give me enough pages—two, twenty, or one hundred—and no matter what, violence will

saturate my imagination. I have tried to write poems and prose that remain in the quotidian, turning an uneventful day over and over, like a polished pebble that glints in the light into a silvery metaphysical inquiry about time. It is late spring. I pick up my daughter from preschool and on our walk home, we admire the perfect purple orbs of onion flowers in bloom. My husband makes dinner that we sometimes take upstairs to our roof with the view of the train and the sun that melts its blood orange into the clouds.

I write down my daily routine that is so routine it allows me the freedom to ruminate. At what cost do I have this life? At what toll have I been granted this safety? The Japanese occupation; the Korean War; the dictators who tortured dissidents with tactics learned from the Japanese and the war. I didn’t live through any of it, but I’m still a descendant of those who had no time to recover; who had no time, nor permission, to reflect. Barely recovered from the Korean War, young South Korean soldiers arrived in Vietnam to pay back their debt to America. They were ground troops assigned “to pacify the countryside” and they raped and murdered civilians indiscriminately. Their zeal for retribution was monomaniacal, where if one of the soldiers died from an unknown sniper’s fire from a village, they went back and burned that village down. In Hà My village, South Korean troops killed 135 civilians, including babies and the elderly. In Bình Hòa, there were 430 deaths. In Binh An, more than 1,000 civilian deaths. There were 8,000 civilian deaths at the hands of South Koreans but that number, like all civilian casualties during war, is inexact.

—

I can’t entirely renounce the condition of indebtedness. I am indebted to the activists who struggled before me. I am indebted to Cha. I’d rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history. I’m also indebted to my parents. But I cannot repay them by keeping my life private, or by following that privatized dream of taking what’s mine. Almost daily, my mother demanded gratitude from me. Almost weekly, my mother said we moved here so I wouldn’t have to suffer. Then she asked, “Why do you make yourself suffer?”

—

“In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist

Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s sun has set.” Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American, I felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O’Grady. I heard the ring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book. Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise.

Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence.

But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only answer that through the actions of others. As of now, I’m writing when history is being devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The administration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to fill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp survivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever happened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why didn’t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, “We need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans didn’t have in 1942.”

We were always here.