December 11, 2020 First Person Freedom Came in Cycles By Pamela Sneed Pamela Sneed. Photo: Patricia Silva. Uncle Vernon was cool, tall, hazel-eyed, and brown-skinned. He dressed in the latest fashions and wore leather long after the sixties. Of all of my father’s three brothers, Vernon was the artist—a painter and photographer in a decidedly nonartistic family. To demonstrate his flair for the dramatic and avant-garde, his apartment was stylishly decorated. It showcased a faux brown suede, crushed velvet couch with square rectangular pieces that sectioned off like geography, accentuated by a round glass coffee table with decorative steel legs. It was pulled together by a large seventies organizer and stereo that nearly covered the length of an entire wall. As a final touch, dangling from the shelves was a small collection of antique long-legged dolls. This was my uncle and memories of his apartment were never so clear as the day I headed there with my first boyfriend, Shaun Lyle. It was the eighties, late spring, the year king of soul Luther Vandross debuted his blockbuster album, Never Too Much, with moving songs about love. If ever there was a moment in my life that I felt free, unsaddled by life’s burdens, and experienced, in the words of an old cliché, “winds of possibility,” it had to be the time with Shaun Lyle heading upstairs to my uncle’s house as Luther Vandross blared soulfully out from the stereo, “A house is not a home.” Read More
December 10, 2020 First Person My Spirit Burns Through This Body By Akwaeke Emezi Human heart, dual view, vintage anatomy print It is storming in Dar es Salaam, thunder belting through the sky and rain slamming against the roof for over twelve hours, until the roads are drowned in swells of water and everyone is stuck in traffic. I am lying under a mosquito net, aged white tulle draped over a four-poster, as the rain seeps under the door to pool on the tile. Kathleen and I catch it with towels and listen to the wind while the right side of my torso goes into convulsions. It starts with my arm jumping, rippling from the shoulder down to my wrist, then it escalates until I’m watching my fingers flex and claw on their own, watching my elbow slam against my side, flaring my forearm out in spasmodic jerks. My shoulder blade lifts off the mattress, the muscles seizing their own control as my sternum scrambles toward the ceiling. My head snaps so violently to the side that it feels like my neck is being torn by the force. I wouldn’t let just anyone see me like this, but Kathleen is family. She sits next to me and holds my hand and I try not to tense my body to stop the convulsions, to control this treacherous flesh. “Let it go,” she says, and my speech slurs and stutters when I try to respond, nerves glitching in my mouth. We get me sitting up against the headboard and the convulsions seep down into my arm, leaving my head and neck mercifully alone for a bit. Kathleen brings me muscle relaxants and painkillers. I throw the pills down with bottled water, wincing at the taste. We talk about how scary this is, and then I make a joke about popping and locking as my arm carves severe and involuntary shapes into the air. We both laugh because it is better than being afraid. When I was packing for this trip, I didn’t bring enough clothes; I was so focused instead on not forgetting any of my medications. I’d sat next to my suitcase with orange bottles scattered around me: three different muscle relaxants, two different painkillers, one for neuropathic pain, my antidepressants, my antianxiety meds, my acid-reflux meds that work together with my asthma meds so I can breathe at night, my migraine meds, my inhalers. Seeing them gathered together hurt. Three years ago, my flesh didn’t need all this, but my stress levels have climbed so high that my muscles have run out of space to hold all the tension, so they release it in flamboyant spasms. My somatic therapist says this is my body processing complex trauma, and we talk about the ways in which my flesh is desperately trying to keep me alive. Read More
December 1, 2020 First Person Tokyo Reeks of Gasoline By Yi Sang Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a painter, architect, poet, and writer in early-twentieth-century Korea, when the Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. Yi Sang wrote and published in both Korean and Japanese until his early death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven, after imprisonment by Japanese police for thought crimes in Tokyo. His work shows innovative engagement with European Modernism, especially that of surrealism and Dada. He is considered one of the most experimental writers of Korean Modernism. The following essay, published after Yi Sang’s death and translated into English by Jack Jung for Yi Sang: Selected Works, details his impressions of Tokyo. The Shinjuku district of Tokyo, ca. 1933. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Before I saw the real Marunouchi Building, nicknamed Marubiru, it was at least four times bigger and far more amazing in my mind. Will I also be disillusioned like this when I see New York’s Broadway? Anyways, my first impression of Tokyo: “This city reeks of gasoline!” People with barely functioning lungs like myself have no right to live in this city. The smell of gasoline seeps into my body though I keep my mouth closed; I taste it whenever I try to eat something. The citizens of Tokyo will all eventually smell like automobiles. No one lives around the Marunouchi Building except other buildings. Automobiles are pedestrians’ shoes. The few who force themselves to walk in this city are the holy philosophers, contemptuously glaring at capitalism and the ending of a century. Everybody else simply puts on their automobiles to go out for a walk. Ridiculously enough, I had already walked in this neighborhood for five minutes when I wised up and got a taxi—inside the taxi, I studied the title of the twentieth century. The moat of the imperial palace passed outside the taxi’s window, and innumerable automobiles busily tried to maintain the twentieth century’s profitability. My personal ethos smells of the stale nineteenth century, and it is a very dignified thing: it cannot comprehend how there can be so many automobiles. Read More
November 30, 2020 First Person The Cold Blood of Iceland By Roni Horn The American artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975, when she was nineteen. Since that initial journey, she has returned to the island nation, both in person and through art, time and again; she has described Iceland as “a force, a force that had taken possession of me.” Island Zombie: Iceland Writings, which will be published this week by Princeton University Press, collects vignettes and photographs from Horn’s ongoing fascination with the country. An excerpt appears below. Photo: Michal Klajban. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. MAKING BEING HERE ENOUGH I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to do anything but be here. Doing something will take me away from being here. I want to make being here enough. Maybe it’s already enough. I won’t have to invent enough. I’ll be here and I won’t do anything and this place will be here, and I won’t do anything to it. And maybe because I’m here and because the me in what’s here makes what’s here different, maybe that will be enough, maybe that will be what I’m after. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’ll be able to perceive the difference. How will I perceive it? I need to find a way to make myself absolutely not here but still be able to be here to know the difference. I need to experience the difference between being here and not changing here, and being here and changing here. I set up camp early for the night. It’s a beautiful, unlikely evening after a long rainy day. I put my tent down in an El Greco landscape: the velvet greens, the mottled purples, the rocky stubble. But El Greco changes here, he makes being here not enough. I am here and I can’t be here without El Greco. I just can’t leave here alone. Read More
November 25, 2020 First Person The Libraries of My Life By Jorge Carrión The Chemists’ Club library in New York, New York, ca. 1920. Photo courtesy of Science History Institute. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I was thirteen and wanted to work. Someone told me that you could get paid to referee basketball games and where to go to find out about such weekend employment. I needed income to bolster my collections of stamps and Sherlock Holmes novels. I vaguely remember going to an office full of adolescents queueing in front of a young man who looked every inch an administrator. When my turn came, he asked me if I had any experience and I lied. I left that place with details of a game that would be played two days later, and the promise of 700 pesetas in cash. Nowadays, if a thirteen-year-old wants to research something he’s ignorant about, he’ll go to YouTube. That same afternoon I bought a whistle in a sports shop and went to the library. I wasn’t at all enlightened by the two books I found about the rules of basketball, one of which had illustrations, despite my notes and little diagrams, and my Friday afternoon study sessions; but I was very lucky, and on Saturday morning the local coach explained from the sidelines the rudiments of a sport that, up to that point, I had practiced with very little knowledge of its theory. My practical training came from the street and the school playground. My other knowledge, the abstract kind, stood on the shelves of the Biblioteca Popular de la Caixa Laietana, the only library I had access to at the time in Mataró, the small city where I was brought up. I must have started going to its reading rooms at the start of primary school, in sixth or seventh grade. That’s when I began to read systematically. I had the entire collection of The Happy Hollisters at home, and Tintin, The Extraordinary Adventures of Massagran, Asterix and Obelix, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators at the library. Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie were devoured in both places. When my father began to work for the Readers’ Circle in the afternoons, the first thing I did was buy the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novels I hadn’t yet read. That’s probably when my desire to own books began. Read More
November 2, 2020 First Person The Messiness of the Suburban Narrative By Simon Han There are sexier identities than “writer of the suburbs.” Such spaces still call to mind images of picket fences, cul-de-sacs, and gated neighborhoods, uniformly and exclusively white. When someone asks me where I’m from—that familiar fraught question—I still catch myself saying that I grew up in Dallas, or at times the mythically vague “Texas.” Plano, Texas, where I spent a decade of my adolescence, now boasts a quarter million residents, a quarter of whom were born in a different country. It’s the home of Pizza Hut, Frito-Lay, the bankrupt J. C. Penney, a host of global tech companies, and a recently relocated Toyota North America. And yet, there’s a cultural specificity to Plano. Its Costco sells edible bird’s nest, a Chinese delicacy that none of my family in China has had a chance to taste. To call Plano a suburb may be a stretch when it’s bigger than cities like Orlando, Newark, and Madison. But beyond the swirl of language and music and food, a suburban state of mind persists. One can feel it acutely this year, as white-collar immigrants stay home and earn their usual salary while working-class immigrants mow the lawns, take away the trash, and maintain the roads. It’s there in the undercurrent of casual remarks: how the police are probably too scared to do their jobs now, how there’s been a horrific murder in a neighborhood like ours, how it could happen even here. Near my parents’ house in a suburb bordering Plano, a Muslim family sits in their driveway on lawn chairs, watching their kids scooter past a house with multiple Trump/Pence signs and a cute Pomeranian that won’t stop barking. Finally, the owner comes outside and snaps at the dog to be nice. * Suburban niceness was a product of people moving to live with the kinds of people they preferred to be nice to. In the thirties, New Deal programs helped middle-class white Americans enter the suburban housing market, while nonwhite, non-Christian, and poor people were largely denied access. Rather than curb neighborhood segregation, the federal government skewed property values by rating white suburbs at much higher grades than Black neighborhoods. Through the civil rights era to present day, suburban strategies of exclusion have endured, often taking different forms: land-use controls against affordable housing, resistance to school integration, and a lack of public transportation and social services to accommodate the growing number of low-income residents being pushed out of cities. There’s a new wrinkle to the old narrative: since at least 2000, more than half of immigrants to the nation’s largest metro areas have settled in the suburbs. Among these immigrants are those who are university educated and upwardly mobile, beneficiaries of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Asian Americans, the fastest-growing racial and ethnic minority group in the suburbs, are the majority ethnicity in seven “ethnoburbs” in the Bay Area. In Plano, they make up 23 percent of the overall population. Lily Bao and Maria Tu, two first-generation immigrants from China and Taiwan, respectively, became the first Plano residents to break the “bamboo ceiling” when they were elected to the city council in 2019. Asian Americans have reshaped the place where I grew up, but remnants of the original Levittown mindset live on in Bao’s and Tu’s platforms, namely in their resistance to apartments and high-density housing as a way to “keep Plano suburban” (Bao’s campaign slogan, with strong echoes of Trump’s current one). And yet, there’s something about Bao’s conservatism that updates the old suburban talking points and separates her message from the polite company chatter of, say, Cheever’s Shady Hill characters. Perhaps it’s the way she leans into diversity—albeit a more exclusive definition of “diversity.” In an interview for Plano Magazine, Bao touts the benefits of welcoming highly educated and skilled workers, immigrants who love their country, drive their kids to excel in school, and receive acceptance in return. It’s a coded description, reminiscent of an observation that sociologist Noriko Matsumoto noted in the suburban New Jersey Asian American subjects in her Beyond the City and the Bridge: a “resurgence of ethnic pride” tied not only to “the growing numerical presence of Asians” but also their “visible socioeconomic success.” “We [Asians] as ‘model minorities’ work hard and pay taxes,” Bao states, “but seldom have our voices heard.” Her call for greater Asian American representation in politics echoes those made in other areas of American life, particularly in entertainment. These calls are often raised and supported by people like me, progressives who grew up in America under vastly different circumstances than their parents, with the same justification as Bao’s: Look at how much money Crazy Rich Asians made. Asians are good business. We’ve paid our dues, and it’s time we get a seat at the table. * As a fiction writer, I’ve thought a lot about how Western conventions of narrative lean on differentiation and change. How does the protagonist change? How does the protagonist stand out from the rest of the characters? These are questions we learn to ask in high school English classes and creative writing workshops, ones that readers expect to be resolved. As we turn the pages, we trust characters will advance through emotional and physical terrain to end in a different place from where they began. But as the suburban story has evolved, with new faces and entry points, so has its relationship to the narrative of change. Many newcomers to the suburbs are not only surviving but excelling. They are reshaping the story in their own image, but they are also living with the knowledge that such a story is precarious. Perhaps to preserve the new suburbs in which they finally feel at home, they also latch onto aspects of the old narrative, resisting the principles that gave them space to enter the suburban story in the first place. I was wrestling with how a storytelling arc built on principles of change would play out with a Chinese immigrant family living in the suburbs. I wrote a novel centered on a family living in Plano in the early aughts, strangers not only to the American suburbs but to one another. A family that, in their previous life, had suffered as a consequence of standing out. More change was the last thing on their minds; they’d moved to the suburbs to avoid the very development that readers crave. Even as the cracks in their “model home” begin to show, and their status as “model minorities” collapses under pressure, the family refuses to reinvent themselves in a way that would satisfy my hopes for them. I wondered then how to sit with that tension, with characters who did not offer me any shortcuts to sympathy. These days I find myself imagining the family beyond the page. What if they were here with us, in 2020? Maybe the parents have weathered the financial crisis, found an Asian church, made a few white friends. Maybe they dream in English. They’ve lived in the States (and Texas) longer than they lived in China. On WeChat, many of their friends who stayed in China have become increasingly nationalistic, defending the government crackdown on the Hong Kong protests and the internment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. The parents in my novel remember what they lost after war and through the Cultural Revolution: homes and possessions and loved ones, yes, but also the memories they never got to have. Everything they’ve endured in Plano, including the current pandemic, feels like a small price to pay for finding their rightful home. Now I imagine them watching the video of George Floyd’s murder. I imagine them reading their children’s social media posts about anti-Blackness in Asian American communities. I imagine those children coming back from the big cities where they live in order to work remotely from their childhood homes. One day, the parents bring up the story of Black Lives Matter protestors crowding a white woman eating outside a D.C. restaurant. They say how much this reminds them of the struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution, when crowds publicly humiliated individuals. The children roll their eyes. “It’s not the same,” the children say. “That’s such an oversimplification. That’s what they want you to think.” The “they,” the parents assume, are the white people on TV telling them that the radical left are going to take over the suburbs. The parents see Trump tweeting to the “Suburban Housewives of America” that “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.” They see Patricia McCloskey, who along with her husband pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protestors outside their St. Louis suburban mansion. They hear her warning viewers that “what you saw happen to us, could happen to any of you, watching from your quiet neighborhoods.” “Your American Dream.” “Your quiet neighborhoods.” The mother in my novel is an electrical engineer and the family’s breadwinner—worlds away from Trump’s “housewife”—but she is also an Asian American. She is adept at projecting herself onto the we and us and you that was never intended to include her. The father, a failed artist and small businessman, his photography studio now shuttered after the rise of smartphones, follows her lead. It has taken him a long time to feel that these suburbs could be his, and the thought of losing that, too, even if it is in the service of the greater good, fills him with dread. He is tired of the unknown. When I started my novel in 2014, I didn’t consider whether my characters would vote for people and policies that I find abhorrent. To worry about such things felt outside the novel, a distraction from the writing of fiction, not to mention incompatible with a kind of “immigrant character arc” in which the change that the characters undergo tends to trend upward—if not socioeconomically, then morally. If the characters do not gain acceptance, they will at least learn a valuable lesson, something that nudges them closer to becoming the woke minority that a white liberal reader will willingly align themselves with. * In 2017, it seemed all of America—Trump included—was expressing horror at United’s forceful removal of one of their passengers, a Vietnamese American refugee who practiced medicine in the small-town suburb of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. David Dao was randomly selected to give up his seat on an overbooked airplane, and when he refused, security guards gave him a concussion, broke his nose and teeth, and dragged his unconscious body down the aisle. While watching the video, I thought the words that Patricia McCloskey, of all people, would later echo: “What you saw happen to us, could happen to any of you.” But then the stories came out about Dao’s past. More than a decade earlier, he had been convicted of trafficking prescription drugs in exchange for sex. He’d lost his medical license, which had only been provisionally reinstated in 2015. He’d faced many complaints of anger issues. For a while, I didn’t bother to read these reports, chalking it up to rumors and smearing. Dao’s background didn’t change the fact that what happened to him on the United flight was an injustice. But as Cathy Park Hong notes in Minor Feelings, to understand the complexity of Dao is to understand that he is not “some industrious automaton.” He did not fit an arc that I myself felt grafted onto: sacrifice + perseverance + hard work = acceptance. He did not become that friendly suburban doctor, quick to pick up the phone, ready to please you, make you feel better. His story did not seem to belong to suburbia at all. To be clear, I’m not equating David Dao’s actions with my fictional characters possibly voting for Trump. I’m less interested in a character’s turn toward Trumpism than in my inability to imagine where exactly that turn would take them. Vietnamese Americans like Dao, many of them refugees and staunchly anti-Communist, are more likely to be Republican than Democrat. Chinese Americans include big pockets of right-wing voters, especially among a new wave of wealthy immigrants who move directly to the suburbs and couldn’t care less about the old methods of work-hard-speak-English-earn-their-love assimilation. Asian Americans, on the whole, are less likely to belong to either political party. One reason for this, Hua Hsu argues in The New Yorker, may be how “they often seem too socially and linguistically fractured to effectively target.” Asian Americans are also the most economically divided group in the United States, and they’re experiencing huge spikes in unemployment during the pandemic, a shift that has gone underreported (as has the story of poverty in the suburbs in general, rising at a higher rate than in cities). When we look closer, the story of how we survive, find acceptance, and thrive is messy, even in the suburbs. For progressive Americans, there’s a temptation to read the headlines (even Republican Asian Americans prefer Biden!) and breathe a sigh of relief, as if all these people turning against Trump means that we’ll be okay. But there was never an easy we in this story of us. * The story of the suburbs is also a story of America. As Jason Diamond states in The Sprawl, “We don’t realize how suburban we’ve become, whether we live in a suburb or not.” It was only after I left Plano that I could look on it with fondness. I would remember how my dad would drive us past all those Taco Buenos, and never fail to creatively butcher the pronunciation of “bueno” to make me laugh. There was a comfort to that memory, how copies of a place could bring back a singular story from the edge of my mind. I grew up among chain restaurants and sprinkler-fed lawns, highways stacked on top of highways and churches as big as shopping malls. I also grew up among faces that looked like mine, with languages that sounded like home, a home nevertheless built to be exclusive and far from the “integrated” spaces that Biden claims the suburbs he was raised in were. Now, after more than a decade, I’m living in the ’burbs of Dallas again. It’s different from what I remember, but it’s still a home, and like all homes, it’s hard to know what to make of it now. If we are to understand where we are going as a country, not just in November but beyond it, we ought to see the suburbs as they are. Because this feeling I get here is a contradiction, too: that there could be so many of us, yet there could be no we at all. Simon Han is the author of Nights When Nothing Happened, forthcoming from Riverhead Books.