Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx.
—Claudia Rankine
While I wait, the barista taking orders asks the family behind me how they are doing. The mother replies, “Good. How are you?” Knowing I was there first, she turns to me and asks, “Have you been helped yet?”
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The person behind me in the grocery store checkout line looks disgusted. I turn back to the cashier and continue my conversation, in perfect English, about the weather.
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I am at a hardware/houseware/garden/everything store called McGuckins. The young employee with rusty hair takes a long look up and down at me and smiles. My body stiffens.
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At the same store, an older man stares at me and my cart. His gaze surveils me as I peruse garden hand tools—cultivators and small shovels. Which to best gouge an eye.
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The white man has only one thesis of me, that I care about racial “equality.” This is his defense for always wanting to talk about “my plight.”
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I arrive at graduate student orientation and see Asian faces, some of which belong to international students. After chatting with a geography student from Nepal, I am happy we connected. Yet I walk through campus ashamed that I am still hoping no one assumes I am one of them.
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On the first day of the semester, I walk into the creative writing course I will teach. I wear a black dress and sandals. I introduce myself and some students smile. I wonder if it’s my clothes or my youth or my English. They must be relieved not to dig through the accent they expected. I interrupt the mental spew of my double consciousness. We review the syllabus.
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I excitedly pick out rice crackers and sesame balls that I’ve been eating since I was a kid. Equally excited, I ask the woman at the cash register a question in Vietnamese. The woman speaks a dialect so slippery I cannot understand, and my heavy-accented Central tone does not touch her. We pass each other, and I am still not home.
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I admire the outfits of white women as they pass me. To separate whiteness from style, I picture the clothing on an Asian body. These are the useful tools I have developed. To check and recheck perception.
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I eat lunch on the steps of the Education building and enjoy the light entering the Shakespeare Gardens. Two girls walk by. One says, “Good thing he didn’t have an accent, or I would’ve had to listen to it over and over.” They laugh.
My food tastes dry, but I finish my cà ri in public as resistance.
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At an appointment I set up with our department chair to discuss the collective interest of graduate students, a white female colleague, who never informed me she was attending the meeting, begins and ends the discussion. A friend—man of color—checks multiple times if I have anything I want to say. No, I shake my head. No, I have nothing to say.
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There is no Asian American Studies course here. There is no Asian American literature course here. I plan independent studies instead. I am reminded that what the university will not provide is especially mine.
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The woman says, “In the US, girls with bangs earn a manic-pixie dream-girl label. What do you think?” She makes eye contact with another white woman with bangs, lobs the question to her. My friend and I look away from under our hair. We are women of color, settling into understanding that this question does not apply to us.
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My housemate is mad at me again for not saying hi to him. But I have. What is the difference between someone who does not hear you and someone who cannot hear you? Hearing adapts to settings and needs. What does his tuning out say about him?
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. . .
. . .
What? I thought you prefer my silence.
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One morning the housemate asks me a question while I make my oatmeal. “Did anyone in your family live a really long time?” I reply that my paternal grandmother lived past one hundred. He leaves, shaking his head and sighing, “We have so much to learn.”
I wonder what’s so mystical about eating simply, walking to market daily, and farming for food. Some call this poverty.
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I feel guilty telling my white housemates I don’t think I’m Buddhist.
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I schedule an appointment with a therapist, most urgently because I need support against the denial of racism, the demand that I let down my guard in this house, this school, this city, this country. I shake furious at the expectation that I act more comfortable for others’ comfort.
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Dear white people, spirituality isn’t an excuse for color blindness.
You cannot transcend that which you do not name.
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I revise this essay and place bets on how many readers will twitch, turn the page, close the browser, or otherwise stop reading.
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The therapist of color I prefer does not have time for an appointment until three weeks out. I cannot wait so long.
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A friend reminds me that denial of racism and denial of my lived experience is gaslighting.
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I mention wartime PTSD to my father, hoping he would pass on stories. He laughs and says, “You see, Vietnamese people are stronger than white people. Look at all the wars we’ve fought, and we haven’t gone crazy.”
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I unlock my bike from the porch one quiet morning. “Phuong! Is that you?” my housemate questions in a worried, hushed voice. In her lack of recognition, I am startled, knowing that in this body, in this neighborhood, in this country, a person of color cannot stand on the wrong neighbor’s porch and be guaranteed breath.
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Grip my pen. Sit down to write every day. Save Sunday mornings for this work, no matter what. Get out of bed by seven. On my way by eight. I force myself open, racing poems out the gate. Compete with time being pulled from under me. Paper over self-doubt, sniff out experiments. Tense my jaw and act like this is my life’s work. Believe it hard before they take it from me.
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I write poems about dahlias. I notice the dew on my lawn, the shafts of sunlight, the terra-cotta of my skin. I write about the way summer dust settles on me in warm puffs through windows. I write these poems, too. I swear.
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Day by day my skin is more tough. Brown. Angrier. But as a writer who wants to break, reach, perform, angry is only one location on a universe map of emotions. I want to unfurl the sails to go everywhere. I, too, wish I weren’t here. This land-locked expedition.
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I have to trust my boat moves when I am honest.
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I recently read Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary and loved her playfulness, experimentation, range, and purpose.
