A Quiet Revolution
I’ve been feeling so much in my body, in my psyche and in my soul at this moment. I’ve had to confront a lot of my own retriggering of past racial trauma in a perfect storm: confronting my own feelings of powerlessness and lack of ability to control my environment in meeting my inner child again and having ant swarms all over the house all while the country burns.
I’ve become physically sick, and I feel like my body is finally purging the traumas it’s been holding inside, and so I am unable to protest. Instead, I’ve been donating, supporting and amplifying black voices, signing petitions and continuing my own education as a non-BI person of color. I’ve been writing and using my yellow voice and experiences in ways that can serve the anti-racist cause and still honor myself and my experiences. I feel a lot of old anger and old victimization coming up against new hope and new moments of learning and unlearning.
And so, I’ve decided to purge this old scholarly personal narrative I wrote back when those were not a thing. I’d been holding onto in the hopes of rewriting it someday, but I am writing much more updated poems with a much updated sense of self and knowing at this current moment. The racial scholarship is old now. The most amazing thing I’ve learned so far while decentering my own stories this past week is how far racial politics and scholarship has come since 2005. Not enough. It’s nowhere near enough in the world for people who’ve experienced much worse than me, but the educational tools we’ve learned and the way trauma is understood now gives me hope for the future.
“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
“Everyone who enters into an interracial relationship or is born of racially different heritages is conscripted into a quiet revolution.”
Maria P.P. Root, “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People”
It all started with daffodils.
Wild, yellow daffodils which lay on the hill in April. Aside from the white tulips that appeared in my front yard at home every spring and the lilac bush beside the driveway, all flowers looked the same to me. If I hadn’t paused in the evening to look at those daffodils, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered a white minivan was approaching.
But I did pause—did look. I wanted to. My eyes were drawn to one red daffodil that stood apart from the rest unbroken. A groundskeeper must have lazily trampled over the yellow ones because they were all torn. I focused on the remaining daffodil, a symbol that stood stentorian simply because it was red, and red is a color that is never, even in its subtlest shades, quiet.
That’s when it happened. Three white men pulled up and shouted, “Go back to China. . .kung-fu!” through the open side door of a white minivan before they sped off down the red brick road. The rest of their words lost in the dusk and rev of the engine.
~
My favorite saying used to be: always look back on what you’ve trampled on. It was inspired by Margaret Atwood’s poem, “Elegy to the Giant Tortoises,” and seemed apropos to what I do as a writer—memorialize and reconstruct. But I’ve learned that looking back on what’s been trampled can sometimes be impossible. By April of the following year, those wild daffodils were gone from that hill, like the rest of what was said in the rev of the engine, and all the tangible evidence of what happened. Only the dusk stayed, and I was left with the intangible to look back on, and the intangible, by its nature, is ever evolving.
Did it all start with daffodils?
~
It all started with daffodils.
Wild, yellow daffodils and men who decided to go out one April evening before dusk to get a round. One was driving, and as he turned his white minivan down the red brick road, he saw two Asian girls standing alone looking at daffodils. “What is that?” he wondered, never seeing such a sight before.
His brother said, “Look at the red flower. It stands out!”
But their friend cleared his throat. He was more interested in the chinks: one with long, black hair and the other with two blonde streaks along the side of her face like some crouching tiger. The image left a dull taste on his tongue, or perhaps it was the blood when he bit down too quickly for a second. Before he knew it, he opened the side door and shouted, Go back to China and what felt like a thousand other slurs, anything he could think of, before it came to him—kung-fu—more as an afterthought than anything.
“What the fuck, dude?” the first brother shouted as the door closed. He put his foot on the gas, burning rubber all the way home.
~
Some questions cannot be answered truthfully when asked. The question, “You didn’t think you were white, did you?” is an example of one in which the answer flies in the face of logic. It is easier to give the acceptable answer: I could see I was Asian when I looked into a mirror, but the truth is when I looked in a mirror I didn’t see a Korean girl. My mother was white, my father was white, and I couldn’t reconcile my Asian features with the reality of my ivory experiences.
I began to create the artifice when I was twelve years old. I wanted others to be able to see me how I saw myself—beautiful and white—so I started putting caramel highlights in my hair on a lifelong quest for blonde ambition. I had to learn to be Asian American. Most of my cues came from books or movies. For years, I wondered if it would have happened at all had my hair been full of the blonde highlights it usually was, but after seeing Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, I died it black, except for those two front streaks I called “my tiger streaks.” I thought they were ferocious.
My back was to the road, after all.
My back was to the road. Maybe these details: daffodils, the way I stood and the color of my hair don’t make any real difference in what actually occurred, but they were the things my mind replayed over and over and over for months, even years, in its aftermath, first memorializing, and then reconstructing them into the story—my story—of what happened. Follow the red brick road, or any road to find the courage.
~
Yoko Ono gave a speech at Oxford University in which she said people are like butterflies, moving from one flower to the next. She heard that “the butterfly effect” is the phenomenon of one butterfly’s wings causing an event or change on the other side of the world and urged everyone to imagine peace instead of struggle, like the butterfly’s flapping wings. She called this idea for radical peace, “a quiet revolution.”
I first heard about a quiet revolution when a friend gave me Maria P.P. Root’s “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People.” Although I’m not of mixed race, the majority of my relationships are interracial, and I found the idea of being conscripted into a quiet revolution, simply by having an interracial relationship to be revolutionary.
Even before I had an idea of what it meant to be revolutionary, I was drawn to the word. It connotes force, the new, becoming, and further implies the circular in its similarity to revolving. At the time, my mind was a swirl and everything led back to what happened that spring day when I stopped to look at the yellow daffodils that only a week before my friend had said were as damaged as she was. It was on a Wednesday.
~
My high school English teacher, Mrs. Swift, drew a long line with several loops on the whiteboard one day when she overheard a student complain about having to learn about the Holocaust again. She told us that was what curriculum looked like. The purpose was to allow us to make progress in our education while constantly referring back to information we’d already learned, both to reinforce it and to provide us with more details.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling: “I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself.” When do we catch up with ourselves?
I didn’t catch up to myself the day I was told to go back to China, but it was the first time I saw myself the way others do so clearly. But, what is clear? What was it about three strangers telling me to go back to China, among other racial slurs I couldn’t even hear from a white minivan that traumatized me to such a degree that my best friend asked: “Are you going to let them victimize you?” because she couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t just roll off my back. She, too, saw me as ferocious.
I was ferocious. And, through a quiet turn of events in April, I was also a victim. It wasn’t what was yelled on the street that Wednesday evening that undid me. It was all that came after and all that came before. Every memory from Look at the Chinese girl! to Go back to China! unraveling in a continuous loop as I lay in bed every night and stared up at the ceiling, each time with new meaning. All these tiny intangibles amounted to the real harm, the real injustice others didn’t even recognize, even the ones I loved. For how can one lay bare an entire life? It is easier to see broken bones than broken concepts, but each one is agony in its breaking. In Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, Frank Wu writes:
In most instances, I am who others perceive me to be rather than how I perceive myself to be. Considered by the strong sense of individualism inherent to American society, the inability to define one’s self is the greatest loss of liberty possible.
~
Did it all start with daffodils?
The Wednesday before that Wednesday, my friends and I stopped to comment on the state of those goddamned daffodils. One saw herself in the trampled yellow flowers: just one in a multitude, damaged and dying. The other didn’t see herself as a flower at all. I saw myself in the red daffodil, standing stentorian—alone and beautiful. I still see myself in that daffodil. Maybe I always will. Or maybe I simply lack the courage to turn my back on the road completely. Signs, signifiers, symbols. They’re all such a literary way of understanding the self, but it’s the only way I know.
Follow any road, and it goes back to its roots.
The first time someone called me a Chinese girl was on the playground (where it’s been said everyone is teased). Two boys kept taunting: “Look at the Chinese girl! Look at the Chinese girl!” No one looked. “I’m Korean,” I would say, though I had no idea what Korean even meant. One day I pointed the blonde boy out to my father at the roller skating rink where the owner used to play The Temptations song “My Girl” five times in a row just for me because she knew how much I liked it. My dad gave the kid a piece of his mind, and I wasn’t taunted again until thirteen years later when this scene repeated in my mind as many times as I used to listen to that song.
Bum-bum-bum. . .bum-bum-bum. . .bum-bum-bum. . .bum-bum-bum.
~
Not daffodils! It all started with a doll my grandmother made the year I was born.
Wild, black hair stood out from her head and a red heart was sewn over the chest. She wasn’t made for me entirely, but for my mother, to symbolize me during the nearly three months before I could fly over. The wait was as long as the Pacific. All my mother had was a black and white photograph of the wild hair spiked out from my head and a letter from the foster mother that said my cries were sonorous, like a bell. My mother clung to that doll as though it actually was her daughter, and there must have been a time when I loved her too. She’s in all of my childhood pictures, but all I remember thinking was that her skin was so much darker than my own, which has always been a shade paler than my mother’s, and how her hair was not my natural shade of dark brown, almost black.
Is this me? I wondered.
It was me who decided to discard those ferocious “tiger streaks” I loved a year later in a self-conscious desire to appear more authentic to the outside world. I called it my “revolutionary pouf” because it was based on two of my idols at the time: Chinese actress, Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk (who had the same hairdo in the movie Clean) and Angela Davis. My pouf was an exact replica of Maggie’s pseudo-Asian Afro, and it was the first time my hair turned out exactly the way I envisioned—a reflection of my radical politics and newfound Asian American identity. A reflection of my anger too. My hair was a permanent fuck you to everyone I knew, and I felt strength and exhilaration from each ebony curl and something more. I felt the edge of liberty within my grasp, but when I looked into a mirror, I didn’t recognize my own reflection.
As I lay in bed at night remembering, resifting and reforming all the moments which amounted to a life, I cried. There was so much I wanted to hold onto, but it seemed to shatter within my grasp without plan or order, creating even more fragments. Always look back on what you’ve trampled on.
~
Movies are often considered a form of entertainment and escapism, but for me they are how I’m able to define myself and the world. Frank Wu lists an entire two pages of cultural images he grew up with in Yellow from Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, Madame Butterfly, a rice paddy worker or Johnny Sokko to “a horny exchange student…eager to date blonde cheerleaders,” Bruce Lee and a “kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly.” He says:
Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.
The images I grew up with were of a completely different nature. Strong women who represented two things: who I was and what I desired to be. Madonna and her blonde ambition; Trisha Yearwood, another small town banker’s daughter with a ferocious voice; Kelli Williams on The Practice, the smartest lawyer in the group, and the one most interested in civil suits (the kind of law my mother practices); Anna Karenina, a tragic figure in Russian literature; Sarah McLachlan, a tragic figure of female 1990s alternative pop and angst driven adoptee; Jennifer Garner in Juno because she wanted to be a mother more than anything else in the world; and my white mother as the ideal symbol of love because she loves me more than anything else in the world.
What I feared more than losing my best friend was the very real possibility of losing my mother too. She came the Thursday after the Wednesday the April in which it happened and found me resting my head against the brick wall of a coffeeshop after the last argument with my friend who called me a victim. I remembered this same friend had looked at me strangely the afternoon one of our classmates told me I would have no trouble getting into the college of my choice because of Affirmative Action. “I don’t see you as a minority,” she said, and I had smiled then, proud of belonging to her majority. But after the events of Wednesday, I realized her definition of me as “not minority” was singular and her own. It prevented her from seeing me—in fact of Asian ethnicity. (Look at the Chinese girl!) And her declaring me “victim” created a chasm between us no butterfly’s wings could reverberate through.
~
As I lay awake remembering, reshifting and rememorializing all those moments which amounted to my life, I cried before I gave up on being able to hold on to anything at all. My mother heard me go downstairs and followed. At first, she listened while I told her (again) what had happened on that red brick road at dusk and how my friend had reacted. But as the anger within me grew, she became frightened herself. She told me she had much worse things than Go back to China! said to her as the only woman in a political philosophy doctoral program at Georgetown in the 1970s. She told me my friend hadn’t meant to hurt me in calling me a victim or not thinking of me as a minority. Her intentions were good.
I don’t remember a single one of our conversations after that for almost a year. Maybe we didn’t have any, but that can’t be the case. We talked to each other every day. We always have. But as I continued to lay in bed every night, every moment of my life flashing before my eyes without plan or order, I remembered how my mother would call me her Oriental Princess when I was young, how she would say that any woman of Asian descent we passed was beautiful, and how she thought Chow Yun-fat was incredibly sexy whenever we saw him in a movie. Is my mother an Asian fetishist? I wondered. And if so, how could I love a woman who represented everything I had learned to hate?
~
Here is what I hate:
— Daffodils.
— If not for daffodils, I would have become a philosopher.
— I awoke one morning as the sun shone through the blinds in my apartment in California and opened my inbox to find an email from my former philosophy advisor in which he apologized for making me feel different than other students back when he knew me. He said he understood how he’d lost me that April all those years ago when he asked if I spoke Chinese during his philosophy class because he needed an example of a language he couldn’t comprehend, and he regretted it. I thought why now? Why all these years later when it was too late to change anything? Would it still matter?
— I hate that it did matter. It opened the floodgates to release a dream I had given up on years ago when my hair was a different color.
— I hate the distance between my mother and me even time, and books and theory cannot erase.
Yet, even the fact of a butterfly’s flapping wings can be felt on the other side of the world, and time is intangible. Like all intangible things, it is ever revolving, and my mother is inextricably a part of me.
In “The Preserve: Whiteness, Innocence, and Education,” Dr. Gail Griffin says:
People of color are, naturally, concerned with the effects of racism on them, whatever its source or motivation, while white people…focus on intent…White people tend to view ‘unintentional’ harm inflicted across the board…as somehow less harmful.
These words, in a quiet turn of events, brought me back to my mother, whom I sent a copy of her lecture to, and after that we read Frank Wu’s book, Yellow, Helen Zia’s Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, the anthology Yell-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American, Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans and Katy Robinson’s A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots. Follow any road. . .
~
Seven years after the fact, I was still bitter. Sometimes I still am. There was a moment I let it all go—everything that happened after I followed that red brick road was gone. The anger was gone. The words were gone. The car was long gone.
Even the daffodils were gone.
Liberty was within grasp once again, but I took it all back. Even the bitter aftereffects. That is what I finally caught up to: freedom—true freedom—is only possible in acceptance, not release, and all of what happened after and all of what came before are part of the circuitry of who I am now.
I’ve been asked many times why I want to be blonde by people who think it’s purely an internal colonization, or a Western cultural standard of beauty, or vanity, or too unnatural and surprising that I can pull it off.
In those moments when I am put on the spot and asked to justify who I am, how can I say it’s because I walk differently when my hair is blonde than I do when it’s dark brown or black, and I like the way I walk—because it’s the way I’ve always seen myself and ever since I was a little girl staring for hours at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, I’ve imagined what it would be like to be platinum, to be seen on the outside the way I see myself on the inside—because it’s something I haven’t quite gotten or managed to hold onto in the way that I’ve wanted, and I always get what I want in the end—because it’s who I am at my deepest core—because the parts of me I keep locked inside my own existence have all been kissed by the sun—because I know what it’s like when I’m not bleached blonde, and I prefer my own reflection—because when I see myself in the mirror irrevocably stentorian, I smile and walk away, into the sunlight.
Sources
Griffin, Gail. “The Preserve: Whiteness, Innocence, and Education.” Anne V. and Donald R. Parfet Distinguished Professor of English Acceptance Talk. Dept. of English. Kalamazoo College, 5 Apr. 2006. Lecture.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Print.
Ono, Yoko. “A Quiet Revolution.” Imaginepeace. Yoko Ono. 10 March 2010. Web. 10 March 2010.
Root, Maria P.P. “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People.”The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. 3-14. Print.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print.
Wu, Frank H. Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Print.
