Ready or not, here we—
A meandering of AAPI identity in process
Organized by: Jesus Sanchez
Music Performed by:
Words & Reading by: mesmi
Arrangement & Mix by: Nathan Kwon, mesmi at VATOCA Studios
Artwork by: Brian Nguyen
“This illustration depicts the Red Dragon Mahjong tile, whose character represents ‘center’ or ‘target.’ This tile symbolizes the elderly, the heart of our community, who were victim to hate crime during Covid-19. The split in the tile expresses the physical and emotional wounds of hate crime and the larger divide racism has caused in our country. StopAsianHate is a needed movement to promote anti-racism and to tear down systemic oppression.”
Stop Asian Hate.
I’m Asian. I’m American. I’m Asian American.
aka APA API AAPI APIDA AANHPI
I know, it’s a mouthful.
Asians are not a monolith. We’ve got East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander. (original source list)
Taiwanese American, my childhood is wrapped in sweety-salties: airy Calbee shrimp chips shaped like crinkle cut fries, flaky scallion pancakes, rice porridge with spicy bamboo, guagua pickles and the fluffy crunch of basou, little yangleduo yogurt drinks with their red foil-cap hats, mizu yokan red bean jellies, those fried cookies with seaweed bit sprinkles and scalloped edges, Haw flakes and Fishnacks and wasabi peas.
Imei chocolate caramels that will take out your teeth, but you still eat them anyway with your best friend, while you both read buckets of books like the Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High and Goosebumps, books you borrow by the grocery-bagful from one of your favorite brick buildings, the Patrick Henry library.
Because at the same time as all those sweety-salties, you’re also guzzling 7-Eleven slurpees and chili cheese dogs, arguing with your brother over push-up pops and Power Rangers, having fantastic sleepovers with your other best friend, Kimberly, who’s blonde and blue-eyed and born on Christmas Eve so she shows you that picture of being given to her mom in a red stocking. You love how your cul-de-sac neighborhood gets together on the 4th of July and being able to set off fireworks in the driveway, summer nights when there are so many lightning bugs you can catch them in your hands.
I count it all as human. And I’ve always loved my heritage, but how does that resound when perception will twist who I am, what I love, into its own monster, its own Frankenstein Creature, a cobbling of cursory ideas to do with it what it will.
Condemn, control, confound, conceal, kill.
What do you see when you see us?
”You're So Exotic Looking"
What men twice, three times, my age would say to me, especially when I first started performing in Los Angeles. I remember that year, playing any dive bar I could and listening to Kind of Blue during my door-to-door job.
”You're So Exotic Looking"
Also the title of a study that just came out this year. An Intersectional Analysis of Asian American and Pacific Islander Stereotypes (March 2021, Journal of Women and Social Work; Data from 3,156 tweets using the hashtag #thisis2016 were examined ).
According to the researchers’ premise, “Asian Americans are racialized as ‘forever foreigners’ and assumed to be non-English speakers and/or noncitizens (Tuan,1999), regardless of their country of birth or the length of time they have spent in the United States.”
Where are you from?
No, where are you really from?
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked that!
I’d be a millionaire. OK not really, I do not have the patience to stay in the vicinity of that kind of question for very long,
But I’ve been asked enough times. I wrote about that whole experience, included those exact lines in one song, people love to ask, “Where are you really from?” that much.
What do you see when you see us?
The Other
Have you heard of the other?
From Zygmunt Bauman: “The second member is but the other of the first, the opposite (degraded, suppressed, exiled) side of the first [ … such as] Woman is the other of man, animal is the other of human, stranger is the other of native, … enemy the other of friend, ‘them’ the other of ‘us’...”
From Andrew Okolie: “These definitions of self and others have purposes and consequences. They are tied to rewards and punishment, […] Power is implicated here.”
And how is the other determined?
From Stuart Hall: “Visual representation takes centre stage. […] Representation is a complex business and, especially when dealing with 'difference', it engages feelings, attitudes and emotions and it mobilizes fears and anxieties in the viewer, at deeper levels than we can explain...”
“The radicalized body”
“Racialized knowledge”
“Visual codification”
It’s so funny when you think about it. Just what is your trigger…?
Typified, it would be the mongoloid eyes with the “epicanthic fold”: The supposed slant, the sinister small-seemingness, the “greater levels of fat [deposits] around the eyeball”? Is that so inciting?
That a simple “look” can drive people to such madness.
Isn’t it enough that so many are driven to monolid makeup, or get awarded double eyelid sangapul (산가풀) surgery as a graduation gift?
Anti Slant Eye
Guess Who’s the Bad Guy?
I ain’t playin,
I’m sayin,
Anti Slant Eye
Guess Who’s the Bad Guy?
Edward Said on the idea of “Orientalism”:
“A temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate" -- especially because it “was a really bad day for him” (BBC) ...
Eliminate.
Eliminate “somebody’s friend, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s beloved… somebody's first call, somebody's home”.
MILCK - Somebody's Beloved (feat. Bipolar Sunshine)
Warped by Racial fetishism - where the 'other' is both demonized and idolized.
I wrote about that too, in the same song. From the other to the object, I sang that I am not a sexual commodity, believe it or not, wasn’t created to service someone’s fantasy.
Always always, we are so much more than our bodies
We are so much more than another’s impression
We should be free to celebrate our bodies
These encapsulating envelopes we were preciously given
Are we always to be strangers in a strange land?
What do you see when you see us?
America dear America
Why the hatred run deep in America
Why they wanna kill me in America
Is it me or is it cuz they scared of us
China Mac - “They Can’t Burn Us All”
Stop Asian Hate.
A fundraiser to Protect our elders, Support our chinatowns, Support our communities. Starting from January 2021:
Our families, our elders.
“孝, xiào [...] the attitude of obedience, devotion, and care toward one’s parents and elder family members that is the basis of individual moral conduct and social harmony [...] the basis of ren (“humanity”), the cultivated love of other people [... and] the Confucian moral ideal.” (from the Encyclopedia Britannica)
Wow. What does that say?
That our humanity is being attacked, our very sense of loving other people.
Our families, our elders.
I have stories, and I’m still learning them.
My A-zhou, my great-grandmother, with her bound feet, who never got to go to school and only spoke dai wan wei. My Ama, my grandmother, who, gaining an education under Japanese rule, spoke Japanese fluently. My mother, who speaks Taiwanese and learned Mandarin Chinese under martial law, when according to her, it was illegal to have gatherings of over 10 people. All on the same small island, across decades and generations.
I have stories, and I’m still learning them.
We have histories, and we’re still learning them. We’re still living them.
Who do you see when you see us?
Stop Asian Hate.
I’ve never liked hashtags. They remind me of co-opting points and purpose, a symbol into a trend, reduction into the most unappetizing of sauces. Dip your toe in and you’ll fall into a faceless flood that doesn’t really care, inserting a pound of your own flesh into an avalanche you have no control over.
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve opened to compromise. If a hashtag is one of those wholesale-priced pebbles serviceable to paving the jagged, slippery slope to revelation, then so be it.
Because ironically, you can be happy with yourself, perfectly proud of who you are, even perfectly OK with everyone around you. But all the self-love and self-care in the world doesn’t stop the fists from flying, the guns from firing, the eyes from turning.
March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021: 3,795 hate incidents reported. Incident reports come from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. (Stop AAPI Hate 2020-2021 Report)
Another March report: The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that hate crimes in the nation overall had decreased by 7 percent in 2020, however hate crimes targeting Asian people increased by nearly 150 percent. (Original source)
The state of danger is getting drastic,
it's 'bout survival
But hate and anger's been spreading faster,
and now it's viral
Anger. Rage.
I understand that response. It’s not inappropriate at all. But it’s not really my natural resonance; I keep a deeper vein close to sadness.
Anger is a potent source of energy, a great fuel, but personally often feels counter-productive. Seems born of the same bent, bent on destruction. A different side in the same circle, when I thought we were trying to break out of the cycle.
Maybe that’s why I love these words from Grace Lee Boggs: “Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary [...] People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors, or who only see Us versus Them, can make a rebellion but not a revolution [...] any group that achieves power [...] is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and [instead] consciously adopted different values.”
Stop Asian Hate.
We’re starting. By “we,” I mean a new-in-modern-memory we.
There are of course those who came before us, and we do well to learn from them.
This internet-age we, we’re learning to stand together, to speak up, to step forward. We are not a monolith, but we are learning together. And in that, coming together. As Bianca Mabute-Louie wrote, For Asian Americans, Sharing Our Grief Is An Act Of Revolution.
These tears will water the ground
Breaking forth a new sound
Let the thunder now ring out
Let it be, starting now
For a group that when it’s convenient, there is no body, no gaze.
There is the invisible. The passive, the pass-over.
Cathy Park Hong put it so well in Minor Feelings: “I have struggled to prove myself into existence.”
What do you see? Do you see us?
What do we see when we see us?
Who do we see when we see us?
In the words of Ocean Vuong:
“Be prepared to be unfathomable to the rest of the world and the rest of the country. When it comes to Asian American innovation and agency, we are often legible when we are at service to larger structures […] We accommodate. [...]
When it comes to your own thinking, your own creation, you will not be legible. You will be inconceivable [...]
As an Asian American, when you dare to have your own agency, your own dreams; when you no longer become the instrument, the empty vessel [...] They will not be ready for your mind when it creates its own thing. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. You should do it.
But be prepared, expect it [...] Be prepared to be inconceivable, and then be prepared to innovate beyond that, because we need you and we are ready for you.”
Ready.
If they’re ready for us, if this moment’s ready for us?...
That makes me wonder: Are we ready? Am I ready?
The good thing is we don’t necessarily have to feel ready to do better.
It’s going to be hard. This whole “trying to improve the world,” “trying to prove universal humanity” thing, it’s a messy, illogical business.
But if we can steep and steer and grow, give and widen and wisen, if we can continue together and continue to learn together, in between moments as much as in the moment, when the wave crests—maybe we won’t be overwhelmed.
We’ll stay steady, we’ll rise, and we’ll take that edge right along with us.
AAPI song reference source: TRAKTIVIST
Ready or not, here we— recording on Bandcamp.
All proceeds to benefit AAPI causes in perpetuity ♥︎ Current org: Asian Americans Advancing Justice-LA (AAJC-LA).
… the nation’s largest legal and civil rights organization for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (NHPI). Founded in 1983 as the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Advancing Justice - LA serves more than 15,000 individuals and organizations every year. Through direct services, impact litigation, policy advocacy, leadership development, and capacity building, Advancing Justice - LA focuses on the most vulnerable members of Asian American and NHPI communities while also building a strong voice for civil rights and social justice.
mesmi - “Broken Lines”
All proceeds to benefit Black and POC causes in perpetuity ♥︎ Current org: Womankind (Works with survivors of gender-based violence, with an emphasis on helping Asian communities find refuge, recovery, and renewal.)