Between Unmaking

Master of (F)arts

Quick Welcome/Thank You!

Thank you to the new subscribers here who joined Please Remind Me since my last essay on the pop culture phenomenon of the “Crying White Woman.” I appreciate you all posting your screenshot and tagging me @jeffdunaway_! This week I want to switch gears and write broadly about how this blog came to be — specifically the conditions that I have worked through (or am still working through) that shapes how I write here at Please Remind Me.

Master of Arts and Unmaking Mastery

In 2018, I moved to Canada for my MA in English and Cultural Studies. I knew school was going to be a bore and I was more so excited about the prospects of leaving Hong Kong to a new environment where no one knows me — to reinvent myself essentially. I know, what a cliche. Yet, the myth of reinventing is ever so attractive than the sliminess survival and unmaking of everyday life to fit in. As much as I want to believe my move to Canada will offer me an enlightened heightened version of me, my foreign alien status renders my life between making and unmaking all at once. There are days in the midst of washing the dishes I think out loud — I can’t believe I am here. There is a certain IKEA plasticity regarding my time in Canada — a strange mix of foreignness, malleability, and interchangeability.

In all honesty, I did not go to grad school in a way that others in my cohort did. More than the language barrier, what differentiated me from the rest was my frame of reference and the things I learned: personal stories, pop culture, bizarre internet moments, visual culture, or just people — that are deemed as secondary, non-authoritative, blasé (Hi I am using Latin/French words in writing to convey that I know my shit!). They are not recognized as other ways of knowing but just overall non-knowledge within a university system that continuously perpetuates Euro-American elitism and marginalization in many structural ways.

It’s a weird mix of phonetics and ego (or the word, performative) — the way we say “grad school” with much imaginary weight from above. Despite universities’ efforts to diversify and invest in community learning, somehow the glass dome over academia still renders the inside calls muffed and impermeable. I felt like the whole time in grad school I used all of my body to play charades. I think about the other few fellow QBIPOC grad students and can only admire their commitment to their work in academia and the numerous hallway chit-chats. We all knew the system is plucked, tucked, and totally fucked. Maya Angelou writes, we as humans “at our best can only create opportunities.” When there is so much opportunism and (white) privilege unfolding in the graduate seminar setting, the challenge for the QBIOPC grad student is between how to create systems of communal care within a system that is harmful and alienating.

After creating the universe, all the stars, each grain of sand, the humpback whale, and the soft-shell crab, even God tired and took a day off. There’s no argument that we humans, who at our best can only create opportunities and at our worst create havoc, need time to rest.

Maya Angelou, Even the Stars Look Lonesome

The game of charade keeps on playing through the glass dome between the so-called real world and academia, while we want to believe there is an overlap and keeping the university academic rigor intact. Innovation, but not too much. Open access knowledge, but not too much. Raise the tuition and bust down unions while you are there.

The position of the QBIPOC grad student has always been a question about the self and the system — the self which is usually perceived by the system as foreign, fetishized, particular, exceptional, hostile, confusing. In her 1998 song “Doo Wop (That Thing), Lauryn Hill sings “How you gon' win when you ain't right within”. Right within as in your alignment with yourself and your search for inner truth, or infiltrate right in the middle of that framework and play to win? The two-for-one question is a contest between the self and the collective — is the work worth it if the system we rely on is doing more harm than good? Does the little good make the system worth relying on? If not, how do we go about abolishing it? What happens if my existence is rendered as “diversity” only to perpetuate the system’s violence? How do we begin imagining and building a future that is closer to inclusion?

“Where Do You Learn From?” — Knowledge as a Collective Phenomenon

Lately, I have been reflecting on the question of “where do you learn from” as a way of reframing how we process, claim, utilize, and hoard knowledge that ultimately alienates more than relates. So instead of “where are you from” one might replace by asking — where do you learn from? The exercise of “knows from” opens up new modes of personal and political relating. I was first introduced to this framing in Eugenia Zuroski in her Cultural Studies and Critical Theory course. In her blogpost regarding the method, she writes:

As a mixed-race person of Chinese, Polish, and Italian descent, I have been subjected my entire life to the question ‘Where are you from?’ This is a question that people tend to ask in a vein of earnest curiosity, without malice, but that nevertheless articulates particular histories of anti-immigrant xenophobia, anti-Asian racism, and the fraught status of mixed-race people in a racist society, histories that land on me each time regardless of the inquisitor’s intentions.

Similarly, Rinaldo Walcott wrote more directly against the question of “where are you from” from a Black Canadian perspective. He comments:

I understand why some people get their back against the wall when they are asked where they are from. Because that has been, historically in the Canadian context — a way of saying you’re not exactly Canadian, and that you don’t exactly measure up.

For Zuroski and Walcott, the question of “where are you from” carries a subtext that is akin to a racial outing of clocking someone. And the asked often bears the task of unmaking themselves again for the asker’s curiosity. Where do you learn from is a way to reframe our ways of relating to each other without creating a process of othering —you versus them within a mythical we. Within the current political timing that is much characterized by liberal individualism — identity is positioned at the hot seat of personhood. So instead of directly putting forth your identity vectors, a challenge of “where do you learn from” nudges us to imagine our knowledge as not just as an expression of an idea but as something that comes from an elsewhere.

We get it — the whole spiel about the author and authority and the power dynamic between the writer and reader la di da. And I would be the first one to admit maybe I am still figuring out what the knowledge building-sharing-citing looks like on a more communal level. In Zuroski’s blog post, she invokes how the question of “where do you learn from” is not a personal phenomenon but a collective one. Thinking along with other peers such as Minelle Mahtani, Katherine McKitterick, Eve Tuck, Aisha Wilks’ mobilization of the question — how do we frame our knowledge as a collective one as a means to uplift the vital intellectual work being done in the field of Black studies and Indigenous studies, particularly by feminists and 2SLGBTQ+ thinkers in those fields? How might we see writing as not a static extraction but a collective process of transformation?

“What’s the Subject of Your Writing?”

In a similar vein to “where are you from” the writer faces the age-old question — what is the subject of your writing? In short, I write at the intersections of pop culture, film, race studies, and internet culture. But as much as the myth of a writer actively choosing their subject, I wonder how QBIPOC writing might contest the author’s autonomy when much “what is your subject” is predetermined by history? At least for the essayist who writes in the autobiographical mode, the dictum of “write what you know” often shifts to “write who you are.”

Currently, I am in the process of acquiring my permanent residence status in Canada. From filling the tedious application questions-boxes about my “ethnicity” to my language abilities, address, level of education, labor skill type (Canada ranks applicant’s job skill into different grades), siblings, parents, job experience, job titles, etc — the process was not just categorical but bodily. I had to travel back and forth to stamp my fingerprints, scan my eye color, height/weight, blood type, document my medical history. And while we are at it, a transnational one too — gathering and sending all the documents back to Hong Kong for my mother, so she could hand them to the Hong Kong Police Headquarters, then the approval letter to the Canadian Embassy in Hong Kong, and then back to maybe somewhere in Canada. My fate of becoming a “Canadian” or “Not-Canadian” lies in the hands of an unrecognizable French-Candian bilingual immigration agent. I cannot help but feel I am the nation’s subject.

“This world is bullshit. […] Go with yourself.”

Fiona Apple, 1997 MTV VMA Awards

But writing is not like filling out an application form. Or maybe it is. Over my early twenties, I have done a few creative things here and there — photography, graphic design, UX design, museum studies, poetry, podcasting — yet returning to writing makes a lot of sense. I forgot that when I exert myself only in the declarative while writing in opposition to whiteness — only recenter whiteness. I write from a place of struggle with cultural identity and yearning to break away from the yoke of colonialism. I write to critically understand the tensions, contradictions, fears, doubts, hopes, and “deferred” dreams that are part and parcel of living a borrowed and colonized cultural existence. How true is it, that we are who write — in an existence that is almost culturally schizophrenic: being present and yet not visible, being visible and yet not present?

I am growing more suspicious of the essay form because of how exhaustive it is, both in its potential extensiveness and the tendency to become self-extractive. Throughout the last month of writing, I found myself leaning towards the latter kind of emotional labor. But don’t get me wrong — I love reporting and connecting the things that I have been watching via pop culture. But somehow I found myself back into writing in an oppositional mode to this tongue-twister thing called whiteness.

The thing is, I think writing is never perfect and harmless — there is no writing without power being exercised and practiced. I cannot disavow myself from my body and my writing. Not to disavow my position but I am responsible for every word printed on here. I am still figuring things out and that is okay. It is okay just to show up and be yourself when people don’t need you to be something you are not. I write to see a day beyond the opposition but meanwhile, the oppositional mode opens up as much as it closes for us. Even within the mode, I want to write and think more deeply about what are we actually oppositional to, and how can we find humanity despite those oppositions that govern nearly all aspects of our lives? What does the opposition look like, sound like, feel like — on the internet or pop culture that can speak to a more transformative inclusion?

Questions

I made a quick inventory of the areas that I am drawn to and want to explore more and I want to encourage you to do a similar practice — where do you know from? The first few items reference Zuroski’s blogpost I recommend reading (3-minute read).

• What are your intellectual interests?

• How did your interests come to you?

• What is your intellectual work for?

• What does non-extractive knowledge look like in your creative practice?

• Can you describe the shape of your knowledge? Is it porous, secluded, accessible, mechanic, metallic, plastic, eroded, etc.?

• What are some ways that we can make our citations more inclusive and open up conversations instead of closing them? Is reading more diversely an oversimplified solution?