Yes, I stole this from Joan Didion (and in her version she stole from George Orwell).
But isn’t this precisely the reason to write and not write — the repetition of human thoughts rearranged on pages with a seemingly new order. As a novice writer, I wonder: what makes my thoughts interesting and thus proving myself as a capable writer? What has not been said already, when writing has always been about the writer and less about the writing they produce?
I do not write because it is heavy, and whiteness forces me to acknowledge the weight. Growing up in post-colonial Hong Kong (Hong Kong was a British colony from 1898 to 1997; I was born in 1995), I was fortunate enough to learn English from a young age and was repeatedly told that English is the universal language, the superior language, the “cool” language when I showed off slangs I picked up from “That’s So Raven” to my classmates.
In Hong Kong, people associate English as a superior class symbol. To speak English is to speak “like an” English — convincing ourselves of our imaginary belonging to an empire that was once “on our side”. I was taught to put my “Chinese” of secondary importance. Fast forward to my college years, a professor told us the importance of reading the “canon”, the “classics”, the “must-reads”: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange, Edward Said’s Orientalism, Wordsworth, Allen Ginsberg, and so forth — only to graduate and teased by my friends for being “whitewashed”.
In my final year of college, I enrolled in a transpacific literature course taught by a young Philipino-mixed professor realizing there are a plethora of Asian writers in North America dedicated to writing in English. I marveled at the self-pitying narrator recounting their generational trauma, via tropes of school bullying, being teased for bringing exotic lunchboxes — and surviving it to become a realized narrator now standing firm in their cultural identity as an Asian in America; or the epic historical novel that spans multiple generations (e.g. Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior ) where the protagonist migrated from the backward oppressive East to the West only to be liberated.
Somehow through reading Asian American writing, I found my “Asian” suddenly augmented but it was only accessed through a fictitious America and the overwhelming whiteness that comes with it. I realized I’ve been sitting on a wealth of racial trauma as a twenty-year-old. Now this will make me a good writer, I thought. This is the rite of passage that I must go through. I dove right in. I wrote assignment essays using words like “colonialism” (Noname: my pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism); I wrote hate poems about boys; I attended poetry readings and performed my bilingual poems to a room full of rich white expats (they all nodded?). I sprinkled just enough of “racial symbols” to exoticize myself. I do not write because I no longer wish to detour myself with a white gaze and have the work hijacked by it.
Reading Asian American writing — as someone who lived a world away from America, gave me a language to name the things that I have lived through, but only to automate myself into the “angry Asian person” (a la the angry black woman trope which I think white media coined to gaslight PoC). Now, I cringed at the angst that had nowhere to go but to chip me from the inside. I cringed at the conversations with rich white poets in Hong Kong amazed by my command of “their” language. Wow, your English is good. I live in it.
Years later, I entered my MA in English in Canada intended to jumpstart my career in academia, thinking that my “identity” automatically translates into “great work.” And so I thought. English departments’ cultish obsession with the canon, theory, and reference — altogether makes up a “who can name that” game leaving marginalized grad students gossiping about white legacy students (parents who are/were in academia) getting huge sums of scholarships and grants. We found out too late that universities fundamentally are operated like businesses with all the intentions to keep their legacies and status quo as is.
Chen Chen describes English in his poem Kafka’s Axe & Michael’s Vest:
This English, I bear it, a master’s
axe, yet so is every tongue—red with singing & killing.
Cathy Park Hong describes English similarly in her latest book Minor Feelings:
“To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.”
Every language, English included of course — has its own set of violent and celebratory histories. The truth is, as much as I’d admit I am a cynic, I never quite saw English as an axe but perhaps a serpent eating its own tail — its hunger and greed remain unabsolvable only leaving us more resentful. We weighed in our options: to liberate the snake but fear if it will bite us. But I freed you! Or we sit and watch, wonder if the snake will ever consume itself into nothingness. Sometimes we are the snake.
My relationship with the English language perhaps has been an amnesiac one. Both of us trying to forget one another but we are all we have. I could never quite retain information from books; I could never adhere to proper grammar. We present ourselves through pronouns, identity markers, and the things we consume. I write because I believe there is still work to be done. Thinking along to Audre Lorde, writing the present as an instrument — to nurture courage to feel, as an antidote to fear; to channel a portal of power and possibility and hence a fulcrum of action; to articulate the many truths about who we are and who we are capable of being.
I hooked up with a guy one time where I told him fragments of my experience with English and in academia. He suggested, why don’t you just turn off the thinker and stop looking at everything in terms of power? That question lingers as I write. I still don’t know. I stopped answering his texts.
For writers from marginalized communities, the question of why we write or don’t write is a historical, existential, and formal one. We want to acknowledge the empire and also liberate ourselves of the circuits of power that produced us. Joan Didion reflects on her writing philosophy: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear.” The Asian writer lies somewhere in the middle in that continuum, but there’s always a sticky feeling. You just want to shake it off by diving into a lake, only to find out there has been an oil spill. We are pelicans drenched in oil trying to wear our new skin. They call us ravens.
What I’m Reading
Make Your Art No Matter What by Beth Pickens
“Can you consider the radical proposal that even if your work never pays you, it will still be a valuable and integral part of your life, for the rest of your life? What if your art gives you life and your employment pays for that life?”
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Check out also these earlier Please Remind Me posts: