I first learned of erin Khuê Ninh’s scholarship a few years ago, while attending a writing workshop. A fellow writer very helpfully suggested I read her former professor’s first work of literary criticism, Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (NYU Press, 2011), based on the themes she noticed it shared with the piece I had brought in for feedback. It would be another year before I finally cracked open the book during a residency in Banff, where I was still struggling to make sense of my own novel manuscript and its autobiographical elements. It was Ninh’s words that finally enabled me to confront my experience coming of age as a young Asian American woman.

The best critical writing not only introduces readers to new ideas but also helps us better understand ourselves and our place in the world. Ninh’s new study, Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities (Temple University Press, 2021), examines with great care and research two ripped-from-the-headlines cases of individuals posing as students at universities they did not actually get into: Azia Kim passed as a Stanford freshman for eight months before being exposed in 2007; Jennifer Pan feigned four years of undergrad, followed by pharmacology school, then hired hitmen to kill her parents in 2010.

Ninh also revisits the “Honor Roll Murder” of 1992, where five teenagers in California’s Orange County killed their classmate Stuart Tay. In revisiting the case that inspired Justin Lin’s film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), Ninh searches for answers beyond Hollywood mythologizing by interviewing two of the real-life perpetrators, Robert Chan and Kirn Young Kim. Perhaps it is her background as an academic that allows the associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to refrain from moralizing, and thereby avoid the trap of respectability politics. Passing for Perfect does not so much debunk the caricature of the high-achieving Asian student and their “Tiger parents” as ask why these stereotypes persist. Over Zoom, Ninh and I discussed the realities, as well as the toxicity, of model minority identity and what’s at stake for all of us.

—Mimi Wong

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Mimi Wong

In the book’s introduction, you describe Passing for Perfect as a “prequel” to your first book, Ingratitude. What was it that you didn’t feel ready or more prepared to tackle in Ingratitude that you wanted to explore in this new book?

erin Khuê Ninh

I know that “prequel” is such an odd way of describing this relationship between the two books, but I wanted to convey that they were telling the same story. When I was writing the first book, I needed for it to be very identifiable as an academic book. I was still so close to the subject. I needed all the barriers [scholarship provided] in order to manage the writing of it. Being autobiographically based, the first book was a way to work out what I needed to work out. But I ended it prematurely. I wanted things to turn out well. The second book feels more to me like I am still able to tap into those feelings in a way that is vivid, but not overwhelming. And this time around, I don’t diminish anything. This ending is real.

MW

I feel like you’ve named something that I really struggled my entire life to figure out how to put into words. In Passing for Perfect, you connect all the dots:

This book considers life at the intersections of some demanding social, familial, and educational realities—among them, neoliberal abandonment of the middle class, “Tiger” and “helicopter” parenting, and increasingly racialized and intensified competition for admission at top-tier universities.

I’m so curious about how you arrived at seeing this larger picture, which is a storm of different issues. I don’t think it’s really been framed that way in mainstream conversation. How did you get here?

eKN

I wouldn’t vouch for having been able to nail all the pieces, or having been able to get them to snap tightly together. But the starting point that differentiates my work, and maybe gave me a different angle on things, is that I came at this from a middle-class sensibility. Granted, my family were refugees. We started off with very little. But by [the time I was in] high school, we were comfortable enough. The particular way that we were moving through “model minority” life, we had made the very earnest transition from refugee to model minority. We were Doing It. And so, in the 1980s and 90s, when neoliberalism starts to really gain speed, post-1965 immigrants’ kids hit high school—we were part of that first wave of these things coming together.

I also think that being middle-class is an interesting vantage point. Because when you’re the kids of a poor family, the narrative of parental sacrifice is much more experientially and visually compelling. Those kids see the kinds of hours that parents put into grueling work, and that kind of evidence of the senses will overwhelmingly persuade one of the power of that sacrifice.

But for me, from our by-then-middle-class lifestyle, I was able to pick up on this disconnect between the hyperbolic narrative of sacrifice as if done for me, specifically for me, and the relatively normal way of getting a paycheck and paying the mortgage. What would my parents have done differently? Would they not have gone to work? Would they not have made dinner? What would they have not done? That enabled me to delaminate the narrative of familial sacrifice that is not seeing itself in an American context of capitalism. That was the entry point from which other things became visible.

Over the decades, helicopter parenting has actually just become more prevalent, more intense. It’s also particularly strong among the Asian American middle class. There’s this additional way that kids who are in this privileged pocket of the middle class are able to position themselves as really damn close to perfect. I think for them it also becomes more tormenting to be deemed failures. To be hitting all of these marks, from the outside world and from within the family, and still not be enough? That can become more visible in its cruelty.

MW

This idea of perfection is an impossibility, so you can never quite achieve it. It’s just something you’re chasing. It’s interesting that when you describe the model minority life, I know exactly what you’re talking about. You write, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a model minority: this being the social identity that American society demands of the biologically Asian subject.” For those who have not read your book yet, can you explain what that means?

eKN

I have this tongue-in-cheek SAT analogy that I use. It’s woman is to feminist as Asian is to Asian American. So that’s how I tend to explain Asian Americans. But I think the flip side of that is woman is to sexist as Asian is to model minority. Both of these positions, where they are ideological investments that are actually self-destructive, support and perpetuate the status quo. This is what the gender/racial hierarchy wants.

MW

You draw from the idea Judith Butler puts forth about gender as performance, and you take it one step further to talk about race as performance. And that’s what this model minority mask that we’re all wearing is.

eKN

Do you wear the mask because you feel unsafe without it?

MW

I think it becomes a tool. Maybe it provides some cover. But in terms of safety, I think that’s what’s been so eye-opening about the past year and a half as conversations about anti-Asian hate are part of our everyday consciousness. It doesn’t provide any safety to hide in this identity. As a woman, I feel like I’ve always known the darker side: that being an Asian woman is to be perceived a certain way that actually makes me feel less safe.

eKN

Absolutely. We’ve witnessed very literally that it does not provide safety. I do think that we still perform it in the hopes of [being able] to distinguish ourselves as the acceptable ones, the ones who know the rules, even distinguishing ourselves from the immigrant foreigner. Perform your model minority-ness and people’s anxieties abate, at least in these white spaces that you go into. I feel like among other Asian Americans—since we can judge ourselves by the same standards—being able to keep up with performance also shields us from criticism. Or jockeying.

MW

Do you mean competition among ourselves?

eKN

Yeah, the little bit of sniping. This is how the model minority is constructed. It’s constructed competitively. That is part of the core DNA of the model minority. How many slots are there? Can I grab one? So I feel like part of the model minority performance is defensive.

MW

I really enjoyed reading your deep dive into the cases of the college impostors. There’s a certain way these stories are reported. They’re very sensationalized. But I think when you come from an ultra-competitive Asian American (or Asian diasporic) minority community like the one I grew up in, they sound like people I went to high school with. They don’t sound that different from me, or people I know. They did something very extreme, but I can see that path. Maybe one wrong turn, and that could have been me.

eKN

That sentiment was so commonly echoed. The mainstream coverage [provided] for a lot of laughing and pointing and entertainment value, turning up the absurdity, but there was a refusal to understand where this was coming from. And then, there would be this other current of people going, Oh my god, that could have been me.

What I hear you echoing in terms of the thesis that I write is kind of a controversial one. It’s something that my readers have felt a little leery of. Part of my argument is that what we’re seeing here with the outlandish college impostor, they’re actually part of the same decision tree. Other branches lead to suicide, and yet other branches lead to homicide. College impostoring is one. Lifelong perfectionism is another. And I’m not equating all the outcomes as the same. These are different people going through the decision tree, too, but the tree they’re navigating, the problem they’re trying to find solutions for is pretty much the same problem.

MW

What distinguishes these college impostor cases from something like the recent college admissions scandal that involved rich, white celebrities? Why is it important that we don’t just write off what you call “passing for model minority” as a problem of privilege or class?

eKN

I think there’s a qualitative difference between the “Varsity Blues” types of scandals and these college impostors that I’m looking at. In the Varsity Blues instance, these are all students or their parents, already very privileged, who decide to cheat the system. So they take shortcuts and get the advantages in the game and the system.

But what makes college impostors like Azia [Kim] fascinating, is that what they’re doing garnered them no inherent, financial, educational advantage whatsoever. In fact, it was a disadvantage in terms of economic opportunity costs. Why would someone go through the performance of college, and maybe even do a lot of the work in college and spend whatever money it takes to do that, and gain no degree? That requires a whole different set of explanations.

Wherever we fall on the income spectrum, we are all measured by the same inflated standard. And then kids with fewer resources just have less chance of actually measuring up to that same inflated standard. So class does make a difference. But I don’t think it’s exclusive to the middle class.

I do think it’s a First World issue. That it’s a function, quite literally, of immigration to First World countries and Western ones with similar histories of Asian labor, multiracial racialization, and also similar capitalist systems of education and opportunity. And so, it computes that one of the main subjects that I talk about [Jennifer Pan] is Canadian, not American. And there is model minority discourse in Australia. You know, I Googled “model minority” and “Australian” experimentally and there are results: people saying that they thought of themselves as model minority Asian Australians.

MW

How do you see mental health factoring into all of this?

eKN

Seen from some angles, mental health is what the book is all about. Some of the outcomes [of model minority life] are obviously depression, anxiety, etc. But after I’d written this book, I noticed it is actually very restrained in its use of mental health language. I feel like I’ve taken a Betty Kershner–like position, the psychologist [in chapter 3], who refrained from using DSM language, diagnostic terms for mental disorders. I did a word search in my own book. Depression turns up unbelievably just three times, which is kind of amazing to me because in Ingratitude that was basically a whole chapter. Three times. I think suicide actually comes up 13 times.

I think that with these particular subjects it’s too easy to dismiss them with those kinds of clinical labels. And so, I didn’t use them. I didn’t use diagnostic labels because it makes it too easy to dissociate ourselves from these kids, that they have personal disorders or personal pathologies. I wanted to stay with the cultural. I kept framing the question in terms of what do these mindsets and messages feel like as lived experiences, and not to compartmentalize them and make them shrink-wrappable.

MW

For the college imposters, it seems like a lot of their decisions were made out of desperation. Why do you think it was so difficult for them to believe they could escape or find an alternative way forward?

eKN

If you can pick and choose what you want to lose, it’s very different from forfeiting everything. I think that part of the problem is that it’s presented to us within the moment as all or nothing—either you are perfect, or you are nothing. And what you lose when you’re nothing includes family, community, and a sense of who the hell you are. If your buy-in or upbringing within this mindset has been complete, and you do not have available alternatives to imagine, then nothing also means losing a sense of identity. How do you opt for that? How does somebody forfeit all that?

MW

When we talk about stereotypes, we’re talking about something that is externally imposed. But I think it’s important to explore, as you do, the ways in which we’ve internalized expectations. How would you describe what that distinction is?

eKN

We talk in scholarship more often about stereotypes being internalized even when they’re hateful—so internalized hate and stereotype threat. But if you can internalize stereotypes even when they’re hateful, then surely you can internalize them when they are shiny and flattering. Yet we don’t talk about that so much. How people end up wanting to be what the model minority stereotype says they are. 

MW

You devote an entire chapter to the case that served as the inspiration for Better Luck Tomorrow. I remember as a teenager going with my best friend, sitting in a movie theater full of other Asian Americans watching that movie, and feeling like it was the most accurate depiction I had seen, maybe ever, about my own high school experience. During the pandemic, I found myself rewatching it and picking up on what you observed about BLT operating as a masculine fantasy. What is happening in the mythologizing of the true story? And what’s missing, what don’t we see?

eKN

I think both things are true. When you were watching with your friend, you did initially experience a sense of recognition?

MW

Yes, 100 percent.

eKN

And you didn’t experience that from the perspective of Stephanie, the cute love interest, right? You weren’t like, “That’s who I am.”

MW

No. She was the pretty girl.

eKN

In the commentary I’ve read, even women who watched the movie identified as the protagonists, the male main characters. And I don’t think enough was said about that. Instead, what we talked about was that it was this triumphant film redeeming Asian American masculinity. And yes, there’s a lot of textbook Asian American masculinity going on here—the textbook denigration and then the textbook Western redemption of it.

When I talked to Robert [Chan], and Kirn [Young Kim], one of the questions that I had floating around in my head was how much would that map on to what they actually felt as children, and how much was it the driving force of what they themselves had done. It turned out it wasn’t. The film had projected so much textbook Asian American masculinity anxiety onto this story that was actually about something newer. Second-generation Asian American life as this emerging and recognizable thing. It was zeitgeist.

MW

With Passing for Perfect, I really appreciate that you’re able to zero in on that high school educational culture, and really dive into that, because that hasn’t been thoroughly talked about. What do you hope readers will take from your work?

eKN

I feel like that high school space is where the wider expectations, racial issues, and our family just zip into each other. This [book] is not exclusively focused on family. But it’s the ways that all these things interlock that make them so impossible to hack our way out of. 

You’re asking about what I hope my readers would take away from this book, and if I had to say it in a word, it would be permission. It’s not that I’ve been authorized to permit anything—no one is authorized—but I think if we can hear from each other that being a model minority is not the only way to have value, and that being the good child is not the only way to be a good person, what might that unlock?

Like I said, this book ends where the first one wasn’t ready to end. I wanted to end without the assurance that things would be redeemable. Maybe we shouldn’t redeem them. Maybe the desire to redeem them is the problem.

Ten years ago, Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and Gerald Maa, the editors of the Asian American Literary Review at the time, invited Rajini Srikanth and Parag Rajendra Khandhar to guest-edit an issue of the review marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11. “We felt that this was an Asian American moment and we want to commemorate it,” Parag recalls Lawrence and Gerald saying. The resulting volume, released in the fall of 2011, gathers the testimonies, dialogues, essays, and art of more than 70 artists, organizers, lawyers, educators, and more. Their words filled in the gaps of official acts of mourning, and brought alive the struggles and resistance of Muslim, SWANA, and South Asian communities in the days, months, and years after September 11. 

I came across the issue on the reading room shelves at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop several years ago, but I only sat down to read it in its entirety earlier this year. As we approached the 20th anniversary of September 11, I wondered what the generation born around or just after September 11 would come to know of special registration, a precursor to Trump’s Muslim Ban; how they might hear of the organizing efforts of DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) to advocate on behalf of those detained and deported without cause; whether they’d have a chance to listen to the spoken word artists who spoke so directly to both the tragedy of that day as well as the horror of the United States’ Global War on Terror. In the AALR issue, Rajini and Parag collected so many testimonies and works of art that tremble with continued relevance. And so I invited them to revisit the issue with me. “Commemorations cannot be static affairs,” Rajini writes in her introduction—our hope is to continue unsettling the ground, and to set the AALR issue into motion. We are making the issue available to our readers for free via a PDF.

Rajini and Parag joined me for a Zoom conversation in late August. Rajini, who has published multiple scholarly works and coedited several anthologies of Asian writing, joined from Boston, where she serves as dean of faculty and a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Parag, who has worked in many Asian American cultural and organizing spaces and now practices solidarity economies and community economic development law as a principal at Gilmore Khandhar, joined from Takoma Park, Maryland. The two of them have also played a significant part in the history of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year: Rajini coedited one of the Workshop’s first anthologies, Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North-America, and Parag served as a program director in the nineties. It was my pleasure to bring them back into conversation with the Workshop and reflect on the Fall 2011 issue of AALR, the importance of collectively documenting Asian American history, and the possibilities of solidarity work.

—Jyothi Natarajan

Jyothi Natarajan

It has been a real privilege to spend time with this Fall 2011 issue of the Asian American Literary Review that you coedited. I was astounded to see how many different perspectives you had pulled through in this issue—the organizers and activists and lawyers and artists, students, young people.

I wanted to start with a question around the nature of visibility and erasure. Rajini, you write in the introduction about how quickly we can forget our community’s milestone moments of political awakening, and you talk about the murder of Vincent Chin, and the ways in which the re-remembering of his murder keeps taking place, generation after generation. 

Parag, in the afterword, you asked this question that’s really haunted me: “Will future generations know whom to ask or where to unearth the undocumented histories of our communities?” 

Throughout the issue, it’s as if you both have been guarding against a kind of erasure that you can anticipate. Can you two reflect on the nature of visibility and erasure of community history, starting 20 years ago, and then maybe 10 years ago, and today?

Rajini Srikanth

When you talk about the two poles of visibility and erasure, for a strange reason Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness comes to my mind, which is about the 1982 bombing of Beirut. That particular title had always struck me as powerfully, paradoxically compelling—that on the one hand you have to remember, but on the other hand, remembering is so painful that sometimes you forget, or you want to forget. I know that’s not what Darwish intended—he was asserting the power of language and memory in the face of forgetfulness. There’s so much to remember from 20 years ago that is too painful to resurrect, and yet not resurrecting it means you forget about those crucial moments of resistance, of solidarity, of support, of fighting, and of demanding some kind of accountability. 

So, while 2001 thrust us into the forefront—and when I say us, I mean in this particular instance the marginalized Asian Americans, Sikh Americans, Muslim Americans—in that moment of being made visible—as suspect, as terrorist—our pain at our own losses was also being erased by the official discourse. Samina Najmi talks about this in her piece; she writes: “Two months after September 11, 2001, I spoke of being robbed of my right to grieve, of my feelings of homelessness in the backlash against the likes of me, a Muslim-bred Pakistani woman who called the U.S. home.” 

I’ve just been struck by how those instances that make communities hyper-visible in not a positive way also have woven into that hyper-visibility the erasure of their pain and their trauma by the state because their loss, their pain, is not recognized as legitimate.

Parag Rajendra Khandhar

I’ve really been struck by the informal ways in which our community histories are passed, from generation to generation, from nonprofit worker to nonprofit worker, from person in an apartment building to the next family that comes into that apartment building. I’m thinking especially about refugees getting resettled into the same buildings, and that there are these different layers or strata of knowing. So when aspects of our community are visible, I want to ask: Is it a monolith? Is it one narrative? When is the time to complicate that narrative? What purpose does that serve? Where are those alternative narratives really vital? 

I think of Zohra Saed’s piece from the issue, where she describes feeling like she was supposed to play this role as an Afghan woman, and then as a coeditor with Sahar Muradi of this forthcoming manuscript of Afghan American writing that they kept being told was not going to sell. Zohra writes about searching for a publisher “that would work with us rather than work to mold us into its image.” 

I saw so many places where people were trying to visibilize their stories and communities in these different ways. I feel a commitment to that. And I actually feel that commitment currently, as I’m in so-called Solidarity Economy spaces, which I think are beautiful, but where it’s very easy for Asian Americans, or South Asian Americans or whomever, to be reduced to a certain model minority role. That’s where I feel like, okay, maybe I can share some stories and alternative narratives.

RS

With all of the protests following the murder of George Floyd, the nation erupting in righteous outrage, and the fact that Black and brown communities have been the hardest hit by COVID, there was a lot of conversation on our campus about paying attention to our students of color—a good number of the students are Asian American, and there’s a very large Latinx population, a very large Black population. So there’s definitely been a lot of concern in the last 18 months about the impact on our students’ communities, especially Black communities and Latinx communities. However, in these conversations, Asian Americans just kept getting elided. And this was before the March tragedy in Atlanta. I remember one of my colleagues saying: “I’m an Asian American here, and I haven’t heard a single thing about Asian Americans and how they’re surviving or enduring this pandemic. Are we people of color or not?” And of course the irony of that was, within a few weeks there was this horrific, horrific tragedy in Atlanta forcing everybody to once again say, “You can’t erase this community because it’s woven into the racialized history and landscape of this country. And what happens to us erupts when least expected.”

How do we keep ourselves in the conversation as part of the fabric of this country when there is no crisis? Who, in a moment of trauma, gets pushed to the foreground? How are we ever made an integral part of the conversation, an integral part of the consideration for how we build a society in this country?

JN

Where were you in your lives when you came together with the Asian American Literary Review to organize this issue? And what had you been doing in the previous 10 years just after 9/11? What was your relationship to Asian American, South Asian, Arab, Muslim communities?

PRK

Thank you for this question. Previous to September 11, I was working in New York City in and with Asian American communities. I started at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and then I worked with the Asian American Arts Alliance for some time, and then eventually found myself at the Asian American Federation. I was doing census advocacy there, because the 2000 census was coming, and I was working with folks at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) and others who were doing redistricting work. 

I lived in the Hudson Valley at that time and worked in Lower Manhattan, so I usually passed through the World Trade Center in the morning. But that morning of September 11, there was a primary going on, which Anouska [Cheddie] wrote about. And so I was doing Asian American exit surveys and voter protection with AALDEF way out in Eastern Queens. I remember my first time traveling into Manhattan a few days later was actually into a satellite office of AALDEF where the attorneys were immediately thinking: Is the ruling in Korematsu v. U.S. still valid? They were thinking that way a day or two in. They were thinking immediately—what is this going to mean, what’s going to happen. And they had called a community meeting in that office, and people were scrambling, people were trying to figure out what to do. I remember one of my coworkers, Shazia, was organizing interpreters to be at Ground Zero and at the FEMA sites to ensure that Asian Americans received some kind of language access. 

The Federation was an intermediary that worked with social service agencies. We started to think through what kind of relief program would be necessary, and then what kinds of recovery and advocacy would be useful. So there was some collective fundraising and work with agencies out in different parts of the city.

I worked on post-September 11 issues for about three, maybe four years directly. And at the same time my partner at the time, Deepa Iyer, was starting SAALT, South Asian Americans Leading Together. They were doing this work every day. The calls were coming in, and they were monitoring hate crimes and trying to engage the federal agencies and local groups that were doing so much work on the frontlines everywhere.

For me, I was in an intermediary role, so I was hearing about so many things and seeing community members through direct service and advocacy work. But in just speaking with any of the groups, any of the organizers, I could see how it was nonstop—they were working all the time.

When the idea for this AALR issue came around, I was at the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center. I had gone to law school in D.C. and was working as a tenant’s lawyer in the D.C. area with Asian American tenants and others who were organizing. I had actually worked with the Asian American Literary Review to help them separate from their university connection. So I knew Lawrence and Gerald, the editors, and it was their idea. They said, “We were having a conversation, we knew the 10-year anniversary [of 9/11] was coming, and we felt that this was an Asian American moment and we want to commemorate it.” With where I was in my trajectory in Asian America—where my heart was so in Asian America, but I was getting more and more disillusioned—to feel like Lawrence and Gerald got it, you know, it felt like I needed that. And then to know that Rajini was going to be part of it was like, oh, this is gonna be amazing. It felt like I had enough space and time between all the things that were happening daily to really take stock.

RS

One can begin at so many different points, and the trajectories can take very different arcs. But I will say that I was just incredibly fortunate in 1994, almost serendipitously, to become really close friends with Sunaina Maira. Sunaina and I lived next to each other in this suburb of Boston. I sort of stumbled onto her, she stumbled onto me, and I don’t I know—there are those friendships and relationships that you have no idea are going to be so generative and so long and so rich. 

Through Sunaina, I got drawn into some real on-the-ground activist work and met a number of people: Vijay Prashad, Amitava Kumar, Raju Sivasankaran. It was several years of being with young people, people who were a good 10 or 15 years younger than I was, and just admiring their resolve, their energy, their refusal to let things be the way they were. I appreciate it so much. I couldn’t have asked for a better education, if you will. I’d always been a bit of a radical anyway, but these friendships brought out the radical in me again. 

I applied to UMass Boston when an opening came up in the English Department in 1997. I got the job in 1998, and that campus has really shaped who I have become. It’s a working-class, immigrant- and student of color–focused, commuter campus. I occupied these multiple positions in the English department, in the Teaching Licensure program, and in the Asian American Studies program. I had multiple homes and multiple mentors, and it shaped who I was. I think that whole experience led to Contours of the Heart with Sunaina, because we wanted to put South Asians on the map. Almost on the heels of that came A Part, Yet Apart with Lavina Dhingra Shankar, who was at the time at Tufts. That became another work we didn’t realize would have such an impact—clearly there was a need for it.

I was also getting to know people on my campus like Paul Watanabe, Peter Kiang, Karen Suyemoto, and Shirley Tang. And I was learning about the whole Vietnamese American experience, because we have a very big Vietnamese American student population, students who are the children of refugees who came over in 1975. I was educating myself on the complexities of Asian America. 

So when 2001 happened, it felt like everything was coming together to help me understand what I needed to do. I’m in a place I love and with people I love, and at a campus that means so much to me. I’m learning so much about traumatic moments in Asian American history, and then suddenly 2001 happens. Maybe a week after the attacks on September 11, I was at a conference at MIT during which Japanese Americans came forward in an auditorium and said, “We’re here for you, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans. We’re here for you.” It felt very similar to what was happening in your circles, Parag, trying to figure out to what extent we can make sure there is not another incarceration. It was such a powerful moment, such a public moment of declaration of solidarity and support. It was so powerful to see Japanese Americans coming forward and saying to Arab and Muslim Americans, “Don’t let what happened to us happen to you. And we’re gonna stand beside you and make sure it doesn’t.”

So in 2010, when Lawrence and Gerald approached us, I had spent 10 years really steeping myself in South African history and politics. I had gotten involved with a helter-skelter hodgepodge group on the UMass Boston campus called the Human Rights Working Group, where one could challenge all of those establishment narratives about human rights and yet be committed to the idea of human rights.

I had published The World Next Door, which is like an overview of South Asian American literature. And as a result of my having been mobilized, if you will, by the ways in which South Asian American, Arab American, and Muslim American communities had been targeted and profiled right after 2001, I had become very interested in what was happening at Guantánamo Bay. Several corporate lawyers, who were all making $500 an hour, became interested in the detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Initially their interest was not for any empathetic reason, but more because they believed so strongly in the Constitution. They were thinking, “This ‘sacred’ text that we work with is being maligned and violated.” So they went to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York, an extraordinary organization founded during the Civil Rights Movement, and CCR challenged Bush and Rumsfeld from day one, when they declared the Global War on Terror and decided to open Guantánamo Bay. I started talking with the CCR lawyers as well as the lawyers from the private bar and began writing the book Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law. Anant Raut, who contributed to the special AALR issue, was one of the lawyers from the private bar. 

When Gerald and Lawrence called me, I was like, yes, I know what’s going to happen on the 10th anniversary—there’s going to be nationalistic fervor, in which, of course there are going to be appropriate remembrances, but there’s also going to be this huge, huge, huge gap. No one’s going to talk about the ways in which South Asian, Muslim, Arab communities have been decimated, devastated, destroyed, and literally pulverized, where people are trying to rebuild their lives because partners have been sent away, people have been deported and detained. 

JN

What do you remember about your hopes for organizing this issue at the time that you were working together? What drew you to the work?

RS

The hope was, for me, that I would have the courage to say the things I wanted to say and that people would understand why those things needed to be said. I now have to say, my colleagues on my campus were amazing. The biggest gratification was when 200 students showed up at the launch of this issue. Many of my friends are in this issue. Parag, so many of your friends are in this issue, and then there’s an overlap, because we know a lot of the same people. So my hope was to reach out to people that mattered a lot to me, who had helped to make me the person I am, the scholar I am. But also, the activist I am. My hope was that I could pay homage to those who had helped shape me, because I take no credit for who I am today—it’s my campus and my friends and my colleagues, and all of the young people in my life, you included, Parag, that I’m incredibly grateful to. And that hope, I feel, was realized.

PRK

I’m really loving that I’m called young in this context. 

Rajini, you had said something early on that I made a note about—the notion of how erasure happens in our own memories, and that it’s pretty much a function of trauma. Even though I didn’t have the language at the time—it’s really now as I’m studying more around trauma and around healing around where trauma actually lives—I realized that what I felt intuitively was that so many of these amazing people, whether they had continued to do similar work or they’d moved from it, were holding a lot. They were holding these collective memories; they were holding so many stories. So on one level, I wanted for the people that I love and care about to be able to release a little bit, and that maybe this would be cathartic and part of a process in some way. 

Another hope was that I knew that there are people in movements that folks know and name, and then there’s a lot of other people. I had the benefit of not being so in it, and also being in touch with a lot of people. If you read the issue carefully, you see people naming people who aren’t in the issue, whose names just aren’t popular—they haven’t run a bunch of organizations or written a bunch of things. I was struck by that. So many people are carrying names of people who have stories. My hope was to bring some of that in. And if the whole issue were that, it still wouldn’t be enough. We still wouldn’t be able to capture all the different stories and all the different perspectives. 

I think the way that this turned out, where you have people looking at it from a number of different perspectives, fulfilled my hope for what this could be more than if it were just my vision, so to speak, of what this could be. 

I feel like it fulfilled that part of the hope, and it also left me wanting to continue to do this work and left me really grateful for community archivists and people who are doing this work really intentionally as things are happening. Which is super hard.

RS

We were so focused on finding people who we wanted to contribute to the issue that now when I think about it, I see just how extraordinary it was of Lawrence and Gerald to imagine and envision this issue. It was an affirmation of what had happened to our communities, and I am just deeply, deeply grateful to them for that. Because it was almost as though they were providing that different Asian American narrative to the one in which we had always been marginalized and erased. 

PRK

Lawrence and Gerald had infinite patience with me. It took me so long to get that Subhash Kateel interview. I was trying so hard to get Subhash and Aarti Shahani together to speak about Families for Freedom. I had to accept that it just wasn’t going to happen in time for this issue. And so the only way I could do it was when Subhash was literally here [in D.C.], and we went around Silver Spring and we ate, and we drank, and we talked, and I had my phone or whatever. And then Gerald hand-transcribed that. There was so much love and so much care. AALR looks like a traditional literary journal, but everything before had really focused on creative work, poetry, prose, and maybe book reviews. But for them to take this departure and to have personal testimony—it really felt like they took a leap, and they trusted us.

“The issue was an affirmation of what had happened to our communities… it was almost as though they were providing that different Asian American narrative to the one in which we had always been marginalized and erased.”
—Rajini Srikanth 

JN

What has the experience been like to dip back into the issue? Did you want to draw attention to any piece in particular? 

And I also wanted to ask about the process of working with some of these writers. As I was reading through the issue, it’s really remarkable to see this combination of writing by and with people working as activists in the organizing space, folks who were immigration lawyers, people doing direct service work, artists, and in some cases people who might not have thought of themselves as writers before this.

PRK

Looking back and actually spending time with the issue in this way was really powerful. I have it on the shelf and I have the PDF, and I’d look at different pieces here and there, but to really actually spend time with the whole issue was very powerful. I came to appreciate that there were moments of real vulnerability here, there was contention, there were contradictions, some people talking about poetry being useless when there’s a lot of poetry in here. That whole dialogue on the relevance of literature was really striking for me to read. And even just reading educators talk about how they were engaging with September 11. I feel grateful to have had this opportunity to read it in this way because it was like a mission. I want to read this. And some of it is actually really difficult to read.

RS

It’s interesting how we both sought out our contributors from the networks that were most familiar to us. A lot of the people that I reached out to were my educator friends and my activist youth friends, for example, Mazen Naous, whose essay is about the need for Arab American literature. I was happy that we had at that time thought it important to devote some space to why Arab American literature is important and how it helps us understand the complexity of the Arab American experience. And then seeing Magid Shihade’s essay. Magid, who is Palestinian, was at the time living in the U.S., and now he’s back in Birzeit in Palestine. It reminded me that we were thinking of linkages—we were not trying to keep this isolated as a U.S. tragedy and its aftermath, but we were looking at it as this arc of imperial U.S. power as it gets played out in different ways in different parts of the world. 

I smiled when I read certain conversations, and I thought to myself, those voices haven’t changed. Especially reading Rakhshanda Saleem and Sunaina Maira. Just the vision, the critique, the complexity, their drawing attention to what is rupture. I was just so struck by what Rakhshi (Rakhshanda) said: The kind of rupture I want to see is a rupture in the discourse of vengeance and hostility. The rupture is not that suddenly the U.S. finds itself victimized, but the rupture has to be a change in how we think about the long arc of history. 

Sunaina drew attention to September 11 and Chile, which nobody ever talks about. The day the U.S. bombed Chile and overthrew a democratically elected Allende to put in place General Pinochet as the dictator. I was reminded of how prescient some of our contributors were, in their ability to see the long arc of history and to underscore how we can never disentangle domestic policy from foreign policy, how we always have to see them in combination. 

The other thing that I loved was going back to read Samina Najmi’s piece. Samina is a dear friend who has since that time become this really accomplished creative writer who has published beautiful pieces about being Pakistani American, about her experience growing up in Pakistan, about what it’s like to raise two children in this country now. So, going back and looking at these pieces told me that what some of the contributors were saying 10 years ago even today holds, and it holds in very powerful ways. They underscore for us the nexus between the kind of nation that the United States chooses to be on the global stage and what happens at home. Like, what is incarceration, domestically, what is the Kandahar Airfield and Bagram prison in Afghanistan, what is Guantánamo Bay—they’re all of the same piece. These writers help us see those connections. The portrait they provide us is not a happy one, but it’s one that we all need to be very, very aware of.

The other thing that struck me in the issue, in addition to Rakhshanda saying there’s got to be a rupture in this nationalistic discourse, was DJ Rekha’s very beautiful last lines [in her piece about deciding to hold her monthly Basement Bhangra party in Manhattan nine days after September 11]: “You do open because sometimes a party is not just a party. It’s also a community space.” And I so love that, because she really must have been asking herself, “Do I hold this event so soon after 9/11? How is it going to be read, how is it going to be processed? Is it safe for us to come together?” I felt her own concerns and anxieties as she was talking herself through that, and then I love the way she ends it. Yeah, it’s a party but we needed one. This book is like a party in some ways.

PRK

I really appreciate that, too. Rekha was very, very resistant to writing anything. It was a lot of back and forth, and then I met up with Rekha before she deejayed a Basement Bhangra here in D.C., and I was like, “Your voice is important in this.” For a number of the people it was like that, for people who didn’t consider themselves writers. There were definitely a number of people who I actually pursued, trying to get something from them, and it didn’t work out. They said, “I’m going to try.” And they just couldn’t.

I wanted to get some voices from Midwood, Brooklyn, and the Pakistani community there, because the community was really decimated. It was awful what they went through. I was trying, but the folks who were working were so grassroots that it was pretty hard to even get in touch with them, let alone ask them to stop doing things to write something. I was listening to a podcast interview with Mohammad Razvi with the Council of Peoples Organization in Brooklyn recently. And they basically converted the organization into a food bank during the pandemic—they were distributing food for 300 people a day, like full bags of food. So the work has continued on Coney Island Avenue in Midwood. 

I was struck by how many attorneys are in this issue, actually. That wasn’t by design. There were a couple of attorneys who I remember were working specifically on detention, specifically on special registration—I’m glad we got Elizabeth OuYang in here. The connection between Elizabeth and Theresa Thanjan’s pieces was actually great, but there are a lot of organizers, too.

And then there’s the work that was happening out of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA). When the NYTWA said to FEMA, “Hey look, we’ve been economically impacted because the Financial District is not operating and nobody’s flying right now, and that’s how we make most of our income,” FEMA’s response was, “Well, you have a mobile office so you can go get your fare somewhere else.” So there was direct service work going on to ensure people were doing okay, and there was also advocacy work to change the rules with FEMA. I felt like documenting as much of that as we could in whatever way we could would allow for other folks to access that and recognize people were getting involved in all these different ways. 

I’ll talk really quickly about the Subhash Kateel interview in the AALR issue. I actually got to know Subhash over the years after 9/11. We had had these conversations looking back, but nothing this broad. Not only was he deeply involved in the organizing with Desis Rising Up and Moving and then Families for Freedom in New York, tirelessly working to support immigrant detainees and their families, but when he moved to Florida, he started a radio program called Let’s Talk About It! and through that platform he introduced me to a whole range of different things. As an organizer with a sharp political analysis, he welcomed people across the spectrum and working in very disparate areas to share their work, giving me a sense of the breadth of what “organizing” can look like, and the power of conversation across ideology and truths. He might not know it, but I actually owe him a lot.

I remember during our conversation feeling like, wow, this is something. And then Gerald, while he was transcribing, messaged me over a time, saying, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.” It was so affirming, because I felt like this is such a powerful document, and Subhash is really trying to remember. I think that cemented for me that there’s a power to the written word and that there’s also this opportunity with people who may not feel comfortable doing the writing themselves to find modalities and ways in which we can actually help them to document. There’s something super powerful about capturing people as they speak and then giving them the opportunity to look at it and edit. I’ve had these opportunities when people have said, “Yeah, I would love to get these people to write something together.” And I’m like, “Why don’t you actually do a roundtable and curate it? You can actually get these amazing voices and the energy of them together.” It’s not a new concept, but I’ve seen it particularly with people who don’t consider themselves writers who have so much beautiful knowledge and information and humor and grief—all those things to share.

I’ll say one more thing, which is about the DVD “Ten Years Later: Asian American Performers Reflect on 9/11,” which I’m really proud of. In my own journey, with whatever limited view I had at the time or even now, I felt it was hard to feel like mainstream Asian America understood how big this is. In Muslim communities, South Asian communities, Arab American communities, Sikh communities—this is their present, right? And then I saw Asian American spoken word artists who weren’t specifically from these communities speaking up right away. And you read Shailja Patel’s piece in the issue about separating “literary production in the U.S. post 9/11 into two simple categories: works of courage and works of cowardice,” and you’re reminded that not everybody was on point. But I really felt like Asian American spoken word artists were on the cutting edge in being outspoken. I don’t even remember how the DVD came up. I think the original call was for it to be a collaboration. Like Leah [Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha]’s piece, we recorded it at the APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit. We just went into a side room at The Loft in Minneapolis and recorded it. I am so grateful to Giles Li and Sham-e-Ali Nayeem for their curation and love for community.

JN

I was thinking a lot about Suheir Hammad recently and how she was the poet that I was reading and listening to the most right after 9/11.

You both have engaged in solidarity work since the publication of this issue. Can we hear more about the work that you’ve done since the publication of this issue, and the ways you’ve been thinking about solidarity? 

RS

I’d say the two most important things that have developed out of all of this work in the last 10 years have been related to Palestine and South Africa. When I try to think about how I got there, it’s very hard for me to tease it out. I will say, in retrospect, I know that Palestine emerged as a kind of trace of a memory that suddenly burst into my consciousness. I had gone to a school in Bombay that was set up for a lot of expat U.S. folks, and the only reason I was going there was because my dad worked for what was then Esso, which is now Exxon. The connections are crazy, all these imperialistic connections. In the school, which was an amazing school, I inadvertently ended up having a very Zionist education. 

Then maybe five years later, after my dad had died suddenly, I was living in Bangalore on a street with a lot of Iranian students who were fleeing the Shah’s regime, and I got a different kind of education. One day I went to the British Council Library and I saw photographs of Palestinian refugee camps, and I had absolutely no idea what they were—I literally went, “What is this?” I remember my Iranian friends saying to me, “What do you mean you don’t know what this is?” And I suddenly realized that certain kinds of histories are deliberately kept from you—that you were made to be deliberately ignorant of certain things. 

It all was brought back into my consciousness as a result of hanging out with people like Rakhshi (Rakhshanda) and Sunaina, meeting my friend from Lebanon, meeting people in Boston who are Palestinian American, going to South Africa and realizing how Mandela and everybody else in South Africa see the liberation of South Africa as completely tied with the necessary liberation of Palestine. Looking at South African liberation leaders who visited Palestine and who came back and said, “What’s happening in Palestine is worse than anything we had in apartheid.” And then, taking myself to Palestine—I went twice. I wanted to understand at a small, basic, minuscule level what it’s like to live under occupation. I remember just thinking, I don’t even know how people do this.

With South Africa, it’s part of my teaching and my wanting to understand social movements around public health. I went there during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and saw how a young democracy handles that. And now seeing how a young democracy is handling COVID and how it’s handling things like water and sanitation and tuberculosis—that’s just completely tied up with my human rights work. 

I feel very proud of what we did in the Asian American Studies space and our support for Palestine, but I don’t think we’re doing much at all in turning the discourse here in this country. BDS, our support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, is a small portion of what we can do, but I continue to feel very discouraged at how the U.S. is not really engaged in Palestine. 

More recently, because our campus is situated on the Boston Harbor in the Boston Harbor Islands, we’ve been involved in trying to center Native American and Indigenous perspectives in all the work we’re doing on our campus in terms of our research labs, our histories, and our curriculum. So I feel like that’s where my solidarity work is taking me: to learn and think about what it means to center perspectives that have been completely marginalized.

PRK

When I was younger I didn’t really understand my place in the history of this country. I had a history teacher in high school who tried to give us photocopied chapters from A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and I didn’t really read it. It was after I graduated from college, after I started to read Asian American literature and Asian American history on my own and with a few friends, that I went back and read A People’s History, and I was like, oh, okay, this is why he kept trying to give me this book. It gave me some understanding of what I’m told and then what’s behind what I’ve been told. 

I think the experience of September 11 and the years after really made me realize that there are these huge movements of history that I actually have been a part of and that some people have no idea about. A few years ago, somebody who had been in New York the whole time, who’s in her seventies, a friend, a colleague, said, “Giuliani, he’s okay.” And I said, “But what about all these things that happened after September 11 with the profiling of Muslim communities?” And she had no idea. So I gave her the AALR issue, and she wrote to me after she read it and said, “I can’t believe I didn’t know any of this.”

I’m still on this journey, but for me solidarity has meant learning humility. Even if I know a thing, sharing a thing in a space where there can be shared learning and shared exchange is the place where that can actually make a difference. Through the solidarity economies work I do, I work in a lot of Black-led spaces. To be trusted in those spaces, as someone who will listen and also try to do what I can in support of movement work, is a great honor, and it also keeps me humble. To me, solidarity, though, is not “I got my access card and so I’m going to stay quiet,” or, “I got into the VIP room so I better not say anything or do anything to get kicked out of the VIP room.” It means that I have a responsibility, that I’m not an individual—I don’t care what America tells me. I have stories, I have communities that I’m connected to and that I care about. 

In solidarity economies, we think about a grand unifying theory of how to connect justice frameworks with a way of decolonizing how we organize and relate to ourselves and to the planet in tangible ways. This means thinking about ownership differently, thinking about our labor and time, centering equity in all of that. And to really do that work means that even when folks talk about Black and brown self-determination on their block, we have to humanize the shopkeeper who’s on the corner. They’re not vultures, and they have stories too. That may not be the most popular thing to bring up, when it’s like, “Hey, there’s no fresh food in my neighborhood, and I’m not treated well in my own neighborhood.” Yes, absolutely, and those people who are running that shop most likely live upstairs from that shop, most likely have a landlord who is actually the predator, who may actually own some of the other buildings down the street. 

To me, solidarity practice is not about shaming people about what they don’t know. It’s trying to be true to my own stories, and then listening. I have my own little support group of Asian American folks who care deeply about community, have done different things—cultural organizing, community organizing, service provision—who have struggled with the ongoing erasure of Asian Americans, even in racial justice spaces, even by other Asian Americans. We wonder: Why is it wrong for me to say Asian Americans have issues and face oppression too? Why is it not okay for me to say, “Our community has things that are going on, too?” That should be a moment for actually coming together. For it not to mean that your stuff doesn’t matter. For me, solidarity is to both make space in my heart for other folks’ stories, and then to find places where I can share stories too. 

JN

I wanted to give you both a chance to share some last words while we’re here together.

RS

This is one of those moments when I don’t think there’s adequate language to capture the range of emotions and the possibilities. Parag, you talked about how sometimes people who do incredible work just don’t have time to write about it. Or they don’t see themselves as writers, and it becomes somebody else’s job to sit down and talk with them about it so they can just speak. And that’s one way of making sure that work gets documented and recorded and archived. Jyothi, I feel you have given us this opportunity to revisit something that when we did it, we perhaps recognized its importance, but didn’t think about its continued life. Or we didn’t think about whatever impact it might have had on people beyond that moment. It has been just extraordinary to think it has touched you after all these years, and now, through you, might touch other people again. 

I also want to say, Parag, that it was a space in which members of our community came together, and that feels very special. One of the entries in the issue was about Desis Organizing [the conference] and how so many groups came together in May 2001, initially to figure out what they were all doing. They didn’t realize those connections they had made would become so crucial after the events of September 11 as people plunged into action. I feel like these non-crisis moments of making connections are really, really crucial, and reviving connections are really, really crucial, too, because you never know when you might meet again.

PRK

I was really proud of this issue. I am very proud of this issue. And I knew it would have a limited print run, and I didn’t know what would happen with it. I had wanted it to have a life online. To be able to revisit this is a gift. And to be able to share it so that people who want to access it can feels like such a gift. 

Rajini, I really look up to you. Many of us do. I used to sell A Part, Yet Apart in the bookstore at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. The way you welcomed me in this role as a collaborator, as a co-conspirator, as a coeditor, I always felt like my ideas and perspectives were really respected, which gave me confidence because I was really in a place where I didn’t have a lot of confidence. I want to thank you. I really felt you were a mentor in this, you know? And also so gracious. 

Your really being in this project in a real way is very different from how other people sometimes say, “I’ve got books, whatever.” No, you were absolutely in it, and I felt grateful for that. The esteem to which people hold you—you can just see from the people who are in this issue.

RS

Thank you, Parag. That is really deeply, deeply gratifying and affirming, and thank you for that gift of those words.

A note about the art: The image that appears atop of this conversation is adapted from the artist Tomie Arai’s “The Shape of Me,” a silkscreen monoprint created in response to a national call to artists issued by the American Friends Service Committee for the 2011 exhibition entitled “Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan.” We are grateful to collaborate with Tomie for our notebook Living in Echo. Find more of Tomie Arai’s work here. 

Today, an entire generation of young people are coming of age with no living memory of September 11. Yet their childhoods have no doubt been shaped by the post-9/11 era—shaped by the U.S. Global War on Terror, by the increased and continued surveillance and state violence targeted at Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.

How have middle- and high school teachers brought conversations around the post-9/11 era into their classrooms? What has the role of literature by Asian American writers been in guiding these conversations? And has literature helped to build the ground for students to understand recent history and its continued ripple effects on their lives? These questions are especially significant for schools in New York City. Stuyvesant High School, for example, is home to one of only a handful of Asian American literature classes taught in New York City high schools and is located just a half mile away from where the Twin Towers stood.

We asked a group of five NYC educators who in some way have used Asian American literature in their classrooms to engage with these questions together. Kyung Cho (Bard High School Early College), Victoria Meng (Hunter College High School), and Sophie Oberfield (Stuyvesant High School) teach Asian American literature courses, while Annie Thoms (Stuyvesant) and Shreya Vora (the Nightingale-Bamford School) find ways to weave texts by Asian American writers into their curricula. Their conversation, which took place over Zoom in early September just before the start to the school year, touches upon how they use 9/11-related texts in the classroom, how to build solidarity and trust in the classroom, and how to discuss the “big, difficult things.”

—Jyothi Natarajan

Jyothi Natarajan

I wanted to start by asking each of you to go around and share a little bit about yourself—where you teach, how Asian American literature has found its way into your classroom, and anything else that you’d like to share. And if we could popcorn it through the room, that would be great. Sophie, can I volunteer you?

Sophie Oberfield

Certainly. I’m a native New Yorker and a graduate of Hunter High School. And my birthday is September 11, which is a funny connection. I’ve been teaching at Stuyvesant for 14 years and teaching a one-semester Asian American literature class for nine years after taking a course in Asian American literary theory at Hunter College with Sonjia Hyon. The class preexisted me; it’s been taught at Stuyvesant for at least 25 years. In the 90s, when I was in high school, it was taught by a white man, and was taught by Asian American women before I picked it up. I also teach it in my ninth-grade English class.

I’m excited about this conversation and to listen. And I’m going to pick Shreya, who is at the other end of the chain of connection—I know Victoria, and Victoria knows Shreya. Hi, Shreya.

Shreya Vora

Bringing the chain full circle! I’m in my tenth year of teaching: I’m currently at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York, taught at Hunter College High School (which is where I met Victoria!) before that, and taught for seven years in New Jersey, in both Newark and my hometown of Bayonne. Bayonne is right next to NYC—you can walk to Staten Island via the Bayonne Bridge!—and I was in my senior year of high school there on 9/11.

Since we’re talking about Asian American literature and given how central identity can be to this work, I’ll mention that my parents emigrated from India, we speak Gujarati at home, and I’m Jain.

I don’t teach an Asian American literature course. And I’ve only ever taught English literature. But my undergrad degree was in Sanskrit literature and philosophy, and I completed a masters in Middle East and Asian languages and cultures as part of my comp lit program. I think that background inevitably informs so much of how I see the world and how I teach English literature.

I had the chance to teach a New Narratives elective last spring. Everything we read was written after 9/11 and so certainly operates in the world 9/11 created. We read Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar and Good Talk by Mira Jacob. We also read shorter pieces by Matthew Salesses, Jia Tolentino, Ocean Vuong, Alexander Chee, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Aside from the elective, I teach junior and senior English. My seniors read an excerpt from Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings as a companion to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. My juniors read Carvell Wallace’s profile of Riz Ahmed as an example of a “portrait” essay.

Kyung, is now a good time to toss it to you?

Kyung Cho 

Whenever I have the chance, I try to put Asian American literature in whatever I teach, whether it’s a general American literature class or a speculative fiction class. I don’t come to it as a scholar but mostly as a writer. I got my MFA in creative writing and fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so that’s sort of my approach to it. Most of my interest comes from trying to expand our imaginative capacity. With Asian American literature, along with other kinds of literature, that’s ultimately what it’s really about for me: to imagine and tell stories beyond those that are prescribed or allowed to be told.

The other angle that I approach American literature from—I was a literary agent for many years in New York City. So I’m also very much interested in the marketplace and what gets published and what is given voice. And how the politics of representation intersects with capitalism within the publishing industry. Let me toss it to Annie.

Annie Thoms

Sure. I apologize in advance for any background noise—my kids are doing guinea pig laundry in the background. That’s what happens when you do your meetings from your basement in Brooklyn!

I attended Stuyvesant High School, and was actually a senior in the building on Chambers Street during the first year that building opened, when the first World Trade Center bombing happened [in 1993]. And then I was in my second full year teaching there when September 11 occurred. Since then, Sophie and I both were there during the 2017 terrorist attack outside the school. I feel there’s a lot to think about in terms of Stuyvesant being at the center of a disaster community in many, many ways. 

So I’ve been teaching at Stuyvesant with breaks to have three kids and to work with the New York City Writing Project as a teacher consultant for a few years on leave. Other than that I’ve been teaching at Stuyvesant since 2000. When I was a student at Stuyvesant, the student population was about 50 percent Asian. At this point we’re 73 percent Asian. So I’ve seen and lived that transition in the student body. And of course Asian is a catchall term that does not accurately represent the real diversity within the student body. We’re not going to get into here how the Stuyvesant student body does not represent the New York City student body, but those are definitely issues. 

For the entire time that I’ve been teaching at Stuyvesant, I’ve tried—in the ninth-grade classes I’ve always taught, in eighth-grade composition, in Women’s Voices, in Writers Workshop, and in the course I teach now to my upperclassman called Writing to Make Change—I’ve tried in every single one of those courses to have texts in the classroom that speak to and represent different populations, especially the populations of the kids who are sitting there in the room. I think a lot about Dr. Rudeine Sims Bishop and Mitali Perkins writing about the importance of having story as window and story as mirror, that we give our kids both of those experiences when they’re in the classroom. So in ninth grade, I started out teaching Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. And my colleague Emily Moore, who’s a poet, invited a number of different Asian American poets in—so we’ve had Jason Koo speak at Stuyvesant several times and Ishle Yi Park and Kimiko Hahn. And seeing our kids respond so strongly is part of what has encouraged me to keep inviting people in. So in terms of 9/11-related things, for a number of years I’ve taught Patricia Park’s novel Re Jane as a companion to Jane Eyre, and Patricia Park has come in and spoken to my students. Re Jane is set in the years just before and after 9/11. The attacks come in the center of the book, and function as a kind of metaphor for the disruption in the protagonist’s life, as well as in the life of the city. And I’ve been teaching Good Talk by Mira Jacob in Writing to Make Change, and I badgered Mira Jacob a lot until she came to talk to my kids too! 

Right after September 11, I was the theater faculty advisor as well as an English teacher. I worked with some students as part of the theatre community to create this play of interview-based monologues called with their eyes, where the students interviewed students, faculty, and staff in the Stuyvesant community about their experiences of September 11 and the years afterwards. The play was published as a book and is also essentially a student-written text I’ve taught as model for student work when I’ve done the interview-based monologue project in different classes. It becomes a way for kids to create their own literature. And that’s the lens through which teaching that play has helped me think about teaching 9/11 directly afterwards and then in the 20 years since. Victoria?

Victoria Meng

Hi! I attended Hunter College High School in the 90s with Sophie. We didn’t know each other well, Sophie, but when we bumped into each other many years later when I was a student teacher at Stuyvesant, you were so generous with your mentorship. And now I teach at Hunter College High School, and it feels wonderful to be back where I was a student—Annie, you and I have that in common. 

So, like Annie mentioned with Stuyvestant, Hunter’s demographics have also shifted, not quite as dramatically but definitely somewhat. We used to have more Black and Latinx students and now we have fewer. We used to have more socioeconomically disadvantaged students and now we have fewer. Our Asian students used to make up about 30 percent of our student body and now it’s about 40. But it’s interesting—here I’m defining Asian as having Asian heritage, and that’s why I can’t put a precise number on it. We have many more multiracial, multicultural students now than when I was a student in the 90s, which is something that I find really vibrant in the classrooms. 

Like Shreya, I feel some imposter syndrome because I also don’t have an English background. I was an immigrant, and the movies and television shows that taught me about what to expect in America were so strange. I mean, wow, people are just not that blonde here compared to what you see on screens! My undergraduate degree was actually in filmmaking, because I wanted to be a part of telling those stories. But then I thought, “I actually don’t know enough about the history of how these stories have been told.” So then I went and studied the history and theory of film and media. I was well on my way to a PhD when I realized: I don’t like research at all, I really love teaching. And it’s back to that mirrors-and-windows concept that Annie referenced. The most exciting part of my day was when my students were recognizing patterns and contradictions between representations and their experiences of the world, and then trying, and sometimes really struggling, to articulate those thoughts and feelings. I was seeing how, depending on what kind of high school education or writing instruction they had received, some students had a much easier time than others. So I dropped that film and media studies degree and went to school again and became a high school and middle school English teacher.

So, in terms of timeline: during my own years in grad school, 9/11 was a part of the discussion because it had just happened. And when I was teaching in Tempe, Arizona, during the McCain-Obama election season, that and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were very much a part of the classrooms. By the time I actually got certified and started teaching high school, we were getting more into Trump world. It’s like Shreya said: 9/11 is always in the background. But there was—and still is—always a proximal dumpster fire that the students are eager to talk about, like the Muslim ban, or nowadays, the January 6 insurrection.

Part of my fear when I was preparing for this conversation was that I don’t really explicitly talk about 9/11 in my classrooms very much. But it’s known, it’s referenced. If I were to compare it to my own experience, it’s a little bit like the way that the assassination of JFK was always in the background of my childhood. I didn’t experience it, but everybody knew it was a big deal for our parents. It was this marker of before and after that leaves a deep impression. 

Hunter is a relatively small school. The graduating class is approximately 200. We offer about a dozen English senior electives every year, and for about 10 years, we’ve had Asian American Literature as one of those electives. John Loonam, who is a short story writer and a wonderful teacher, proposed the class, and our chair, Lois Refkin, has also taught it. I started at Hunter eight years ago, and I felt so green. I mean, I just felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. Starting my third year, several colleagues, never in a particularly formal setting, started saying, “Hey, would you consider teaching Asian American lit?” And there was a part of me that was angry at that actually, despite also feeling intrigued. Because I had been, at that point, the adviser to the student science fiction magazine for two years, and nobody had ever suggested that I teach the literary science fiction elective. Not that I wanted it, but I didn’t want Asian American lit either, because these are bodies of work that I enjoyed experiencing as a reader, but I didn’t really know as a teacher. Teaching’s like hosting a party instead of just going to a party—it’s fun, but it’s a lot more work. I felt like I needed more preparation. 

But one thing led to another, and this is my second year teaching Asian American lit. And I still feel completely out of my depth, but I’m also incredibly grateful because I think there is an impact to seeing a teacher at the front of the room who looks like they’ve had certain experiences. Or at least that’s what my students say. I think that part of my initial reaction to being asked to teach Asian American lit was due to my own learning experiences—that during my six years at Hunter, I never had one Asian American teacher. I had five Black teachers, which was wonderful, but no Asian American teachers. I had a few as an undergrad, but they always taught Asia- or Asian American–related topics. And when I was working on my degree in film and media studies, I was encouraged very, very strongly to specialize in Chinese cinema even though I wanted to work in animation. Many of my students say they felt the same kind of ambivalence about signing up for this elective where most of the students have some form of Asian heritage. There’s the feeling that their Asian heritage is either invisible in their lives, or it becomes the defining factor in their lives. What has been really lovely about the course for me and my students is learning how to speak about this aspect of our experience so that it becomes more integrated into our lives as a whole. So that we have more words and ways to weave this in. 

JN

Thank you all so much for sharing so generously. Victoria, you kind of led us into the next question when you mentioned the indirect ways that 9/11 has come into your teaching practice in the classroom. Did that resonate with other folks? What are the ways in which you’ve each brought 9/11 into your own curriculum—direct or indirect or in the background? And it would be fun to hear about specific examples, whether it’s narrating moments from the classroom or particular lesson plans or books.

 
SV

One of the challenges with teaching 9/11 is the fact that all of my students at this point have been born after 9/11. But they live in a world shaped by 9/11. It’s “the water we swim in,” to borrow a phrase from Ezra Klein’s interview of Spencer Ackerman, who just published Reign of Terror.  Klein framed it up beautifully: We have to be able to see the world that the War on Terror built more transparently if we’re going to question its premises, if we’re going to move on from it.  We have to be able to see it.

And so how do we set ourselves and our students up to see what’s become invisible, especially when it’s so freighted and charged? I loved reading Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar with my students last spring. We see “A NOVEL” plastered in huge letters on the cover, but the protagonist’s name happens to be Ayad Akhtar and happens to share the author’s autobiography.  9/11 comes up in several places, and Akhtar writes about the day and its aftermath with so much complexity and nuance. We’re 200 pages in before Akhtar describes the actual day, and the narration is so painstakingly self-conscious and precise. He recounts experiencing the day as both victim and perceived suspect. He comments on his own retelling of 9/11 in the conditional: if I were trying to do this, then I would write the reaction this way. He addresses the reader directly. He also does this really neat thing where he references a line in a play he actually wrote—this line that the U.S. deserved 9/11 and much worse—which elicited a ton of controversy, and sort of proposes to give a backstory to that line. So, the line actually exists in Akhtar’s 2012 play, Disgraced. But Homeland Elegies presents itself as fiction. And even within the fictional world of Homeland Elegies the line was uttered in a totally different context, years and years before 9/11, by a character who denies ever having said anything of the sort after 9/11 happens. Akhtar’s sleights of hand here speak so well to this modern moment, as the lines between truth and fiction and news and entertainment continue to blur, and as social media generates viral posts stripped of context.

Mira Jacob’s Good Talk is another one that’s really fascinating as well, but I’ll leave that to Annie to talk about! 

But this also ties into a much broader trend in American history, all the moments America has created this hazy other and then cast the other as a threat. We see it with witchcraft and Communism when my eighth-graders read The Crucible; years ago, I paired that with Citizenfour, the HBO documentary on Edward Snowden, and we talked about mass surveillance after 9/11 and the role of the individual when systems go wrong.

AT

I’ll jump in to talk about Good Talk, which is such a gift in the classroom—what an amazing book. Mira Jacob wrote and drew a graphic memoir—it’s autobiographical, although told in a thematic, non-chronological form—that begins with a conversation she had with her son, who at that point was six years old, on the subway about race. She is Indian American and her husband is white and Jewish, and their son, who she refers to as Z, is mixed-race and trying to make sense of who he is and how race works—but again, with this background of 9/11. She has a section that’s directly about September 11 in the book, which, when I first read it, took me totally by surprise. I didn’t know it was coming. And I cried. It’s very specific in the details about what it felt like to be in New York City at that moment. It’s also part of this background that she weaves showing all these different conversations in which there are these microaggressions and then actual aggressions that she’s experienced and seen in her lifetime as an American. 

The conversations with my kids in class about the 9/11 aspect of things have been really interesting. Some of those details Jacob includes—like the streets with walls and lampposts covered with missing-persons posters in the first few days after the attacks, when there was still some hope for survivors—are things that they didn’t know or weren’t really aware of. But I do think about what you’re saying, Shreya, about this being the air that we’re all breathing—that especially for my students who are Muslim or who are brown or who consider themselves that way, they have felt typecast and scapegoated and have had experiences of harassment that were caused by people blaming them for 9/11, which happened before they were born. They recognize that was a moment that changed the world before they came into it. And Mira Jacob writing about her own son in that way resonates for them. And I would also just pull out that while I haven’t taught A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, it’s also a book that does a beautiful, beautiful job of describing what it’s like for kids to grow up with 9/11 being the reason they’re looked at suspiciously. 

I use Good Talk in my class Writing to Make Change as an invitation. I ask my kids to brainstorm conversations they’ve had with people in their own lives about major issues or controversial topics—conversations they’ve had with their parents, conversations they’ve had with friends or significant others, conversations they’ve had with people on the street or acquaintances. And then they draw and write their own little graphic representations of those conversations. It has brought up some really small issues that are then allowed to take up space and to feel real, but it’s also brought up some very large issues for them. That’s one of the amazing things about that book: it gives you the sense that so many very tiny issues or moments that can feel very, very small, are actually connected to something much greater. 

KC

Just a little background: Bard High School Early College opened its doors on September 11, 2001. The first day of our existence was on 9/11 and began in the morning, that beautiful Tuesday morning. And the first building was in Greenpoint, from where they had a view of the planes crashing into the towers. I wasn’t there that first year, but it’s become a part of our genesis, our community narrative that we began on that day. So it does come up in the classroom because our year usually begins right around September 11 and we’ll talk about it. 

One of the first books I start with is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and that first chapter, “No-Name Woman.” The main thing that I focus on and discuss with the students is: How do we tell the stories of people who are silenced? Who are seen as that bad relative we don’t talk about, the rebel, the smoking, whiskey-drinking uncle—the black sheep or taboo subject. What Kingston does is give voice to that aunt [in “No-Name Woman”]. 

In terms of 9/11, I do a lot of writing exercises with my students, and one of the things I ask them to do, because so many of them are born post 9/11, is interview their parents and ask: Where were you and what were you doing? Many of them are from New York, so we get a lot of stories. The frame here is—and I think it touches on 9/11—how do we talk about these big, difficult things in a way that goes beyond the documentaries on mainstream media channels. How do we tell the stories from the voices that are not heard or given space? It’s getting the students to be aware of just that—the voices and stories that are missing. And to not let things be produced for them, but to take the time to produce and to create, to take the time to ask and learn.

SO

I have so many things I want to say about so many of the things I’ve heard. And I want to share a little more about my own journey to teaching this course. Victoria, what you said about your feelings about teaching the class as a person of Asian descent—as a white Jewish person teaching Asian American literature in a classroom that is almost always entirely kids of Asian descent, sometimes with one or two white kids, I have certainly had a lot of trepidation. I’ve tried in some ways to note, “I’m a white person doing this. I’m not expecting expertise on anyone’s part, I hope people will share if they want to, but this is for everyone.” I taught The Woman Warrior and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake in regular American literature during the one semester that my colleague who taught Asian American lit was out on leave, and the class wasn’t running. I got such great responses, and then during a sabbatical, I signed up for the course [on Asian American theory] at Hunter that helped me feel more comfortable. And then decided to take up the class when I returned, since I wanted it to run and was interested in the books.

Part of my philosophy is connecting to different writerly communities: the festivals at the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, also the Asian American theater community in New York. I’ve encountered Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, Shreya, the play that you’re talking about, and I remember going to see it with excitement and thinking, “Can I teach this play?” And deciding, “I’m not sure.” It felt like a nerve without skin. I was nervous and excited about it, but I didn’t end up teaching it. But that line—I know exactly what you’re talking about. In some ways, poetry and theater are kinds of literature that can more directly and quickly manage the process and focus on some of the things happening in the world, in Asian American communities that my students are part of.

In my class, my goal is really not for it to just be processing your identity. Some students have told me that their friends or parents are like, “You should take this class, it will help you with your cultural identity,” which I see is an immense privilege and also terrifying. It’s a privilege to provide a space for exploration of identity and possibilities, but scary as a person who is not of the culture that I’m teaching works from—not feeling like an expert or a member of the community. Teaching a literature class feels more doable. And I’ve never really thought, “I’m going to teach a 9/11 thing,” but some books have helped us get at some of the issues around it. 

The first book that I taught that really helped get at some of the post-9/11 racial profiling of South Asians and Muslims by American civilians and the government and the impact on the communities most impacted, was When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka about Japanese American families being interned during World War II. In some ways, it felt like a very 9/11 book to me. It culminates in this interrogation scene, in this bravura last chapter where the speaker confesses to every possible stereotype, every racist imagining of what a Japanese American person might have been doing. I felt like it was a way to open up conversations and have students write responsively, creatively, experimentally—kind of however they want to talk about it. We’re focusing on a historical event—and also a catastrophic part of a world event—where the impacts were so much on these particular communities and were ignored by the national narrative about that event. I found that particularly Chinese and Korean American students told me that reading that novel helped them feel compassion for Japanese Americans in a way that they had not because of what they had heard about Japan’s actions in conflicts and wars from their families in Korea and China. So that book was doing a lot of work in helping us have a lot of different conversations. I felt like that happened again at the beginning of the pandemic, when we were all literally stuck in our homes and when my students had been experiencing harassment and anti-Asian hate. The events of the novel felt closer to what they were going through in the spring of 2020. 

And I taught Good Talk for the first time this past spring, remotely using the audio book, which is fascinating: Mira Jacob plays herself but there’s a cast of actors who read other parts. My students ended up writing a lot about Trump and COVID and their experiences. How does this get back around to 9/11? In some ways 9/11 feels so big, but it also didn’t happen to them. But it shaped so much of the world that we’re in. I feel it’s like how dreams help us process traumas—it’s like the symbolic language of literature. The thing that’s next to the thing is what I felt comfortable introducing to the class and encouraging them to write about. I also feel like reading some of those books, which are published, which are legit, can help some of my students write about their personal experiences that they might not feel are legitimate subjects for creative or personal writing. Showing them some of these books with analogous experiences can help in that way.

VM

It’s so amazing to be hearing from other educators, and surprisingly, we don’t always get a chance to do that. And now I have a much longer book list that I don’t think I’ll ever get to finish, unfortunately!

One piece that did lead to a direct conversation about 9/11 in my classroom is from The Margins. It’s an essay from a few years ago by Nina Sharma called “Shithole Country Clubs,” and I love that essay. I love how that essay ends. I love how it’s an essay that has so many complexities. Nina Sharma writes about herself but also her father, who is this big, absolutely huge Trump supporter who loves going to the golf clubs at Bedminster. In the only moment in the essay where her father has any reservations about Trump, she writes:

Only in the midst of Trump’s campaign, sometime in November 2015, did my father hesitate in his ardor. Trump asserted that the “the heavy Arab population” of Jersey City “were cheering” during 9/11 as “the buildings came down.” “He went too far then,” my father said.

I wonder if my father remembered the bumper stickers that my mother bought just days after the attacks, American Flags and soaring eagles slap-dash on their German cars. Maybe he recalled the Dotbusters terrorizing Jersey City in the 80s and early 90s and was angry at Trump’s erasure of this history. Or maybe his mind went further back, toward hardships from his first year in the U.S., when during his medical residency he broke down in front of his supervisor over a fellow resident’s continual taunts and aggressions. Or maybe he simply knew, no matter what caste he was himself, he could always be mistaken for a “cheering Arab.”

Those two paragraphs brought up for me and many of my students how every trauma is both something fresh and completely unexpected, but also something that has happened again and again and again. Sophie brought up the anti-Asian violence during coronavirus, but that’s just the newest iteration. What’s lovely about this essay is that it gives us a way to talk about how there are different ways to respond to compounded trauma.

A piece that somehow all the Hunter students have gotten at least once during their education by the time they’re seniors is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story.” But I think you sometimes also get the danger of the double story where you’re either the good or the bad, the compliant or the rebellious. What I found super helpful that year, after that conversation, was to have my students read the introduction to Edward Said’s Orientalism. To talk about this bifurcation of Oriental splendor and Oriental cruelty. This is the operation of othering that is so specific to the so-called East in the so-called West’s imagination. We never get to be just ourselves. We’re always both aspirational and a cautionary tale, both the source of fear and the source of desire, right? Broken blossoms or dragon ladies. It just keeps happening again and again and again.

That kind of patterning is very useful for students to recognize because the word racism as it tends to be used, for good reasons, tends to be about the patterns of white-Black relations here in America. And that’s not really been the experience of Asian Americans necessarily. It’s useful to have this term Orientalism and the precise operations of it—how we are seen as both model minority and perpetual foreigner, how we are used as a wedge, and then how we ourselves become divided against ourselves. How you can have a Trump-loving father and a Trump-hating daughter who love each other. I think that’s a part of the 9/11 story.

Continuing on, how do we process all this? It’s pretty heavy reading, Edward Said. I ask them to skim because part of what he does is prove his credentials. This is 1978, and it’s nonstop dropping of names. And then many years later, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?, [which considers questions like the ones] Kyung mentioned: Who is in the room, who gets to have power, who gets to have a voice? Again, it’s another piece that is just nonstop name-dropping. To participate in and accuse academia, Said and Spivak had to use the language of academia, to show their absolute command of the so-called Western canon. So how do you gain authority beyond academia? What is the practice of authority, and what is the pageantry of authority? These performances of bumper stickers and flags from Sharma’s essay—this is a part of the system, part of the rules of the game that happen when something feels threatening, when there’s something very bad happening. So displays of patriotism after 9/11 was not just a moment of unity—the unity can be very superficial.

SO

I just want to mention the poem “Terrorism” by Hayan Charara from the 2017 issue of Poetry magazine that was published at the same time the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center did their first Asian American Literature Festival. It’s a poem about a poet interacting with another member of his community who wants to censor him [from using particular words]. It is a poem that I recommend. Based on what I’ve heard here, I have exciting new ways to frame what it does and how the terrorism in the poem, in my opinion, is another member of the same Arab American community trying to censor this poet, who considers but then ultimately [rejects this person’s criticisms] since we have this poem, which has the words the critic doesn’t want used. 

AT

It’s such an excellent poem.

I wanted to jump on to what Victoria was saying about a kind of superficial unity. I think we’re opening up questions about how we get to a real empathetic sense of solidarity. I’ve been thinking a lot about disaster communities. I taught with their eyes, the play that my students and I created, at the very beginning of the pandemic in my Writing in the World senior course, and my students had such a strong empathetic reaction to the stories in the voices of people in the Stuyvestant community directly after 9/11, because of their own experiences right now. In the same way, they were removed from their school, except that we were all a giant disaster community with COVID. But they were removed from their school; they were losing this place and sense of safety in the city. There’s a monologue in the play with the student Mohammad Haque who talks about being Muslim and how his mother and his sister cover their hair and how he’s very afraid they’re going to be harassed and that he was racially profiled on the subway. And so many of my East Asian American students were experiencing such intense fear for their own bodies, for their family members, for their grandparents on the street, that they keyed into that monologue in a way that I don’t think had been true in as great a way in previous years. 

This is not Asian American lit, but I taught The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas this past year and was teaching my ninth graders and teaching into what the Black Lives Matter movement is about. And so many of my East Asian American kids again were like, “Oh, being racially profiled on the street—that’s happening to me all the time now. I’m getting this. I’m getting this sense of empathy in this very deep way.” I feel that directly after a disaster, or at the very beginning of a disaster, we have this solidarity response. We have the “okay, we’re all New Yorkers” after 9/11, and “we’re all in this together” at the beginning of the pandemic and “we’re all going to get through this together.” And then that very quickly can turn into these moments of intense scapegoating and racist scapegoating and “well, who can we blame for this thing?” And then, as we’ve been talking about, you have to prove that you’re American, or more white-like or flag-loving or whatever it is, in order to protect yourself.

I wonder whether there are ways that we can, through teaching a variety of texts, go from that solidarity response to that scapegoating response to that solidarity again. Like that empathy, like, “Okay, I see that so many of our systems are set up to pit us against each other. Let’s instead see each other as humans.” That’s the hope anyway. But I feel like those specific stories can get us there in a lot of interesting ways.

SV

When earlier Kyung articulated the question of “how do we talk about these big, difficult things,” I wrote it down in all caps because that is really hard, and I want to move at the speed of trust. For me I’m thinking about classroom culture. I was talking to a colleague this summer about ways that she navigates this. And I’ve learned so much from her: setting up a Google form so feedback can land anonymously and immediately in my inbox; being able to take the pulse of “Do you want to keep talking about this? ‘Yes, but not now.’ ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘Yes, I do.’”; asking students to reflect, “How have your life experiences led you to XYZ belief?” in ways that are both empowering and humbling, as needed. 

Another thing that was super helpful for me: talking through the texts with teachers who bring perspectives different from mine. Another teacher at my school was teaching another section of the same elective course. She’s white, I’m South Asian American, and we realized how we reacted to specific scenes so differently. I think I was much quicker to call out Akhtar’s or Jacob’s South Asian protagonists as being flawed or off base on something. And I do think allowing South Asian protagonists their flaws really just affirms their full humanity. But I was so grateful to have another teacher teaching the exact same text—a teacher who is a dear friend and absolutely committed to our students—who could challenge my thinking.

And it also makes me acutely aware that I’m asking teens to talk about things that adults find hard to talk about, in the classroom, in department meetings, at home. It’s been helpful to get really, really granular on how we talk about these big, difficult things and in a way that’s reflective, in a way that metacognitively lets students articulate that this is really hard. Having texts that model how difficult this all is is really helpful: There’s a panel in Mira Jacob’s Good Talk when she describes her experience of 9/11 to her young son, Z, who will soon see Trump elected president. Z asks, “Did anyone ever try to hurt you [after 9/11]?” Most of the visual space of the panel is taken up by background text, a sort of internal monologue describing three times Jacob was harassed and assaulted. But what she actually says in response to Z’s question is captured in a tiny speech bubble at the bottom: “Not really.” Why does she hold back?  When are the moments we hold back?

And the last thing Sophie said about the value of fiction and poetry. Fiction gives us imaginative space to talk about, gives us this bounded common ground. So I don’t have a great answer for the deeper question of solidarity, but for me right now I’m very much thinking about how we set up conversations about big, difficult things, and what’s the unique value of fiction and poetry in driving social progress and change.

SO

We’re all going back soon in person, and I’m just thinking, Shreya, about how I love that “move at the speed of trust.” But 9/11 is the very beginning of the year. We have just met our students. It’s such a traumatized moment in general, I’m literally thinking about what I’m teaching in September and how do we do this again? It’s overwhelming. It’s so nice to talk to you guys about this.

KC

I have so many things I wanted to respond to while listening to y’all. I don’t know what to choose. 

I’m thinking about who our students in the classroom are and who we are in front of them. And how do we teach? What is our role when we talk about 9/11 and bring it up in the classroom, or when we talk about or introduce Asian American literature, whether we are Asian or not? One of the things that I’m really uncomfortable about is when I get the sense that I’m there to serve, help students appreciate Asian American literature or Asian American culture. That I’m like their chef. I get that sense, like I’m at a hibachi place or something and have to perform. And that these are my ingredients, my homeland ingredients. So that’s a self exotification that can happen and also sometimes with the literature itself. I’m very wary of this in the similar way I’m wary of any big, dominant feelings about 9/11. I’m very skeptical of the national narratives around them and all the documentaries on the 20th anniversary that are coming up now. 

I try to get students to be aware of the language that’s coming out of this event. What’s the language that we’re using, what are the stories that we’re telling around 9/11, and can we do something else? And can we go beyond our own experiences? If you’re not Asian, are you allowed to write about Asian characters? It’s going back to Pearl S. Buck—as a white woman, should you be writing about China? In terms of Asian American literature, I think it’s an opportunity to actually take the risk of imagining someone else’s life. And someone else’s experiences. And don’t stay in your little identity marker. It’s important to know, but it’s also really important to take the time to hear these other stories and let them become a part of your imagination.

VM

Yeah. Oh my gosh, Sophie, I have been having stress dreams for almost a month now about school starting again. It’s not usually that bad in August, but August is the season of stress dreams. And I’m sure that once classes actually start, it’ll just be fine. That’s the way it is. But then I think about what it’s like to be 13 and anticipating the start of school? I’m just like, “Wow, okay, first day, we’re just going to start with some stretches.” 

And Shreya, I love how you always center the classroom and the students’ experiences. That’s one of the things I love so much about being your friend and talking with you.

I love teaching English because ultimately, we only experience life from one tiny sample. There’s that silly joke of: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I don’t want to eat an elephant ever, but no matter how big the thing is, we only have that one connection to it. And I think stories give us several glimpses into this, or, back to the windows and mirrors, several other sources of triangulation. And then what you mentioned about how you and your colleagues responded differently to a text, Shreya—that’s where class discussion becomes so helpful, when you know some students will love this moment and some students will hate this moment. And then they can talk about it in a way that helps them see that they’re reacting to the same things and why they’re reacting in these ways. 

I don’t see myself as a chef; I see myself as a person who gives due dates, because I am so fortunate to be teaching such self motivated students who love to learn that all I need to do is to give them a structure. So, what I think the students at my school need more is a way to not be so lonely. Because they’re so gifted in so many ways and they’ve been told that they’re gifted, they often use the intellect as a coping mechanism for everything else in their lives. 

So I try to give them assignments that help them to engage in lots of experiences, and hopefully through that process, learn to neither overvalue or undervalue their own experiences. For example, one of the assignments I give and is one of their favorites is to attend an AAWW event and then write about it. I give them two months to do it, and they’re 18 years old mostly, so I don’t care if they end up talking about “adult matters.” They’re old enough to deal. But what’s so lovely is that they sometimes choose events I didn’t expect them to have chosen. And then they’ll come up and say, for example, “Wow, I did not know there are so many Asian and queer authors.” That sense of loneliness, of being somehow the only one? I think that’s just adolescence. But when you look a certain way, there’s a lot of very easy to hand ways to let you feel like you’re not the only one, and I think this is one of the ways for me to use this class to help students feel like no matter what your experiences, you’re not the only one. But your story is also not the most important one; there’s no story that is the most important one.

I also use student choice to create a capstone assignment for the class. It’s a fall senior class, and they’re exhausted from college applications, so we read a lot of texts and then for the last two, three weeks I just say, “Okay, get into your own groups, choose your own text, and teach us about it.” And they’ve again just taken the assignment in so many different directions. I learn so much, and it’s a way for me to deal with my own imposter syndrome. I think that the danger of that teacher-as-chef feeling, which I have had, is feeling, “But I’m not the best chef! I don’t know all my ingredients, I don’t know all the methods.” But there’s a kind of colonizing approach to it where it’s like, “Oh, let me present to you this organized taxonomy of whatever it is.” It’s not even just Asian American lit. When the students do some of this work, I can show them how knowledge is constantly being constructed. And it doesn’t mean that there is nothing there. It’s just the opposite. But at the same time, it’s finding a balance between being the most important and being nothing. There’s somewhere in between there.

AT

I love what you’re saying there, Victoria, about recognizing that what they need is a way not to feel so lonely. And I think that that speaks very directly to our particular time right now.

Kyung, when you were talking about having your students interview their parents about their stories—I was thinking about the interview-based monologue. The interview-based monologue that I use was stolen from Anna Deavere Smith, the actor and playwright of Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. That whole idea of having to embody somebody else’s story— by asking them to tell their story, you’re practicing this extreme empathetic listening and then getting up and embodying them and their gestures and voice. It gets you that diversity of voices in the classroom, but it also gets you this very intimate feeling of empathy and really truly listening and trying to portray somebody else’s story, which I think is so valuable in terms of human connection. And also valuable in terms of a kind of a creation of our own literature, a creation of student-written literature. That sense that, “Oh, you who are sitting here in the classroom, you can also become writers.” 

I wanted to pick up, Sophie, on your mention of how you bring theater into the classroom. I know that you teach, and I’ve stolen from it a little bit, Peerless by Jiehae Park and M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang. And Sophie does this extraordinary project with the nonprofit theater company Second Generation Production where all of the students in the Asian American lit class write one-minute plays, and then some of those plays are performed as staged readings by an incredibly diverse cast, many of them Asian American actors. [The performances are coordinated by Gladys Chen and frequently directed by Vichet Chum.] So again, this question of how do we come to solidarity? And how do we give kids the power to show the diversity of their own experiences? And not feel like you’re the model minority or the perpetual foreigner, as you were saying, Victoria. But to express all of the many, different possibilities of identity that exist in all of us, and to have each other in this classroom recognize that in each other feels so powerful to me.

Because our population is so hugely Asian American, I feel like part of the Asian American literature that I want to be teaching in my classroom is the writing of my students. It’s like they’re writing for themselves, for each other. In my class Writing to Make Change, for their final project students have to put a piece of writing out into the world. It can be any way they want—it can be theatrical or it can be an op-ed or it can be a graphic novel or it can be a letter to a representative or whatever—but they have to get it somewhere where somebody else can see it so they’re trying to change something with their words. That’s one of things I’m trying to do as a teacher. Set them up and then push them out there.

KC

Some of these projects seem to get at the essence of what I think is a satisfying definition of solidarity, which is not necessarily just having things in common, but actually taking the time to amplify someone else’s voice. Taking the time to say, “Oh, you know what, we haven’t heard from so-and-so.” Or, “I’m noticing that so-and-so wanted to speak, but did not get a chance or seemed hesitant to.” It seems like that’s how solidarity is built. And projects mentioned during this discussion seem to be doing a lot of that.

JN

I would love to just do one more round to share anything you want to close with and leave us thinking about, whether it’s what you’re taking away from this conversation or sharing some of the challenges in your work as teachers.

VM

Okay, two challenges that I have when it comes to teaching history: First, I just don’t know enough. I never know enough. I rarely know enough. And then the main challenge is related, which is that I then risk doing a Quantum Leap version of tapping into a historical issue that isn’t experienced, that is an old TV show where time and space gets reduced to costume and music. Especially in today’s digital-media saturated culture where things are fast and Twittered and multiple choice and so forth, I think it’s very easy to reduce history to some keywords and images and what it’s supposed to be somehow. So how do I make it so that it’s not this display, so that we have a better sense that there’s a lot that we don’t know? That’s kind of humbling. 

SV

Thanks for sharing, Victoria. One thing I’m taking away is just how inspiring it is to hear from all of you and to learn from your examples: Victoria having students go to an event and write about it, Sophie having students author plays, or Annie having students get their writing out in the world!

The second thing on my mind: I’m interested in the parts of “the water we swim in” that I can’t see, as we think about how 20 years after 9/11 might be different from 10 years after, as we see the progression from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden. So many of the narratives for me are New Jersey– and New York–centric. I’m curious how 9/11 is taught in other parts of the country and other countries. Dana Goldstein wrote a fabulous piece in the New York Times comparing how social studies textbooks in California and Texas teach American history differently. What would it be like to do that for how 9/11 is taught in other countries, to see narratives beyond New York City?  

SO

That makes me think, Shreya, about what it feels like to go through an anniversary of something you didn’t experience or as someone who may not have been in New York. So much of high school and adolescence is trying on different things and stepping into the adult world in small ways. I’m remembering how the social studies department chair always narrates the moment the towers fell over the PA system. I’m curious too about teachers around the country, how we as New York–rooted people have experienced this. I just come back to this sense of theater or trying things on.

AT

I want to take all of your classes! I want to steal from all of you, like whole cloth. You’re so inspiring and amazing.

One of the things that I’m thinking about toward the end of this discussion is: How do we get into all of this complexity, all this solidarity, and all of this helping our kids figure out how to talk and write about all these complex things—and still retain joy? How do we make space for them to have fun with some of it and be wacky and silly and creative? My eldest daughter is entering ninth grade this year, and I’ve taught ninth grade for 21 years and now I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I have a ninth-grader also!” And I want her to have that space of joy, as well as doing the hard stuff. And she needs it. They all need it so much. That’s something that I’m thinking about around this anniversary and going into the school year—figuring out how we make that space behind our masks with our little microphones on.

KC

Thank you to you all. I think I was in a different place before the conversation in terms of my feelings and attitudes about the class. Now I’m reminded of the importance of joy and creating and using Asian American literature as a way to help students create and feel freer in the kinds of stories that they can tell and how they can tell their stories. 

I’m really excited to be connected to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. I think it’s a new generation. In the 90s, I was a Van Lier fellow; I was writing and did some readings there. And it seems like there’s a whole new kind of literature coming out of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. I saw a little bit of that in the masterclass that we shared, Sophie and Victoria. Back in May, we picked this class and Denise Cruz at Columbia introduced us to some young writers, and they were so great. So I’m really excited to work with young writers and work with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. 

I’m coming at this with a little bit of ambivalence. I’m thinking about Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism—and that’s always in the background for me now. Stories that feel too good, stories that are too redemptive. And I kind of want to resist that and focus on literature that can resist that. 

VM

To bounce off what you just said, Kyung, and the inspiring thing you said before about what it means to be in solidarity, to amplify the voices of people who aren’t here—I feel so much fellowship and enjoyment of this experience, but it’s also a kind of privilege. In some ways, we are connected in a very small world, the people who are on the screen together right now. We just do our best, right? What else can we do except our best? But maybe there’s more. Because who is entering the teaching profession? Who is made to feel welcomed and valued here in the teaching profession? Three years ago or so, Eid became a public holiday. But Hunter—this was shameful—made it a professional development day, because there was no teacher who celebrated it. And then of course there was a huge backlash, and we did not make that happen again. But that is horrible that that could have even happened. 

So here we are having an educator discussion about 9/11, and all of us are speaking from different and interesting and diverse and direct and indirect experiences of that event—I mean, Sophie, your birthday being on 9/11! That’s one kind of directness. But I don’t think we have a Muslim educator here for example. And I personally don’t know of one. If I did, I would have invited them. And that’s a gap. That’s a disservice to the students as well. I have no idea what to do about it except at this moment to just say it.

SV

I’m also conscious of the ways in which our schools are not representative of New York City’s demographics as well. 

SO

Yeah, I very much wanted this conversation to have as many groups represented in the questions as possible, and I thought, with disappointment and some embarrassment, about how I don’t I don’t know Arab American English teachers. I didn’t know other South Asian American English teachers to speak with, or Muslim ones. I’m so glad you said that, Shreya, and I feel that way too. And our schools being extremely in the public eye and full of very motivated students.

JN

I appreciate all that honesty and vulnerability. Those are all really important things to name in this space. 

One of the more insidious aspects of state violence and genocide lies in the lengths perpetrators go to silence and ignore victims. Worse still is that survivors must contend with the obstinate indifference of the wider world even as they speak out.

The conversation below—between a Tigrayan survivor of war, a Kashmiri scholar-activist evading Indian state surveillance, and myself, a Sri Lankan Tamil trans woman and journalist who grew up in the United States—attempts to challenge these dynamics. The Ethiopian and Eritrean armed forces have perpetrated atrocities in Tigray, including mass killings and weaponized rape, not unlike their Indian counterparts occupying Kashmir. By discussing their experiences, both interviewees demand recognition and solidarity for their communities’ struggles.

Located on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Tigray has been caught in a vicious pincer assault by both countries’ armed forces. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed spearheaded this attack in hopes of crushing the region’s historic calls for self-determination and keeping the Ethiopian state consolidated under the supremacy of the Amhara ethnic group.

“Tsinia’t,” a writer from Tigray who has repeatedly had to conceal his name, joined this conversation after witnessing this gruesome endeavor firsthand. Under the Amharic pseudonym “Mister Sew,” he documented how the groundwork was laid for a manufactured famine (a brutal repressive tactic used throughout Ethiopia’s history) and how even burying loved ones killed by Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers has become grounds for extrajudicial execution. Tsinia’t means “to persevere” in Tigrigna. 

The Indian military has occupied the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir for more than 70 years. Despite having their territory divided between rivals India, Pakistan and, later on, China, Kashmiris have long demanded respect for their right to self determination. Following armed uprisings in the 1990s, India’s response to Kashmiri aspirations became especially brutal. The state of constant siege has made Kashmir the most militarized place on Earth.

Indian soldiers in Kashmir have total impunity to abuse the population. Below, “Bint Ali,”—a scholar-activist from Jammu and Kashmir who is also using a pseudonym to protect herself from the Indian government—explains that the military presence, the New Delhi government’s repeal of the territory’s limited autonomy, and laws enabling settler colonialism represent a mandate to seize Kashmiris’ land and wipe away their identity.

—Simi Kadirgamar

Simi 

While Tigray and Kashmir are both geographically distant from each other, they both face settler colonial violence. Could you explain the broader history of the violence Tigrayans are facing now?

Tsinia’t

It goes all the way back to the way the Ethiopian state was made. The Ethiopian state is, I would say, an empire, and the Ethiopian state was also a colony. Not a white colony, but a Black-on-Black colony. The current borders of the Ethiopian state were made by colonizing the people in the southern part of Ethiopia, for instance the Oromos, and the people from the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s region (SNNPR) who make up about one third of Ethiopia, and the more than 50 ethnicities in that region.

It [is similar to] the Europeans coming and colonizing the rest of Africa, it’s just this one is a Black-on-Black colony. 

Abyssinia, or the highlands of Ethiopia, has a long history. And the lowlands, the other southern parts of Ethiopia, have their own civilization and their own history as well. But when Ethiopia as we know it today was established by Emperor Menelik II in the 19th century, the Neftenya system was [introduced]. In the Neftenya system, the people from the highlands, specifically from the areas of the Amhara, would establish themselves as landlords and would basically enslave the native people in the southern parts of Ethiopia to do their work. And the native people would till the land and give [the landlords] the whole yield. As tillers, they could get one third of the yield. 

Tigray was part of the highlands, part of the former Abyssinia. So, it’s not one of the regions that [was] subjugated by the Neftenya system. But Tigray, despite coming from this part of Abyssinia, recognizes the right of self-determination or the right to rule oneself, because Tigray has been an independent state for close to 3,000 years.

This is where the clash with the Ethiopian colonizers comes because the colonizers want an Ethiopia that is in the image of them, that speaks the Amharic language, that has the Ethiopian culture. And this was actually very well recognized by the socialists—many of whom were Amhara—and by the leftist movement within the student movement around the 1960s and 1970s. So, resisting colonization was also part of the movement. By 1991, there were 17 armed groups that wanted to secede from Ethiopia and form their own nation or form their own state.

Tigray’s strong sense of self-rule was considered a setback to the formation of Ethiopia as a nation-state with one language and one culture. This is the root cause of the conflict.

Simi

How has the government of Abiy Ahmed continued this agenda of creating a consolidated Ethiopia under the auspices of Amhara supremacy?

Tsinia’t

Very good question. So, Abiy Ahmed is actually Amhara. His mother is from Amhara. His father is from Oromia. But more than his ethnicity is his actual line of thinking—Abiy Ahmed is infatuated with the idea of becoming an emperor and, like Menelik or Hailie Selassie, he wants to be a king. He doesn’t want nations that want self-rule, that want classification of power between federal and regional states. If it was about ethnicity, the Oromos would have accepted him. 

But most Oromo intellectuals are against him because Abiy Ahmed represents everything that they fought against, everything that was undone by the 1974 revolution. The student movement that I mentioned, in the late 1960s and 70s, had two fundamental questions. The first one was the land to the tiller—they wanted to undo the Neftenya system so there would not be any landlords and the tiller should own the land. The second one was the question of nations and nationalities. Nations and nationalities should be recognized and should have the right to express themselves in their own language. They express their culture and rule themselves. This is the right of the nations and nationalities. 

So, Abiy Ahmed wants to roll this back, all these gains, and take us back to 1974. That’s why the Oromos are also against him because his ideology is more in line with the empire of Ethiopia than an Ethiopia that recognizes its citizens, that recognizes that there are 80-plus nations and nationalities inside [Ethiopia] now.

Simi

Do you see parallels between the story of Tigray and the story of Kashmir’s refusal to be incorporated into the Indian Republic, and also its history of fighting for self-determination that goes back to resisting British colonialism in the 19th century and beyond?

Bint Ali

So, Kashmir wasn’t ever directly ruled by the British. The British did however sell us to the [Dogra dynasty].

But, of course, there are a lot of similarities. What really hit me was when [Tsinia’t] was talking about land to the tiller in Tigray because, in Kashmir, we have something similar. It was brought into place around the 1950s by Sheikh Abdullah, and Kashmiri people love[d] him for that. The older generations because they were poor and they were tilling this land for the landlords, for other people, and they were barely getting anything for themselves. Everybody in Kashmir owns some kind of land now and it’s because of that land-to-the-tiller act.

First and foremost, it’s not just the land that [India wants] to take away. It’s not just the land that the Indians want. It’s also an assault and an attack on our very ethnic and indigenous identity. They want to change the names of our places, they want to turn us into something that we are not. They want us to forget our language and basically mold us into something, but not Kashmiris. They want Kashmiri land but they don’t want Kashmiri people. They want to make Kashmiris into something else—maybe more obedient, maybe [so] the resistance in them is not alive anymore.

Looking at the things that keep changing in Kashmir every single day and the level of oppression that people are under, I honestly have to refresh my Twitter to see if any news is coming out officially, [if] any Kashmiri is tweeting anything. There is hardly anything at all, because all of us have been silenced. But does that mean that we have been put into this mold and made into something else? No, absolutely not. As much as I feel hopeless, I know that one day, very soon, this silence is going to be so deadly and people will not be able to carry its weight anymore. They are going to burst and that will bring out some change and that would be something that India cannot handle. That’s where resistance comes in.

If you look at the history of Kashmir, we have not had a single ruler for many years. We have been ruled by Hindus, by Sikhs, by Mughals—there have been so many different rulers in Kashmir but everyone’s kingdom came to an end. And so will this. India’s and Modi’s regime may come to an end at some point—it’s not me telling you this but the history of Kashmir that will tell you this.

Simi

One very striking similarity between the war in Tigray and India’s state violence in Kashmir is the use of information blockades and communications shutdowns. I was wondering if the two of you could comment on how you have navigated those restrictions and how they have affected your political activity.

Bint Ali

When [people] think about internet [and communication] blackouts in Kashmir, 2019 immediately comes to their minds, but [blackouts have] been happening ever since we had telecommunication and ever since we [got] internet. Internet became common in Kashmir in 2008. It was literally right around that time that internet blackouts also became common. 

I think in 2001, or sometime around then, phone networks were not working. You couldn’t even send an SMS to somebody, you know? There was no internet those days in Kashmir, just mobile phones to call and text people.

In the 1990s, when people started revolting against Indian rule, many Kashmiri men would cross the border, go to Pakistan, get armed training as well as guns, and come back to try and fight the Indian army in Kashmir. I did not see [women] as a part of it when this whole thing was going on. And then this [arm]ed resistance sort of faded around 1996. It wasn’t over, but it did definitely fade. Organizations sort of surrendered their leaders. 

But in 2008, when this discourse of Kashmir—this discussion of Kashmir wanting freedom and Kashmiri people resisting—came into online public spheres, onto Facebook and Twitter, women and men were fully a part of it. They started talking about resistance and what it meant to them. And people actually started organizing on these platforms. Somebody would be killed somewhere, and there would be a call on Facebook—“Assemble here, there’s a protest.” And you would see huge protests in Kashmir in 2008, 2009. For example, if a local rebel would get killed in an army fight, thousands of people would attend the funeral. 

There was a little bit of space for that kind of dissent. There was a little bit of space for protest. There was a little bit of space for at least mourning and expressing your grief. And that was completely, completely taken away from us in August 2019. India basically monitored everything—how Kashmiris breathe and eat and sleep, they monitored it and they came up with ways to stifle Kashmiris in each and [every] possible way. 

You know, it’s interesting what technology does and how it makes you feel. I was in Kashmir that August. I literally remember waking up into this kind of absurdity and hollowness. I suddenly felt like [I was] thrown into some kind of a black hole, you know. I couldn’t locate myself, I couldn’t map myself, where I was and what I was supposed to do. And there was absolute silence everywhere because it was not just the communication, it was that there was a complete curfew. You couldn’t go outside your home. You didn’t know what was happening just one mile away in your friend’s or relative’s home. People died and their relatives and immediate family wouldn’t even know. So all that trauma gets triggered when I start talking about it, and in that time I even had to leave my home and go abroad and study. And for months to come I had no idea if my family was alive, and they had no idea what I was doing. 

Internet bans still happen in Kashmir. Just two weeks back the internet was banned for a week in most areas in Kashmir. I mean, this is heartbreaking. We didn’t even have internet to download directions and guidelines for [what we were] supposed to do in this COVID pandemic. What is the pandemic, how [are we] supposed to keep ourselves safe? There were no resources. Forget about watching a YouTube video telling you how to be safe or how to clean your stuff. The pandemic as well as the existing lockdown in Kashmir was a deadly combination. It hampered people’s lives. 

The worst part is the level of censorship we face. We really don’t have platforms and avenues to go and tell our story and say these things. Many places don’t want to publish [anything] about this. They’re like, “Oh, we don’t like to publish about Kashmir because it’s very controversial.” Isn’t this your responsibility?

In spite of all this violence and this intense, intense censorship that we are going through, no one else is speaking when it should be their prerogative. If I can’t speak about Kashmir right now you should be talking about it! If Tsinia’t can’t talk about Tigray right now using his name, I should be talking about it! We have to take up each other’s cause! Only then can we sort of achieve this ideal and this future of global justice where we imagine communities not living under occupation and war anymore.

Simi  

What about the impact of the Ethiopian state’s information ban around Tigray?

Tsinia’t

Tigray has been in communication blackout for more than 100-some days now. This is retaliation for Tigrayan victories in June 2021.

When they started the war in November 2020, they blocked the power. They turned off the internet. They turned off communication like telephone and everything. Because of this, most people don’t have enough batteries on their phones to record atrocities. That was a deliberate strategy starting [in] November when they were moving in. And then in the last 10 months they continued with this. This deliberate strategy was part of the genocidal act. 

Rape was used as a weapon of war, where soldiers were, in an institutionalized manner, encouraged to rape women. More than 22,500 women, according to the United Nations, [were] raped. You know that if one woman said that she [was] raped, there are at least 20 that [aren’t] in the report, so we can multiply the numbers.

Besides that, there are atrocities. More than 250 massacre sites and 250 massacres have been recorded so far by the University of Ghent, even with all these communication blackouts. So, you can imagine that if there is no communication blackout, this number would skyrocket. 

There is also now a man-made famine in Tigray. All the yields of the farmers were destroyed, deliberately destroyed. Anyone that was found farming was shot, especially by the Eritrean soldiers. Now they have closed Tigray, put it under a Gaza-like siege, and are not allowing humanitarian aid to go into Tigray. In the last 86 days, there were 900,000 people under famine-like conditions. That’s almost a million. Out of the Tigrayan population, 91 percent needed humanitarian aid to survive. So you can imagine after 86 days of blockade, where only 5 percent of the food that was needed for this 900,000 to survive was allowed to come in … 5 percent of 900,000 were allowed to survive, basically. The other 95 percent were doomed and condemned to be killed by starvation.

What is making this worse is the communication blackout. There is no internet, there is no telephone, [and] even the United Nations cannot move food because they don’t have fuel. Fuel is not allowed either. So people are killed in darkness by starvation, and death by starvation is the worst of its kind. You are dying a very slow, excruciating, painful death. This is what the genocide has come to.

The world cannot see this because the world cannot see Tigray because it’s in complete blackout. Not only internet, not only telephone, but also power, banking, fuel, everything. Places that were lively are now quiet. People that are well-to-do, even if you have 1 million birr in the bank, you can’t use it. You will starve to death because there is no banking service because all the money is locked by the Ethiopian government. I have friends that are well-to-do in the capital city of Tirgay, Mekelle. They are starving and I cannot help them. I wish I could send them money. How can I send them money? There is no banking.

In relation to [the] communication blackout, you can’t even speak about this because you are blocked. You’re in darkness. The world only gets to hear about this cruelty through information that’s trickling out. 

Simi

In the piece you wrote for Ethiopia Insight, you noted that people were being killed for trying to bury the dead. I was wondering if you could comment on the impact of this sort of disruption of grief as well … not even just destruction and darkness, but you can’t even mourn.

Tsinia’t

This is not accidental, where a disgruntled soldier wouldn’t allow you to bury, for instance, your daughter [who] was killed or your father [who] was killed. This was actually a policy, especially by the Eritrean government—they wanted to break the morale of the people, they wanted to subjugate them—[that if] they killed someone inside your house, they wouldn’t allow you to bury them. You’re supposed to live with the body that’s smelling for days, and they come daily and check whether you bur[ied] it or not. So …

Simi  

They actually check? 

Tsinia’t 

Yes, they come and check—that’s why I’m saying it’s not an accident. If it had been a onetime thing, you would say it’s maybe some barbaric commander. No, it’s institutionalized. They come and check whether you buried that body or not. And they want you to live with that body because they want to traumatize you. And they want to subjugate you. You are not allowed to mourn. You are not allowed to bury your dead. They make sure that they leave someone to live, to be traumatized. When they leave them, it’s not out of kindness. It’s out of hate … out of the need to make them suffer. 

The funny part is that it didn’t actually subjugate the people of Tigray. It made them much more resilient, much stronger to fight back. 

[In the] recent agriculture study from the University of Ghent that I told you about, they found out that the number of people that joined the resistance corresponds to the amount of cruelty that was committed in a given village. For instance, in one small village, 13 people were killed. So every youth in that village went and joined the resistance. 

They tried to subjugate us, but the more savagery that they showed, the more atrocities that they committed, the stronger the resistance became, the stronger the will of the people to fight to death became. 

Simi

The detail is … is sickening but I also think what you’re describing … obviously, there are many mass graves in Kashmir. 

I was wondering … going to Kashmir, [Bint Ali] if this at all reminded you of the Indian state confiscating the body of Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the use of enforced disappearances?

Bint Ali

Honestly, I’m still processing the details. And I’m so sorry. Of course, saying sorry is not enough. I wish these awful and horrendous things were not happening. But it’s also heartwarming that people are resisting and not just bending down to what’s coming their way. 

In Kashmir, sexual violence has been used against men and woman. Men have been tortured, sodomized, [and] forced to masturbate in front of each other. And then women have been raped and entire villages have been raped, like Kunan Poshpora in the 90s. The men were rounded up outside and all the women were raped, from eight-year-olds to eighty-year-olds. And they are still seeking justice! India, in fact, never acknowledged that the Indian Army did this. 

Another thing in Kashmir is, of course, enforced disappearances, which leave behind families or half widows or children or parents. It’s absolutely disturbing. Then people end up in these mass graves. Two years back, an organization in Kashmir called Jammu Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society, [came out with a] study that found out [that] there were so many hundreds and hundreds of mass graves where unidentified people were buried. And the man who was responsible [for burying] them in this far-flung village in Kashmir, he had kept like bits and pieces of whatever they were wearing as, you know, their identity. Families literally live the rest of their lives in trauma and go in search of these people who have been disappeared, [hoping] they’ll find them somewhere. So this man had kept those small, small things, maybe by which their families would identify them. That guy also passed away, may his soul rest in peace. 

Another thing is how India controls bodies that are dead. [I]n [the] case of a lot of other local rebels who were killed by the Indian Army, and even this year teenagers who were killed by the Indian Army, their bodies were not returned. They were not rebels. They were literally taken away from their home and then killed … . And then India says, “Oh, they were militants. That’s why we killed them.” Or, “We don’t know how they got killed, et cetera, et cetera,” to label civilians as militants and all these things. They were juveniles, and their families were mourning.

Not that [the families] expected any justice—they just wanted the dead bodies. They just wanted closure, to bury them themselves with their hands. The right of mourning, the right of burying bodies has been taken away from Kashmiris. And recently we saw it in the case of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, may Allah have mercy on him. But it has been happening all along with the bodies of so many other Kashmiris. They get buried in very, very, very remote areas of Kashmir so that the families can’t even reach there. 

Simi

Is there a way you can see Kashmiris and Tigrayans developing bonds of solidarity? What would you say for people outside of these respective communities who are interested in seeing justice done for those who have been violated and in supporting liberation from these oppressions?

Tsinia’t

You can start with the reports from Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. They have reported about the weaponized rape, about the massacre scene in Axum, where there was a massacre during a major religious holiday. But the funny part is that while they were massacring [people] on that very day, they had live transmission saying that everything was fine from the city. People were interviewed at gunpoint, forced to say that everything is fine. This is from one of the reports from Human Rights Watch and from Amnesty as well. There are also reports about the use of food as a weapon of war. You can find this from OCHA reports from UN [and] Human Rights Watch. And from World Food Programme reports. 

About massacres, University of Ghent has an Atlas of the humanitarian situation in Tigray. It has [well documented accounts of] atrocities. This is what they can find on satellites. Of course, a lot of reports from CNN, about one incident where soldiers were killing for pleasure—soldiers killed people and [threw them off] of a cliff, and they are recording it and are laughing about it. Because it’s a genocide. They have dehumanized people, so killing them has become fun already. These are reports from CNN, from [the investigative journalism site] Bellingcat, from the BBC.

You can also find so many Tigray atrocities reported in international media, and advocacy groups such as Omna Tigray, Stand with Tigray and Tghat are very good resources.

Bint Ali

There are so many resources, and everything is online. If somebody wants to learn about what is happening in Kashmir, a lot of human rights–related work is on the website of Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, and then to make it easy for you[rself you] can just go to the Stand With Kashmir website. They have put together resources, lists of books, and [a] syllabus that you can actually read to be educated about Kashmir. And then you can follow credible voices from Kashmir.

People who come out for different causes, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, whether it’s Palestine liberation, should also come out for lesser-known causes like Kashmir, like Tigray, because there cannot be peace in the world unless there is peace in these less-known regions. And as much as I pray for Palestine every single day, and Inshallah I hope Palestine will be free, I also pray for other regions of the world. They do not have to be Muslim regions or Muslim countries, it is just that we really need to bother about other causes.

[O]ne good thing about talking about issues and bringing different people together is [that] it does help. We start these conversations among ourselves. As much as we need solidarity from the rest of the world, we need solidarity from each other. Because we would understand each other’s pain way better than somebody who has [not] actually lived it. And there are so many of us, so if we join hands, we can actually change the course of action, we can actually change our present. So, it’s very important for all of us to have solidarity between each other and then the rest of the world to have solidarity with us.

Simi  

Thank you both so much for your time and for spotlighting these resources.

Before she was an award-winning graphic novelist, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was a painter, a sculptor, a bookbinder, and a translator between Korean and French, living in Paris. She lived there for 17 years before returning to South Korea. 

Gendry-Kim was in her late 20s living in Paris, however, when she heard the story that grew into The Waiting (기다림), a moving and dramatic graphic novel of aging, war, family reunions, and separation. Her mother’s story. Her mother was staying with Gendry-Kim in Paris for two months after Gendry-Kim’s father passed away when she revealed a family secret. She had grown up in North Korea and had left behind family—an older sister in Pyongyang, who she desperately wanted to meet again.

The Korean War (1950-1953), which began over 70 years ago, permanently sliced the peninsula into two nations, and the remaining families, separated by the 38^th parallel, still wait for a reunion with their loved ones. Gendry-Kim’s The Waiting, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong, explores this ongoing division through the eyes of Jina, a writer, and Song Gwija, her mother. 

Gendry-Kim’s black-and-white hand drawings of aging Gwija—wrinkles, moles, unibrow, and forehead etched with deep affection—and her lonely life in an apartment in Seoul are poignant. Jina’s guilt over caring for her ailing mother, still stuck with a wartime mentality, is palpable. But the impossible promise to reunite her mother with her first son, Jina’s half brother, lost to the north, weighs heaviest. Of course, it’s not an uncommon story. An estimated 2 million civilians died during the war, and hundreds of thousands of Korean families remain divided. A generation of people well into their 80s and 90s who remember an undivided peninsula is dying out. Some hope against hope to be selected via a government lottery system for a meeting, however brief, with their family members.

Gendry-Kim’s English-language debut, Grass (풀), which told the story of sex slavery (comfort women), won the Krause Essay Prize, the Cartoonist Studio Prize, the Harvey Award, and appeared on best-of-the-year lists from the New York Times, the Guardian, Library Journal, and more. The Waiting, which came out last week from Drawn & Quarterly, is an important follow-up. Of all Gendry-Kim’s stories and images in this graphic novel, the most striking is the quiet view from a high, grassy lookout over cloud-swept mountains. Populated with people, her drawings are like etchings—scratched, frenetic lines with pools of ink on the page—but this mountain scene is soft and empty of humans. Korea’s old myths revolve around its mountains, so the mountains can make one homesick. The caption tells us this is Kapsan County, South Hamgyong Province, 1937, in the calm before the storm—land that used to be Song Gwija’s home.

Over email, Gendry-Kim and I discussed the evolution of The Waiting, her past lives in France, and the artist who inspires her today. 

—Esther Kim

Esther Kim  

Earlier this year, you spoke with Emily Jungmin Yoon (The Margins’s longtime poetry editor) for Korean Literature Now and mentioned that you came up with the idea for The Waiting in 1999! The Waiting published in South Korea last year and has since been translated into many languages, including English, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic. I imagine in that long process, there were multiple versions. Tell us about the evolution of The Waiting. What were some stories or versions that you changed or decided to scrap? 

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim 

In 1999, when I first heard the story of my mother and her family, I found it captivating, perhaps even more so because I never knew my grandparents on either side of the family. She told me all about her childhood and marriage to my father. It was fascinating. This was at a time in my life when I was questioning my identity and my roots. Something about living in France for so long had pushed me into this self-reflection. All of this is why I started recording my mother’s memories.

Part of what I recorded touched on life in North Korea and my mother’s elder sister who stayed behind when she left. At the time I didn’t think I would make a graphic novel about it, but the more time passed, the more I knew I wanted to tell this story. Because her story was intimate and specific to her but also universal. At first, I wanted to recount [my mother’s] experiences, beginning with her parents’ lives. I was thinking I should be faithful to the testimony I had recorded. But when I started with that premise in mind, I realized the only way I could do so faithfully would be to make a whole series, not a single book. So I decided to focus on the Division of Korea, the generation that lived through the war, and the generation that didn’t know what living through that war meant. 

EK

When I finished The Waiting, I was surprised to find that the story was fictional. I mistook it for completely autobiographical—probably because one main character, the daughter, is a writer too—until I reached your author’s note at the end. What research did you undertake for The Waiting? 

KSGK 

The Waiting is partially my mother’s own story. I couldn’t be 100 percent faithful to her experiences because I wanted to protect my family and myself. So I decided to interview two people who were reunited with their families. I combined those interviews with the testimony of a friend’s mother and the testimonies I found in other works, and all these sources helped me shape the story. 

EK 

The ongoing division between North and South Korea affects Koreans across the globe, including my family personally. In South Korea, the topic of reunification is a political minefield because it touches on questions of nuclear disarmament and communist sympathies. But at base, there are so many who simply long to reunite with their family members and see their hometowns. What is your hope for the future of the peninsula? 

KSGK 

Hope… There are a lot of complications and complexity when it comes to reunification. Despite all that, I hope that it happens as quickly as possible. The longer we have to wait, the harder it will be.

EK

You lived in Paris, France, as a painter, sculptor, and bookbinder for many years. The way you fell into drawing graphic novels seems like a happy accident. That is, you supported yourself by translating Korean graphic novels into French and translated nearly a hundred! What was the French appetite for Korean manhwa like back when you started in the 1990s, and have you seen changes? 

KSGK 

Korean comics (one-off graphic novels and longer series) started to be acquired by French publishers at the beginning of the 2000s. At first, French editors were buying a lot of every kind of title, because they thought that it would sell the way manga does. That wave lasted a few years, and even led to the foundation of dedicated manhwa publishers. But when they realized that manhwa wasn’t going to sell in the same numbers as manga, a number of series were canceled and the publishers shuttered. Nonetheless, certain independent publishers continued to put out Korean graphic novels that were more “artistic” and dealt with more serious subject matter about society, history, or more intimate stories. In other words, the publishers who had always put quality ahead of quantity when deciding what to acquire continue to publish Korean authors.  

EK 

And how have French graphic novels, comics, or illustration influenced your work (if at all)?

KSGK 

The range of artistic styles and the freedom of expression in France made me understand that there isn’t a set of rules you need to follow when making a graphic novel. The most important thing is that I do what I want, to the best of my ability.

EK 

Your works tackle historical events of great violence, such as sexual slavery (comfort women) in Grass and now the Korean War in The Waiting. What is the role of an artist in documenting history? 

KSGK 

Of course I speak about the violence that took place in Korean history. But with these stories, I am able to show the resilience of the people who lived through these hardships. The themes of all my books are connected. My parents lived through these events—sometimes intimately, sometimes just by being alive—and I come from them. 

Recently, I was invited to Belgium and France to participate in events and book signings. The people who came to these events told me that because of my books they were able to learn about important historical events that had been hidden or swept under the rug. According to them, the historical events I write about do not appear in textbooks. And they told me that they were very touched by my work. I think maybe that is the answer to this question about the role of an artist. 

EK

Lastly, who are the artists and writers that inspire you today? 

KSGK 

Nature is the most incredible artist. Right now, my inspiration is autumn and the stars  

Translated between the French and English by Julia Pohl-Miranda.

I don’t remember when I first began reading Jay Caspian Kang’s writing. I do know it had to be no later than 2017, as he and I had a phone meeting about Asian American activism as he was finishing up his New York Times Magazine feature that would be published that year. That story, “What a Fraternity Hazing Death Revealed About the Painful Search for an Asian-American Identity,” provides both the thesis and title for Kang’s second book, The Loneliest Americans, published in October of 2021. During the four years between these two publications, I read a lot of Kang’s writings, from his tweets to his stories and opinion pieces. I found in his work someone who takes seriously both the craft of writing and interrogating Asian American identity and politics. Many times I felt his writing to be simultaneously beautiful, funny, and frustrating. Owing to the beauty of the writing, as well as Kang’s humor, I have to dig deeper for what bothers me in what he’s saying—which pushes me to clarify my own thinking, a reading experience I kind of enjoy. Reading The Loneliest Americans was no different. Kang’s conceptualization of loneliness as a sociological framing of Asian America’s position in race politics, both ascribed and chosen, is provocative and ties together what Kang has been hinting at, sometimes loudly, in various places about how Asian Americans practice and narrate our political identities.

While we covered several topics in the two hours we met for this interview, a significant amount of time was given to exploring the debate among some Asian American scholars and activists regarding Kang’s skepticism about a coherent Asian American identity and his consideration of Asian Americans and coalition politics. As discussed in our interview, what some might read as Kang ignoring the history of Black-Asian solidarity is actually him interrogating it. In the process, The Loneliest Americans raises controversial questions about the performance and reality of Asian American politics against the backdrop of shifting Asian American demographics following the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as the contemporary social justice landscape in which discourses of solidarity, allies, and privilege commonly circulate.

This interview was conducted with Jay Caspian Kang on October 22, 2021, via Zoom. It was edited for length and clarity.

Tamara K. Nopper

One of the critiques you’ve gotten is that you’re not saying a certain narrative about doing Asian American politics or solidarity that some might want to hear you say.

Jay Caspian Kang

Well, everyone has an opinion on what this book should have been. And a lot of the criticism is, “Why didn’t you talk about X?” And I don’t feel any responsibility to X, because why would I? I think that leads to the same book being published over and over and over again.… People can hate the book, it’s fine, but to ask, “Why is it that you haven’t done the thing that I care about?”—that places so much pressure on individual writers. And I don’t quite get why so much pressure is placed on all our work—this idea that there’s nobody writing about Asian Americans right now, or that there are no Asian American writers, it’s just nonsense.

TKN

There’s been this idea that The Loneliest Americans is centering whiteness or that you as an author have self-hatred. And in your book you use the word neuroses several times to describe your own exploration into Asian American identity. Was there anything about sharing that that scared you or worried you?

JCK

No. No, no, not at all. Because I think if you’re going to be a writer, you should be very honest. And you should try and fulfill the people before you whose writing you admire and really touched people. What’s the point of doing it otherwise?

I think we all have moments of deep self-hatred and feeling terrible about ourselves. That doesn’t mean that people are like, “Hey, I wish I was white, I wish my hair was blonde, and I wish I had blue eyes.” But this idea that we can’t talk about our self-hatred because it’s embarrassing and makes us look bad or strange to white people—I find that so odd because then you’re basically just being like, “Well, I’m only out here for white people, that I care so deeply about what white people think that I’m just going to lie to you. I’m not going to just lie to my readers and shortchange them, I’m also going to lie to other Asian people,”—that’s the idea. Because we all know there is an element of self-hatred that goes into being raced—it’s one of the effects of living under white supremacy. If that’s true, then of course it has psychological effects on us. We’re all trying to get through it. I’ve always had that outlook on Asian, Asian American people—I find it very difficult to judge any of them…. When people say [you have self-hatred], I don’t know. I feel like it is a very odd thing to make fun of someone for being sort of psychologically damaged and for carrying that with them throughout their life. I just don’t believe the people who are doing it don’t struggle with this [as well], I don’t believe that you’ve fully decolonized your mind, or whatever.

TKN

You make this argument in your book with regard to how people have constructed an understanding of Asian Americans and racism, and the symbols and history they draw from to situate themselves in racial politics. You make this provocative argument that post-1965 immigrants don’t totally relate to that history and those symbols, and you also look at their attempts to relate to it and be interpreted or plugged in, through contemporary social justice narratives of what it means to do “good” Asian American politics. And I think that’s where the storyline of your narrative pisses people off. Whereas if you had talked about neuroses, but then the so-called resolution or clarity that you got was, we should all be doing this version of social justice/Asian American/solidarity politics or being part of POC coalitions, I think that would have been more acceptable to some people. With your concept “loneliest Americans,” you reject the idea that Asian Americans want to be white, but you also make a really provocative statement about locating an authentic place for Asian Americans in coalition politics, or what is seen as the so-called correct social justice path for Asian Americans. And you don’t take that path and you don’t demand that other Asian Americans take that path, and I think that is why some people hate what they think your book is about.

JCK

…the moment that’s upheld as this great moment of solidarity and possibility within Asian America—Asian Americans care about this moment more than anyone else—is the Third World Liberation Front. It is seen as this example of when we did what we actually can do, and that if we use this as a model for inspiration, then we can find solidarity with other people. There’s a lot that I admire greatly about the people who organized the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and Third World. I think this idea that they had at the beginning—that we will organize everyone who isn’t organized, we’ll let in everyone who’s not in another group, and that’s what we are—I think is beautiful. Like I genuinely think it’s a beautiful idea.

But I think that we have to understand that that impulse comes out of a sense of rejection, too. Like Vicci Wong who tried to join the Panthers. When they told her to go do something else, do your own thing, that’s when she joined AAPA…. My point here is that I do understand why people are attached to the story. But I think that we have to be realistic about who those people were and why they were able to situate themselves in politics that way. The other people who were in AAPA at the time, their families had been in California for five generations. They were living under the era of Chinese exclusion… They could situate themselves very clearly under a rubric of white supremacy and it made sense to them. I don’t think that post-1965 babies are quite there yet. I think that we understand microaggressions, I think that many of us do understand violence in a type of way, but we have not actually articulated our own version of that. And my proof that we haven’t articulated our own version of that is because when we try and articulate a version of that, we talk about the Third World Liberation Front. We don’t have our own thing, we just go right back to the old thing. And so, yeah, I think that that is a lonely position. I think that is an alienated position. I am not saying this out of scorn or sarcasm or out of contempt for people who attempt to do that. I’m saying, out of sympathy, it is sad that we don’t have this, it is bad that we don’t have this, and I wish personally we had it, too. But we just don’t, and we just have to be honest about it.

TKN

To me, your book has a much more tender argument about what it means to be the loneliest Americans. And I think what’s happened is that some people see you as kind of shitting on the things that they care about and that they fought really hard to get into public consciousness around these political struggles. I actually see you making a much more complicated kind of argument than even what I think you do publicly, or when you make these sound bites.

JCK

I understand that there’s a fair perception of me as being a bit of a cynic. And, you know, I think that I probably deserve that just because of my presence on social media. None of these people actually know me, so it’d have to be through social media. But I’ve always felt that my writing tries its best to be as deeply sympathetic towards its subjects as possible, sometimes to people’s actual annoyance. Like, “Why does this person seem so interested in what these toxic frat bros who killed a kid think? Why does he feel sympathetic towards them?” That’s just what I think writing is.

I think the misconception is that when I write about how I saw two kids at a protest last summer holding a “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” sign, that I think that they are idiots and that I’m sneering at them. It’s the exact opposite of that, and that misconception really pisses me off because it thinks so little of the person who is writing that passage and makes such large assumptions about who that person is. My thoughts about those kids who I saw is one of deep sympathy because I’ve been in that position, too. I went to protests when I was a kid. I felt so nervous because I was just one of three Asian people or zero Asian people at this protest. I’m the only one, you know—how do I situate myself here? It’s just white allies and Black people, or if it’s an anti-war protest, it’s just a lot of white people. You feel nervous about it, you want to do something. Either you want to sort of abandon your identity and you want to be part of the crowd that’s part of the protest, or you want to say, “Hey, I’m here too, I’m a representative of my people.” Then what is the language that you can bring to that second action. Well, it’s a lot of nostalgic stuff like those two kids do. And that’s why they end up in that place where they’re holding that sign. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just that I understand that that’s how they got to that place and that there’s a stranglehold on them of anxiety and neurosis about it, and I sympathize with them. I want them to have something that’s better, something that they can fully occupy. And so to say that that’s sneering at them is to fundamentally misunderstand the book.

TKN

You didn’t say this so much in your book but you say it in interviews, that if we try as Asian Americans to depict our politics as always about social justice and in solidarity, we’re not always dealing with all these Asian Americans we don’t want to deal with. And in your book you talk about all these examples of politics, examples of Asian Americans who don’t think they’re white, who have grievances, they’re organizing in various ways, some ways you are critical of and find harmful, but you’re saying they’re all doing it with the sensibility of being outsiders and not white, but that we don’t always deal with them. We like to kind of almost hide them because it doesn’t work well for us being seen as good coalition partners in solidarity work.

JCK

But I always want to know: What is that solidarity work? What is the coalitional work? Who are the people who really think that an Asian American respectability needs to be obtained so that they can continue to do the so-called work that they’re doing?

I’ve been looking at this for 10 years now, and what I have found is that there are people who are deeply invested in that type of coalitional work, people who are deeply invested in the lives of immigrants, people who are living in great precarity, and undocumented people. Not many of those people sit on Twitter all day [worrying about] how this makes Asian Americans look right. The people that I have found that care very deeply about how this makes Asian Americans look like are writers, academics, and people who sort of advanced this new type of respectability politics, right, that we must always be perfect in our politics, we must always be progressive.… So there’s an attempt to make the assimilated Asian American not seem like they want to be assimilated, that’s the first tenet. And the second one is to make them into a multicultural elite where they don’t have to apologize for their community, that they can say, “Actually, our people are just like your people, and they should work together.” It is an erasure, to use their terminology, it is an erasure of how people actually think.… And if we ignore that, if we say that that’s not real, or we say that those people don’t count, then what are we doing? I just don’t understand that impulse at all. It is deeply a respectability impulse.

TKN

Respectable to whom? You’re kind of flipping the idea of what respectability politics is, it’s like respectability to basically Black people and coalition politics—

JCK

Right, right, right. So that’s the thing.

TKN

Not the white world. So do you want to expand on that?

JCK

My sense of this is that there comes a time when most Asian people who are upwardly mobile and coming around in the world really do stop caring so much about what white people think about them. In some ways they kind of write white people off. They might have white friends or whatever but they don’t really care what those white friends think about them so much. The thing that assimilated, upwardly mobile Asian Americans within progressive spaces care about deeply is what Black people think about them. You know that that’s true just as much as I do, that’s who they really care about what they think. And that’s because they want to feel like POCs. They want to be able to take part in progressive politics as somebody who has a stake in it. And I understand that impulse quite deeply—I think that that’s an important thing and I think that they should do that. But I think that they feel that they need to scrub off all the ugly parts of their community, that they have to always apologize for them. That’s why when George Floyd happens, it is not that all Asian Americans who are progressive start marching on the streets in solidarity with everybody else. They do that, right? But first they have to apologize for anti-Blackness in the Asian community. What’s that about, right? Did anyone ask them to apologize for anti-Blackness in the Asian community? No, it’s a cleansing impulse to say, “I am not like them.” It is a distancing, and I do think that that’s its own form of respectability politics. It’s not aimed at white people, it is aimed at a multicultural elite, or the idea of a multicultural elite. And I actually think that is sort of the animating engine behind progressive Asian America right now, this sort of “we must always apologize,” or “we must always eliminate those of us who would embarrass us within this group.”

TKN

This has been a concern I’ve had sometimes when I’ve read your various writings in the last several years, and it was a concern I still had when I read your book—sometimes I feel like you fetishize grassroots organizing. But part of the history, if you don’t know, of people critiquing and developing a critique of anti-Blackness took place in those organizing spaces. You’re kind of saying, some of the social justice language that people use in these spaces is elite or appealing to elites, but you have people who are trying to push these conversations in these grassroots organizing spaces. And I don’t think you deal with that in your analysis.

JCK

I think that’s a fair thing to point out. I think it’s a fair criticism of the book. But I would say that my vision of what this could look like in the future is much broader. There are great challenges in organizing different groups of people together, especially recent immigrants. They’re gonna cling together.… I remember I was talking to a friend of mine. And she was like, “The way you write about politics is that you have this hope that we can organize all these recent immigrants, for example, who are very, very vocal against affirmative action, and who vote for Trump, and who hate changing Stuyvesant and all these schools.” And she said, “They’re gone, they’re just Republicans, you should just think about them that way. There’s [no way] they’re going to be persuaded back to our side.” And I think she might be right. So I understand that there are these challenges out there. I also think there are so many people who were politically engaged in their home countries who come over here and can’t navigate the American political system. There are many reasons for that. If you look at the data, one thing that really sticks about Asian Americans is that the [political] outreach to them is way lower than any other group.

TKN

Your book helped me understand more your critique of people employing social justice critiques of Asian Americans because of these reasons that we’re talking about, and that you can’t create a specific kind of portrait of a good, social justice Asian American and really think you’re really getting at the way a lot of Asian Americans are actually doing politics and shaping the conversation about being Asian American. You can’t just hide them away out of this sense of shame of wanting to look like a good coalition partner. And when I read your book, that resonated with me because I’ve done different talks, and one of the biggest questions that comes up all the time from Asian Americans, particularly young Asian Americans, is “How do we confront anti-Blackness in our communities?” And one of the things that I say is that we can’t disappear all these people that might politically embarrass us.

JCK

So we agree about that, right?

TKN

So we agree about that. I think what I have concerns about is, do you think your critique could suggest that talking about anti-Blackness is an elite preoccupation?

JCK

Well, yeah, um—

TKN

So you do think that?

JCK

Right.

TKN

And that’s what I get concerned about.…I think in your critique, there’s this way where you almost suggest that dealing with anti-Blackness isn’t relevant to working-class and poor communities or to bettering the conditions that people are in. And this is where I would disagree with you. Part of the history of labor organizing is dealing with people’s racism. There’s a history of dealing with racial conflict or anti-Blackness on a working-class level to achieve some of the work that you’re trying to get at. And I feel like some of your critiques about anti-Blackness and critiques of gestures of solidarity as being elitist don’t really account for that.

JCK

Sure. I don’t want to be misunderstood here and say that trying to combat anti-Blackness is a bad thing. I think it’s a really good thing, obviously, I think that it’s a good thing. I think that my critique is not necessarily so much about the space that it takes in places where it is very necessary, like the conditions you were talking about. Like, you can’t build a coalition if one of the groups hates the other group and doesn’t trust them or thinks that they’re degenerate or whatever racist thing that they think. I’m sort of speaking more about the place of this performative critique of anti-Blackness in the larger discourse around race in America and around Asian Americans. I agree there are contexts where it should be front and center. Right. But I do think that there is sort of an elite preoccupation with it in a way that does feel like it is a purging of one’s community.

The example that I’ve given in the past is kids who were like, “We’re Ivy League students and we’re writing letters home to our communities about anti-Blackness.” And this was right as the George Floyd protests are wrapping up. And so you think, well what’s that about, what are those kids doing? I don’t judge those kids, like I said. They’re trying to engage in a protest action, and I think that that’s sacred. I think that’s the most important thing they can do. But the thing that I would say to them is, “Why are you identifying yourselves as Ivy Leaguers? And what are you trying to say by the performance?” Well, you’re trying to say that “we are very accomplished people,” but you are also saying that “we are not like these other Asians who are racist.” You’re distancing yourself from the community, and I do think that’s a form of respectability. But I also think that it’s totally empty. It’s about the individuals being accepted and having permission to protest. Giving themselves permission to enter that space without being accused of being anti-Black. I have been to many, many, many, many protests.… I say just show up. You don’t have to do this whole thing where you cast off all the ugly people in your own community, you know? You don’t have to distance yourself from all of that. You can just show up now. They’re trying to position themselves as being worthy partners, and I understand why they feel like they have to do that, but I am trying to tell you that you don’t have to do that. Show up and that’s enough, and you can leave all this neurosis behind.

TKN

So your book contract gets announced around 2017. You basically have the same thesis as you do in your New York Times Magazine piece about fraternity hazing, and that’s also where your book title comes from. Did your thinking go through shifts? Did you feel conflicted about some of your arguments in the last four years as all this stuff is happening?

JCK

Yeah, I think it changed in that in 2015, 2016, I was much less charitable with my thinking about the Asian American elite, of which I also am one. I understood the criticisms that I could make of myself, and I felt that that entitled me to also criticize people around me who I felt were acting in similar ways. One of the things that changed during the pandemic and during the attacks, especially after Atlanta, was that I began to think about us, if we are a people—something you know I feel very conflicted about. That if there is an Asian American people, they’re scared more than anything, and that fear is the great motivating factor behind many decisions, not just for people who are being attacked, but also people like me. When you think about people who are afraid, you feel much more sympathy towards them and you try to understand their actions in a positive light, or at least a sympathetic light. And the pandemic did make me start thinking much more along those terms because I was also afraid. And I think that has made me more sympathetic, and I don’t think that that will end.… I think I’m much more thoughtful about some of the scholarship than I was five years ago, and I think that changed as I wrote the book. And so there are ways in which I do not believe in going back and scrubbing everything in the last edit to make it all aligned together.

In August 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, The Margins launched a new Flash Fiction project. One year into the fortnightly series, after reading over almost two hundred pieces, our editors got an inside peek into practices of Asian American and Asian diasporic flash fiction. Something we noticed was how flash fiction, with its urgent language coupled with its swift writing pace, has unique possibilities for writing into the present moment. Like a petri dish, flash fiction is an ideal container for play. The word count limitation can create bold experimentation. Also during the pandemic and an all-too-often dehumanizing news cycle, we thought about readers—those of us feeling isolated, those who were and are actively organizing, and those who were unable to garner the attention for reading longer pieces of fiction. From the enthusiastic response by readers, we saw the series was wanted and needed in a quarantine: a fictional world to escape to and escape quickly!

With the possibilities that the flash form afforded our writers, the series has been able to work with and publish poets, essayists, and even graphic artists. We’ve been able to distill the flash pieces further into astrological tidbits, where an evocative sentence from a story became a horoscope reading. 

The five writers we’ve gathered here for a roundtable conversation have had varied approaches to writing through and about the pandemic. Sadia Quraeshi Shepard explored the fabulist possibilities that the early days of COVID engendered, with the struggle to get Desi groceries delivered. (Note: this piece was recognized as Wigleaf 2021 Top 50). Jireh Deng portrayed the claustrophobia that a queer college student feels at her Christian conservative home during Zoom sermons. Jemimah Wei wrote about the tragicomedy of elementary school kids in a virtual classroom, and reflects critically and compassionately on social and digital dynamics between children. Poet Chen Chen dipped his toes into his first published work of fiction, about the theater of retail encounters and what can and cannot be touched in a store during a pandemic. Jefferson Lee writes about a software engineer tightening his N95 mask as the wildfires in California burn red skies and grandparents’ death notices arrive from across the globe . 

The five writers gathered to reflect on the genre of flash fiction, recommend other Asian, Asian diasporic, and Asian American flash writers to read, and share how COVID-19 impacted their writing. Plus, they all share favorite flash writing prompts. At the time of publishing this roundtable, the Submission Period for The Margins flash fiction series is open, and will close on December 5, 2021.

—Swati Khurana, Flash Fiction Editor & Yi Wei, Flash Fiction Assistant Editor

Recognizing both its ongoingness and its different phases, how has the Covid-19 pandemic affected your writing practice, the subject of your work, and/or your writing communities? 

Jireh Deng

For me, writing had been a form of self expression, but I truly didn’t see myself as a serious writer until the pandemic hit. I turned to writing and the writing community for survival; in the summer of 2020 I took four writing classes online where I met some amazing people who really informed my own growth and development as a writer. In these spaces, mentored by other writers of color and queer writers, I saw the possibilities for my own writing to take shape in the unique landscape of Asian American literature. Making art during a pandemic also clarifies your work, in the way that uncertainty strips away the unnecessary so you can focus on the essential. I write with intentionality about family, community, love, and my desire to see culture shift. I hate to sound grandiose, but death makes you think about your legacy, and I want to be remembered in my writing by who and what I cared for and how I loved.

Jemimah Wei

It was the complete opposite for me—and because of that I love hearing how the pandemic has been clarifying for other artists, because it gives me so much hope. For me, the pandemic completely interrupted my writing, my community, and my subject. I think my brain truly broke a little bit, because nothing I was working on before could proceed. I very nearly abandoned my novel, and it caused me so much sorrow. Everything I wrote was rubbish. I took online classes, trying to jolt myself into writing, into community, but I think my panic was so transparent that I found it hard to make coherent conversation with anyone I met in those Zoom rings, and I’m pretty sure I gave one or two of them a big scare with my non sequitur responses, for which I’m now deeply sorry. 

I was trying so hard to force myself to persist in my writing that it was making me very depressed. But when I turned away and let myself free-write into the pandemic (which I also hated, and fought every inch of the way), I wrote stories and stories of hypothetical worlds confined within the current parameters of disaster. Some of these were then picked up and published, and when other writer-readers emailed me with their own panic, it made me feel less lonely, less gaslit by the nightmarish global situation which I simply couldn’t comprehend. From there, the panic gave way to rage, and the thing about rage is it’s less isolating than fear. I formed new and mutually encouraging relationships with other writers, started leaning into the imaginative landscape, and from there, very slowly, my writing started picking up again.

Jefferson Lee

I definitely, definitely get the “my brain truly broke a little bit,” thing. If we’re trying to focus just on the writing parts that broke, I found that I could not for the life of me figure out if anything I’d written was working. I could crank out a few pages, but when I went back over them it just wouldn’t really register at all. I told myself that writing was just like anything else, and as long as I maintained a practice, it’d even out. So I tried to get a little stricter about having some set time every day, and that kind of worked. It felt good to have some routine. But also, if it weren’t for some really great friends/readers who, for whatever reason, were willing to help me sort through all that mess I was generating, I really don’t know if I’d have stuck with it. 

Jemimah Wei

I know, right? I would read, and reread my work, with a sinking feeling that it was all hot trash. Somehow, having a routine didn’t work for me, it just made me more aware of how much I was failing as a fiction writer. But on the other hand, I started as a weekly columnist at No Contact Magazine (it’s bi-weekly now) and that external deadline really helped. At least I was writing 800 words a week, even if it was essentially 800 words of me talking frankly about how panicked and depressed the pandemic was making me. 

Sadia Quraeshi Shepard

The idea of feeling drawn to and also distanced from a daily writing practice really resonates with me. Like so many writers with young children, in early pandemic days I found myself juggling work, homeschooling, and domestic tasks instead of writing. Instead of working on my book I was washing the groceries. Remember washing groceries?! Writing began to feel very far away. One bright light in this period was participating in Jami Attenberg’s project 1000 Words of Summer, which reminded me at a time when I needed it most that it was possible to write a thousand words in a day. What I ended up working on were a series of flash fiction pieces in the voice of a single character who is part of a long project of mine. While I’m not certain these fragments will end up in the final manuscript, I came to know my character in a very different way writing them. And Jami’s daily missives felt like a creative lifeline. Another bright spot was moderating a Kundiman/New School webinar about myth and memory in the diaspora featuring Hala Alyan and K-Ming Chang. As much as I have acutely missed attending readings and talks in person over the last eighteen months, the huge proliferation of literary events online has made participating in book events much more accessible and affordable (no childcare!) than pre-pandemic. This has been an unexpected silver lining. 

Chen Chen

I’ve been thinking about how I should really attend online classes, too—in particular, generative workshops. I finished my PhD in English with a Creative Writing focus in 2018 and, at the time, I could not imagine ever being a student again. I was so done with school, though I was transitioning to teaching as my main occupation. In 2020, I felt lonely and isolated, as a university teacher, expected to go on doing my job—and completely online—without any break, without any real space for processing pandemic grief and rage. I felt like I was constantly giving and had little time to replenish my creativity. Writing poetry seemed impossible; it went very, very slowly. And I was avoiding returning to work on my second full-length collection. That book, so focused on crisis, from the Trump administration to mass shootings, and also largely set in a deeply conservative city in West Texas (where I did my PhD coursework), seemed already too full of difficulty and I had no desire to add more to it by writing about the pandemic. I turned instead to craft/personal essays and my contribution to this flash fiction series. I’m so grateful to the editors who’ve asked me to write prose, though I tend to do that even more slowly—these opportunities gave me a way out of my writing slump. 

It was only in the spring of this year that I was able to return to my poetry manuscript. Big thanks to my friend Sam Herschel Wein, who visited me in the Boston area after he was fully vaccinated; he kept nudging me to get back to the collection and finally, when we got to have in-person conversation again, I felt reinvigorated and like I could find my way through. That book is now slated to come out from BOA Editions in September 2022. I’m surprised at how quickly it ended up coming together, once I had some other source of motivation and inspiration, through reconnecting with a friend. I’m excited about this book again, as sorrow-filled as many of the poems are. Still, I know I need to take better care of my creative mind/heart; I need to keep myself nourished.

Do you typically write flash fiction? If so, what draws you to the genre? If not, what genre do you write in and how did it inform your process?

Chen Chen

I mainly write poetry and identify as a poet; I think I bring a poet’s love for lyricism, imagery, compression, and swift turns to my writing in other genres. I don’t typically write flash fiction, though I enjoy reading it and if I ever were to write a book of fiction, it would likely consist of flash. I love the overlap between flash fiction and prose poetry (one of my favorite MFA classes explored both genres). And there can be overlap with nonfiction, too—I’d say “Summer,” my flash piece in this series, has elements of personal essay as well as lyric essay. I’m drawn to poet Mary Ruefle’s approach in her prose books, The Most of It and My Private Property, in which she doesn’t distinguish between fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—the books are simply all prose. I think of Sawako Nakayasu saying, “I work mostly in poetry because it claims to be neither fiction nor nonfiction, because it acknowledges the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it.” 

I wrote “Summer” last summer, as some stores in the Boston area were reopening and experimenting with different “customer experiences.” I was having a great deal of trouble writing poetry. So, when I got the invitation from Swati to contribute to this series, I thought, well it’s been ages since I’ve written fiction, but maybe that’s what I need to do to find the language for some of what I’ve experienced during this time. I hope what I’ve brought over from poetry is an attention to the music of language and the rhythm of feeling. Too, an openness to dream, to surreal imagery, to leaps, and to lingering over the sensory and sensuous.

Sadia Quraeshi Shepard

In my teaching life, one of the exercises I do with my students is writing loglines and summaries for documentary and fiction film projects before they begin shooting and writing. I love the way that compressing a story into a couple of sentences can act as a kind of crucible to help you find the story that you want to tell. Who is your protagonist? What do they want and what is standing in their way? What is the catalyst for this story? Similarly, I find that the compression of flash fiction can act, as editor Swati Khurana has said, as a kind of pressure cooker. In “Monsters” the compression of the form also suggested to me something that I haven’t tried before—incorporating fabulist or surreal elements into a piece of otherwise realist fiction. This is definitely something I’m interested in experimenting with again in the future. 

Jemimah Wei

I’m actually generally really long-winded. Pre-pandemic, my stories were about 10,000 words, and my novel now stands at 130,000 words, which is really, you know, not anything that someone who isn’t Hanya Yanagihara should do. But to Chen Chen’s point on having a great deal of trouble writing at all, I experienced something similar in that nothing I wrote during the early months of the pandemic could go over a thousand words. So I was quite unceremoniously dropped into the world of flash fiction, but what a delight it’s been. I think what Swati said in her introduction to this series, back in August 2020, about comparing flash to an instant pot is exactly right. Dancing with pressure and tension has been incredibly exciting, and it’s now been a year and I’m still dabbling with different instant pot recipes for the flash form. 

Jefferson Lee

130,000 words! That’s super impressive. I think the longest I’ve ever written clocked in at like 15,000, maybe. I write flash once in a while, but still mostly think of full-length, 3k-7k-word short stories as my focus. Still, I’m not where I want to be with that yet; I’m a lot more comfortable riffing at a language or scene level than understanding how a plot should be constructed, how tension should be built and resolved. When the right idea comes, flash gives me the opportunity to work in those areas I’m more familiar with. It’s a welcome respite from banging my head against another story’s structure or pacing problem. 

Jireh Deng

Like Chen, poetry is my main form of expression, but that’s why I love the intersection of poetry and flash fiction, because both rely on the efficiency of your words and scarcity of the page. There are a lot of similarities between structured poetry and the constraints of flash fiction; the container for the putty of my words helps me to create a more defined shape. I also appreciate that Chen referenced how poetry doesn’t differentiate between fiction and nonfiction; it reminds me of what my poetry professor, Patty Seyburn says along the lines of “Poetry is more about sincerity, than honesty.”

It’s interesting because I, as a journalist, see that the profession is obsessed with objectivity and accuracy. But as creative writers, we understand that our proximity and distance to the subject we are writing about is a fallacy. “Queeranteen Sermon” has a lot of details from my own life, but it’s also about so much more. 

What literary possibilities do you think the large tent of “Asian American Flash Fiction” or “Asian Diasporic Flash Fiction” allows? Is there anyone in the genre, or a related compressed one (i.e. flash memoir, prose poetry, social media posts, hybrid genres), whose work excites you?

Sadia Quraeshi Shepard

​​As Asian American writers we draw on wildly diverse histories, homelands, and literary traditions, which I find hugely inspiring. In my own writing life, the idea of the fragment and how it might suggest the fractures and dislocations of memories and border-crossings is a recurring fascination. One collection that I return to frequently is Saadat Hassan Manto’s Siyah Hashiye (1948), translated from Urdu into English as Black Margins. The stories are extremely short—some as short as a single line or paragraph. To contemporary readers in the aftermath of the Partition of the Subcontinent, the book’s title would have likely recalled the way that incidents of trauma or violence were reported in local newspapers with a black margin around the text. The narrative voice of Black Margins, which fluctuates between wry humor and at times a kind of affectlessness, reminds me of how the repetitive cycle of bad news can leave an imprint of numbness. 

A recent piece of Asian American flash fiction that I think works with similar ideas and speaks to our current historical moment elegantly and economically is Eugene Lim’s “What We Have Learned, What We Will Forget, What We Will Not Be Able to Forget” published in The New Yorker’s online summer Flash Fiction series. 

I was also excited to see some fantastic Asian American writers featured in the most recent Wigleaf Top 50, curated by series editor Shome Dasgupta and guest selecting editor Molly Gaudry. Two stories that stick with me are “Deal” by K-Ming Chang, and “Lovebird” by Hanahah Zaheer.

Jemimah Wei 

I had that same experience with “Deal.” K-Ming truly is a delight. Her flash and short fictions all over the web are incredible. “Gloria” comes to mind. As does “Radish Head.” And how could I leave out “Ghost Bride,” also part of The Margins’ flash fiction series? Other emerging Asian writers I’m excited about include Vanessa Chan—her flash piece, “The Ugliest Babies in the World,” is an absolute riot, and I can’t even say how incredible it is to see another Southeast Asian writer claiming space. I was also obsessed with Melissa Hung’s “The Aunties at the YMCA”, and when I finished Gina Chung’s “Mantis”, I yelped.

Since you mentioned social media posts—I spend way too much time on Twitter, and have really enjoyed Chen’s project over @olicketysplit, as well as the top-tier shitposting by Tony Tulathimutte (his short stories and novel are also great). 

Chen Chen

Thank you for the shoutout to the lickety~split! Editing that Twitter journal has been such a joy. I also run the online journal Underblong, and issues of that take much longer to assemble, as it’s a highly collaborative process, and we receive a high volume of submissions. I started the lickety~split in part because I wanted to work on a journal more independently (I’m the only editor, plus my “assistant editor,” the lazy egg Gudetama) and I wanted to publish many more poems on a regular basis (which turned out to be every weekday). Of course, given that the lickety~split only publishes poems that can fit in a single tweet, the main reason for creating this journal was to open an affirming, celebratory space (within a social media platform known for literary discourse, good and bad) for very short work, something I’ve always enjoyed reading, though it’s not what I usually write. It’s funny that I’ve published a flash fiction piece now, as I also think of “Summer” as a longer poem. One of the most popular poems I’ve had the honor of publishing on the lickety~split is Steven Duong’s absolutely delightful “Good Dog,” which I can totally see being read as a work of Asian American flash fiction, too. 

Jireh Deng

I’m so glad that Sadia mentioned K-Ming Chang. I’m such a fan of her work and how she compresses language on the page (I think that poets make the best fiction writers, look at Ocean Vuong, but I’m of course biased). As I was reading her most recent book Bestiary, I was so shook, I had to sit with each page for a minute. I may be wrong but the reason why I think that Asian American writers (and writers of color in general) particularly thrive in the blend of genres like flash fiction is because we’re living compressed histories. The ways in which we navigate cultural differences means that we aren’t as timid to commit faux pas in the literary world when we are trying something new and inventive. I’ve been reflecting on the ways in which queer expression and also language barriers have erased the ways we can use words to describe ourselves so we have to be making something new to hold our identities. 

I think of genre bending work in Asian American literature and I’m thinking about Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, a novel written in the form of a screenplay, and interdisciplinary works like Naomi Shihab Nye’s The Tiny Journalist, which uses poetry as a means to record Palestinian histories, loss, land disposession like a journalist preserves events in time. Bending the rules or borrowing another form of writing can open new doorways. I’m always excited when another writer finds a new way to write about [enter something mundane] that gives me an existential crisis about my own work. It means more possibilities and an entirely new frontier of expression we have yet to unlock.

Jefferson Lee

I really like this question! I’m excited to try and work through all of the recommendations here. K-Ming Chang has truly been crushing it—she had a story in McSweeney’s that was a little bit longer I think but still truly wonderful. 

I feel like flash fiction’s advantage is that it’s so flexible. Some of it is very narrative focused, the language largely a vehicle to reveal the story’s structure. Others seem to lack narrative almost entirely, and are constructed on the language level. It’s all fair game, and given how diverse Asian America is as a demographic population, this flexibility might allow us to see a lot of writing we otherwise wouldn’t.

Can you share what inspired your specific piece published as part of The Margins’ flash fiction series? 

Jemimah Wei 

I’m interested in in-betweens—the space between bullied and bully—and I was already doing research into the ways schoolgirl politics has changed in the last decade, especially with the pervasiveness of the internet. When everything went online, this story just bled right out of me. The pandemic has been disgusting, but I wondered how that disgust might be self-directed, especially for those who have the option to look away.

Sadia Quraeshi Shepard

Writing “Monsters” grew slowly out of my experiences in early lockdown, finding myself reluctantly awake at 4 AM, besieged by images and ideas from the news. I began to think a lot about fear and what scares us awake, as well as the mundane household worries that can spiral in times of extreme anxiety. With “Monsters” I wanted to explore the emotional world of a well person who loves someone who is unwell or vulnerable in this precarious time. Several years before COVID-19 I spent a lot of time with my late mother and father in hospitals while they were both sick, and during this period I became acutely aware of what felt like a parallel world of the chronically and terminally ill, a world I was all too eager to leave and yet found myself irrevocably changed by. We all handle fear so differently. How does naming, or making tangible, our fears animate and give strength to one person and torment another? Lastly, I was very interested in writing a story where the characters’ South Asian identities are present and important but not central to the narrative.

Jefferson Lee

Like Sadia, my piece was inspired by events both before and during the pandemic. It’s probably pretty obvious, but I was thinking a lot about the California wildfires, the death of my grandparents, the tendency to trot out the old, tired caricatures of parental sacrifice, and the difficulty of engaging with global phenomena (COVID-19, climate change, immigration) through anything other than a personal lens. 

I was also thinking about how hard we can be on ourselves. It sometimes feels like a personal failing that I haven’t read Grace Paley or Edward Said, or that I don’t get Stokes’ Theorem, or that I couldn’t fix one of the burners on my stove last year when it stopped lighting. I’ve always been especially hard on myself for not speaking Korean, and generally not knowing “enough” about Korean culture—I wanted to explore that more here. 

Chen Chen

As I’ve mentioned, I wrote “Summer” last summer, in the midst of a weird period of stores reopening and experimenting with, I suppose, how to be stores during an ongoing pandemic. As I kept writing, the sales associate Carol became an increasingly important character in the story. I loved working on her sections, which veered into the surreal and somehow also the divine. I also think of this story as a longer poem, a love poem, and I got a big kick out of bringing in people and places, like Carol at Williams Sonoma, that one wouldn’t expect to show up in a love poem. And I was surprised by how the narrator’s mother comes into the story, after a major tonal shift in one section; I hope that’s surprising for readers, as well. I was thinking about precarity, about vulnerability to both serious illness and societal neglect, about such vulnerability being deepened by the pandemic and by failures in leadership. One of the things that’s made me so angry and sad during this time is seeing how inequities in healthcare and education have largely worsened. In writing this story, I struggled with a feeling of helplessness, a feeling that felt bottomless; I tried my best to find ways through, if not out. 

Jireh Deng

“Queeranteen Sermon” really emerged out of the frustrations during the pandemic when I was grappling with the fact that I had come out to my family at the most inopportune time, when I couldn’t just avoid the truth by staying away at school for eight hours of the day. I didn’t particularly like this piece because it felt too long to be a poem and too short to be considered prose. It was only after a writing friend pointed out how it read like a sermon that I found a lot of creative licence to push the piece in new ways that I hadn’t seen before. 

As someone who grew up going to church that was majority first to third generation Chinese American, there’s a very particular style in which I heard messages growing up. In American churches, sermons would follow a kind of three act structure like it was an essay with a topical sentence that would then lead into more specific points. At the Chinese American churches I went to, there was no linear structure to the stories or lessons. We knew there was a central theme to the sermon the speaker was trying to get to, but it was more of a circular maze and we inched closer and closer to the target. “Queeranteen Sermon” tries to follow that in a similar way in which the lineage of trauma coursing through the main character’s body doesn’t follow a neat or defined path. It’s curving around the edges of her ancestor’s stories and the end is more of a beginning revisiting the tenderness and hope that emerges when a child is born.

Keeping in line with the art of compression, please share a flash fiction writing prompt.

Jefferson Lee

There’s a great Lydia Davis essay in which she describes how “Susie Brown Will Be In Town” (later published as “Nancy Brown Will Be In Town”) was inspired by a group email. Building off this: 

1. Keep track of (or go back through) pieces of text that you interact with regularly (patient charts, subway ads, YouTube comments, etc.). Remain open and receptive; when you find something that surprises you, write it down.
2. Read what you wrote. Figure out why it surprised you.
3. Expand and/or cut the text to amplify this surprise.

Jemimah Wei 

That’s amazing—thanks for sharing!! Here’s my contribution. Write a story that uses ______ to solve ______. For both blanks, pick from the below in any order and write towards it:

Duck fat, an ear infection, sleep-talking, wireless charging, overly salted meat dishes, organ donation, plagiarism, a broken AC unit, expired instax film, shared fridge space, obsession over a second degree acquaintance’s Twitter feed, mynah birds, and sexy ghosts. 

Sadia Quraeshi Shepard

Here’s an exercise I do with students which I call “The Walk.” Filmmaker Agnes Varda said: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” 

To use Varda’s idea, what are your landscapes? Make a list of 3-5 places you have unique access to. This might be a neighborhood/city/town where you spent time as a child, a place that your family is from/has a connection to, a place you have worked, etc. Choose one of these places, set a timer for one minute and write down every detail that you can think of. What do you see? Hear? Smell? 

Now that you have this rich list of details, you will invite two characters to walk along a road in this location. One character is someone you know well. This could be you, an alternate version of you, or someone else entirely. The other person should be a new character that is suggested by this location. As you imagine these characters, answer the following questions: What are their names? Where are they going? What do they want? All of this information should be suggested by how they appear. Spend one minute writing down everything you know about character #1. Now take another minute to write down everything you know about character #2. 

Now imagine that these two characters are lost. As they walk, one character should try to convince the other character of something which is unrelated to their current predicament. What does the first person do and how does the second person react? Do their needs and fears match up with how they appear? Or not? 

Jireh Deng

I love the prompts that everyone shared, and here is one that I’ve created for a poetry class that I think can also be expanded into a flash fiction prompt. I’m drawing on my background and appreciation of math to kind of help us grow comfortable with thinking about narrative as not a path but a total sum. 

Read the following:

• “L’Hôpital’s Rule” by Lucy Wainger
• “How to Find the Center of a Circle” by Tiana Clark
• “f=[(root)(future)]” by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Trace your family tree; write out where the lines curve or stop abruptly //or// trace your connection to someone. Where does the thread begin and how do your stories intertwine and then unravel. How do you calculate the distance between two hearts, how do you subtract memories or add love? Write an equation with math symbols (or not) of how you write a story in its fullest sum.

Chen Chen

Ah, these prompts/exercises are great! Here’s one I’ve adapted from a haiku and tanka exercise.

In person or over Zoom, compose out loud a story of only four to six sentences. Each sentence must be 12 syllables max; feel free to use your fingers to count. You should do this with one other person or in a group of up to five people. Lean into the spontaneity and interactive nature of telling a story this way, as you would around a campfire. Let yourself reconnect with the oral tradition! Don’t worry about every sentence being polished; focus instead on making the story surprising and entertaining for the person or people you’re sharing it with. It may be helpful to first practice with a very low stakes version of this exercise, such as recounting something mundane that occurred last week. When you get into constructing your actual story, try telling it twice (and you can revise out loud, too, but I recommend not dwelling on that part too much), and then write it down. From there, you can really revise as you see fit, which may include expanding or—if you want to go super microfiction/haiku-esque with it—condensing it further.

This fall, Mai Der Vang and Sophia Terazawa both released poetry collections that reckon with history and the ways governments cover up and warp that history. In Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press), Vang investigates an episode from the 1970s in Laos that remains contested and often forgotten, in which Hmong people experienced “yellow rain,” a mysterious substance that fell from planes, after the United States abandoned the Hmong at the end of the Secret War. Thousands of Hmong died, while the U.S. government sought to blame the Soviet Union–backed Laotian government and later discredit and deny Hmong testimony. Playing with collage, media reports, scholarly works, declassified documents and cables from the U.S. government, and Hmong testimony about yellow rain, Vang rebuts the versions of events provided by the U.S. state and media, and centers the Hmong experience. In Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum), which takes the form of an abecedarian, Terazawa addresses the legacy of the Resistance War Against America in Vietnam, but also shows the speaker, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, seeking to stop cycles of violence and generational silence. Like Vang, Terazawa draws on other texts—in her case, testimonies given by U.S. military personnel during war crime tribunals in the 60s and 70s—to conjure a polyvocal, formally inventive collection that unearths the crimes of an empire.

While both Yellow Rain and Winter Phoenix deal with painful and violent histories, both collections are, as Terazawa says, not really about war or trauma. “It’s about what it means to resurrect out of that,” she says. Vang says, “We tap into something that is trying to create a space to be heard again whether it’s our ancestors or some energy that demands justice for what’s happened. Those are the shadows that stay with us until…we go and cut off the head of the thing and purge it of all that it is.”

The poets each contributed an audio recording of a poem, and in late September, talked with one another over Zoom about their work.

Mai Der Vang’s “Blood Cooperation”

Sophia Terazawa’s “Cross-Examination (K.2)”

Sophia Terazawa

Both your books, Afterland and Yellow Rain, deal with a kind of history that has been made dormant by both the state but also by collective memory. It’s something I think about in my craft as well: When do we wake up history? And how do we wake up history?

Mai Der Vang

I love this question because that’s what I was trying to do with this second book: reopen that history, resurrect that history, re-reckon with that history. I came to a point where I was like, “I’m ready to write this book.” This book has been a long time coming. 

I grew up in a Hmong family. As refugees from Laos, my parents resettled here in the early 80s. Growing up as a kid in a refugee family, we didn’t have access to literature in the ways that we have now. So I wasn’t in a position where I was ready to reckon with any of this. Only now have decades passed and the children have grown up. And in that passage of time, I’ve been able to experience and internalize the impact of that history—that is still happening—and that trauma on my parents, the elders, and ancestors, to now be ready to try and write about it. It’s taken this long for us to grow up, and maybe that’s why we’re now seeing this huge, tremendous, inspiring wave of literature coming out from children of refugees. 

That I think speaks in some ways to your work. Which I want to turn to now, because I’m so happy to have a copy. [Holds up Winter Phoenix.] It’s a gift to behold this book in my hands. 

Tell me about your experience. I’m particularly interested in the way you used the work, the testimonies, the documentation to serve as something that might be a restorative or healing component of the poetry.

ST

I think about the word you used previously: resurrection. I think there’s a lot of synergy between your work and my work. You also began your book with a statement on being the daughter of refugees, and in my book I also mention that this book is not really about war. It’s not really about trauma—it’s about what it means to resurrect out of that. 

And for me, the seed for this book was honestly heartbreak. I had my heart broken pretty badly in 2017 and was very lost, and [searching for] a language to look at that heartbreak and where it came from. I keep going back to a statement James Baldwin once made in an interview, saying that you can always think your heartbreak is the worst in the world but then you just read a novel and you realize that it’s not—it’s the heartbreak of humanity. 

Once I started to think about my own heartbreak as part of a larger state of humanity, I realized that the way I feel and operate in this world is out of what I’ve inherited from my mom. Like my mom being heartbroken by her country. Or being heartbroken by her family or her people. Essentially that’s what a refugee is—it’s the ultimate form of rejection, right? You’re rejected by the land that you’re from; you’re rejected by your own history. So I was able to enter the book in that way.

I want to pivot to a conversation about channeling and shamanism, because that’s what helped me stay sane writing this book. Because we’re playing with forces that should—at least to a lot of people—stay in the ground, should stay dead. You mentioned in your book that a lot of times the government documents basically imply these bodies should stay quiet, should stay hidden. What we’re doing is resurrecting these moments. Thankfully I had a really great cohort at my MFA, a really great mentoring system, and some really great people around me who loved and cared for me and allowed me to have that space to resurrect. 

Was that a similar experience for you? Did it feel like you were entering a territory that you might have felt a little bit small in, but that you felt had something you needed in terms of magic or channeling? Did you feel like you were strong enough to channel that history?

MDV

Sometimes as a poet I don’t know that I’m ever strong enough. And if I feel not strong enough to confront or come up against the thing I’m writing about, then I know it’s what I should be writing about. If I come to something and I’m able to get at it without much effort, then perhaps I’m not pushing far enough just yet. Perhaps there’s another level in my thinking, or another branch in the conversation, that I’ve yet to breach.

I felt exactly like you’re saying—small against the work, uncertain about where it’s taking me, terrified by the ghost of the speakers in the poems—a lot with this collection. I felt it with my first collection, too, in writing poems I never thought I would write. I didn’t know that I wanted to enter those spaces. And when I accepted it and said, “This is where I’m going,” I allowed myself to inherit a new form of agency where I could confront the shadows of the work.

Beyond the labor of the page, there’s the labor of confronting the shadows. Sometimes I have to remind myself to care for myself. I have to step away sometimes. I have to come out of the work for a moment so I can ground myself back in my reality, in my present moment. The work humbles me all the time. There’s still so much I don’t know about what I’m doing in this work and that’s okay. I don’t have to have all the answers. There isn’t one right way to do this work. If I have any feelings of uncertainty at all, then I’m on the right path. 

But thank you so much for asking that. I love that question. What about you? 

ST

In writing Winter Phoenix, I wanted to lead with justice. I wanted to lead with not just history but restorative history. And I just wasn’t sure if the method I was pursuing—using the form of testimonies—was the best form. But it served as the most tangible form that I could work with. I was thinking about the modes of justice that had been pursued after the U.S. War in Vietnam. And really all I could find were these testimonies from the Winter Soldier Investigation, from the Russell Tribunal Investigations. I wanted to use that template as a vessel to fill in the language. But the book just started overflowing. It makes me think of the movie Princess Mononoke. Have you seen the movie?

MDV

I have not, no.

ST

It’s one of the best movies ever, you should definitely see it! There’s this spirit/god of the forest who gets its head cut off at one point, and in search of its head, the spirit starts to overflow and take over the land and destroy all the beings in its path. That’s how it kind of feels—like I’ve cut off the head of something and suddenly it’s overflowing.

So the biggest challenge for me in writing this book was knowing how to stop. I’m glad that writing poetry forced me to pick and choose which words do come out. For me it was a lot of channeling. It was like I was asking these spirits or this history to talk to me, but I was getting five thousand voices at once and trying to figure out which voice to put on the page, which one to respectfully push away, which one to delete.

MDV

I love this. Sophia, this is amazing. 

I wholeheartedly agree—anyone who writes channels something or someone or some aspect outside of who they are. Sometimes that’s when you look at a poem and you’re like, “I don’t know who wrote this. This is not what I would normally do.” I was raised in a family that practiced and continues to practice shamanism where much of that healing comes from being able to step outside of yourself and connect with something beyond you. I feel we do that as poets. We tap into something that is trying to create a space to be heard again whether it’s our ancestors or some energy that demands justice for what’s happened. Those are the shadows that stay with us until, like you said, we go and cut off the head of the thing and purge it of all that it is. Before it finally can be put to rest. 

Could you talk about crafting the language for Winter Phoenix? Thinking about the construction of the language around these testimonies and the poems and even the exhibits and affirmations—I’m curious what kind of channeling was happening for you.

ST

I’m not very methodical when it comes to the way the words take shape on my page. I guess it’s a kind of lyric. I’m very sensitive to sound and rhythm, so it is an internal lyric that I’m carrying with me—I don’t know if it’s ancestral or just my inner voice that comes out. 

In terms of how it gets shaped into the exhibits and into the form itself—there wasn’t really any method to it. I don’t know how to explain it. I knew these words were coming out really quickly, so I was like a bouncer to the words. I was like, “You’ve got to stand in line, you guys.” I remember saying, “All the A’s come to the front.” And so we did the A’s. I remember just channeling anything that was related to the sound “ah,” and that’s where the abecedarian form came out. And then the Bs’ came. And in terms of breaking that up into exhibits—it was simply that I would have a testimony and I would still feel things coming, and then I would feel, “Well, there needs to be an image. Or there needs to be proof.” So in my mind I thought, “Oh well, an exhibit.” So I would have the overflow, so to speak, come in and fill that out. And then later on, I started adding visual diagrams. I wanted to incorporate things I was seeing come in. Ultimately, in the closing statement—that was the last poem I wrote for this book, this entire book was pretty much written in chronological order—I was like, “Ok, now everybody come on in.” I wanted to synthesize everything all at once in that final long poem. 

I remember in writing that last poem, I had an image of bees. Bees weren’t in my book until the very end, but I just remembered I wrote down a quote from your book, “I break the pages and let the bees fly out.” Was that your method around this book as well? Did you have to break the page and all these bees just came swarming out?

MDV

The idea of cutting the head of something and things just splurging out is equivalent to the bees for me. Allowing the bees to go free. 

I love your closing piece because of the way you’re describing it, but also because of your astute and diligent consideration for syntax. And the construction of the clauses. It’s even more profound to hear you talk about how you channeled much of that language. 

There is that one phrase that repeats throughout the entire collection and feels very incantatory and leaves a haunting quality throughout the pages, the phrase: “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that if you’re feeling up to it. To talk about your thinking on the power of that repetition.

ST

Thank you so much for asking that question. I appreciate that we are entering this conversation with so much care. I will say that it is directly addressed to my biological mother. At the core of this book, there is also a trauma I’ve been working on in my own history of sexual assault and sexual violence. And the biggest trauma around that has been watching my mom react to that trauma in me and then realizing to some extent that—and this is not a conversation that we’ve really addressed as mother and daughter—this is possibly a kind of lineage I am reliving. So we were basically retraumatizing each other through this history. 

“Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” is a phrase I’ve carried with me since I was little. I don’t think it was necessarily directed toward my mother, but it was a voice I could hear my mother saying to her mother, and possibly her mother saying to her mother. So it’s like this cycle of us looking at our caretaker and saying, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” But the sad irony is that we’ve had to ask that of somebody else before us. I don’t know if it’s resurrecting anything, but in terms of how it might heal us—by me asking that statement, I want it to stop with me. And whoever comes after me, whether it’s biological or not, I don’t want them to ever ask that question. Or ever need to ask that question. The act of uttering it over and over again kind of allows it to take a physical shape so that it doesn’t get passed down psychically.

MDV

That makes complete sense. The act of being able to utter it again and again is the speaker saying, “This is the last time you’re going to have to show your face.” Or, “This is it. No more after this.” I felt there was a kind of assertion coming through from the speaker in the willingness to say that again and again, and I just want to applaud you for the courage, the literary courage, of doing that in this work.

ST

That’s so kind of you—thank you. 

With my work, I look at documents from the 60s or the 70s, whereas your work overlaps generationally a bit more closely to your own. For you, a lot of the people who wrote those documents or who are complicit or who were directly affected by yellow rain are still around and alive. How do you feel about uttering words spoken by people who are still with us? Is there something different there for you? 

MDV

Confronting that question is still a block in the larger historical understanding of what’s happened. There are some people who are no longer around as far as the political figureheads go. To my knowledge, yellow rain is not really discussed within the Hmong community. When we think of Hmong, we think a lot about the Secret War, but we don’t think enough about the erasure and dismissal of the yellow rain allegations, and perhaps we should. It’s a history shrouded in mystery and a huge lack of remembrance towards and potential understanding about. There are Hmong Americans in the generation after me who have never even heard of yellow rain, that don’t even know this is part of what has happened to the elders, this is a fallout of the war. 

It feels like I’m constantly clawing at something to try and get it out, but forces are continuing to put dirt on top of it. I’ve learned that I have to be relentless in this work. Like when you were saying that your book kept getting bigger and bigger, and you kept writing and writing but more just kept coming and coming. I felt the same with Yellow Rain; there were so many moving parts to what happened. Even for me, I was learning about it, trying to wrap my head around the whole fiasco of it, the political implications of who was taking what side and what angles and agendas were being applied over the whole story of yellow rain. And how within the middle of that political fiasco, the Hmong were the collateral fallout of this larger discourse happening between these two sides of the government. That’s the feeling that stays with me—that as a writer of color, as a daughter of refugees, as a Hmong person, I’m constantly having to shovel my way through this work again and again. And for my own community, there are still so many people who have yet to learn what’s happened. 

There was actually more to this collection, but it was getting too massive. I had to stop.

ST

You had overflow as well?

MDV

I did. I had to cut out a lot of stuff and probably for the better. As a poet, I try to be diligent about space in some way, shape, or form. For me it was: How much am I going to tell? What needs to be told? What aspects of that thing need to come out? Sometimes, the heartbreaking reality is that we won’t be able to tell everything. There’s always something that will get left out of that larger narrative. 

ST

I saw several different images while you were speaking. First I had an image of you at a table shuffling papers around, all these documents, especially governmental documents, which I know you put in your book especially toward the end. It also made me think of papier-mâché—it’s like you’re glueing these documents on top of each other, and of course some negate others, but ultimately it creates this hardened shell. And it comes back in my mind to the beehive, because that’s how beehives form—little shells put on top of each other until it becomes this hard mass. And I think about that too with your book.

I think what’s really exciting in your book was that it felt like the kind of book where if poems were taken out in one way, they could be put in another part of the book and it would completely shift the book in a really powerful way. How do you imagine an audience receiving this book in possibly alternative ways? I’m imagining on a larger political scale—I do think about other groups of people who have been disenfranchised, or have experienced traumas by the state in various ways. Do you imagine them being able to see this book and how it channels into their own histories and stories?

MDV

I hope that any person of any community who has experienced displacement, genocide, war, disenfranchisement—crimes of empire—will find a thread or bridge of solidarity in this work. And to have moments where we see that whether the crimes that have been committed against us are the same or different, there is that shared hope toward liberation of each other, of ourselves. 

It’s interesting, the question you’re asking also has a lot to do with the way the poems are structured and ordered. The original question you asked: If they moved around, what new narratives would come out of them? You had that image of me shuffling papers—yes, that happened. I had to have a lot of tablespace to work with all the declassified documents. I ended up printing out a lot of things because I wanted to experience the documents in their most crude form, as a piece of paper that was passed around. It was a challenge to decide how to broach the ordering because I’m aware that not a lot of people know about yellow rain. So there was the burden of having to tell that in a particular way so my reader could engage with the history. And if I told it in a different way, it made me wonder if my reader was going to be able to understand—how do I construct this complex narrative in a way that allows my reader to walk alongside with me? To understand what’s at stake. 

What was at stake, at least for me, was the erasure of the trauma and how to depict that. I did play around with moving things in and out; there was still so much that I didn’t get in there. But I think what’s there now offers to the best of my ability a counternarrative on yellow rain, along with a chance for readers to make their own discoveries as to other histories that might have been buried by the state, by the government, by empires, to then be able to do their work of unburying alongside me. And I hope that anyone who can relate to that, any community who has experienced that kind of grief, can share in that solidarity with me.

The work that we’re doing is work—we’re not only laboring with language and the page, but we’re laboring with the shadows that look over this work, the shadows of the histories that have happened and are continuing to happen. So what do you do for self-care, to be able to come back to this work?

ST

I was in a very dissociated state when I worked on this book. I remember having days at a time where I would just pour into this work. And then I’d step away from it. It only took maybe a year and a half to write all this book, and the editing was very minimal. I don’t really edit my work too much except maybe for when I’m transferring from paper to computer; I might change some spacing or a word here or there. It kind of feels—not sacred, but it feels like I can’t touch the work after it’s out. It’s been given to me and my job is simply to be the messenger and make sure that it’s given its proper shape legibly. I haven’t really allowed myself to come back to this work; it strictly feels like a document at this point. It’s in the archive now. It’s part of my past, and it’s like a sibling and it’s like I’m letting them do their thing. And so that does help in terms of self-care. In terms of whether or not I will return to this voice or return to this mode of being—I don’t know if I’m open to it just yet. Mentally, once I finished the book’s closing statement I’d closed that door. It was like done and I locked it. Maybe that’s part of my self-care process.

MDV

Absolutely, for sure. We definitely need to let the work live on its own, right? Because once it’s a book like this, it’s its own thing. It’s its own being, it’s an entity of itself. That’s the part of writing that can be so transformative. The book has been born.

ST

And ironically, I’m not attached to it much. How do you feel at the end of writing your book? Do you feel like you’re able to let it go, or is there any kind of attachment, good or bad?

MDV

I have moments where I come back to poems like, “Ah, I should have done this differently, or I could have done that differently.” But at some point, you just gotta stop. You gotta let it go, and let it be its thing. I’m not eager to come back and spend more time on these poems. I invested many years in Yellow Rain, and now it’s time for the thing to be its own thing. As much as it is still a part of who I am, it now has its own agency, it has a cover, it has a binding, it has pages, it has a body. That’s the least I can do for it—give it that body.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Editor’s Note: As the Asian American Writers’ Workshop celebrates its 30th anniversary, we invited current and former editors, writers, community members, and workers to make new meaning from the Workshop’s archive. Together, they have awakened AAWW’s print anthologies and journals, returned to the physical spaces of the Workshop starting from our basement location on St. Mark’s, and given shape to the stories from within AAWW that circulate like rumors, drawing writers back again and again. In revisiting the Workshop’s history, we hope for insight into the ever-changing landscape of Asian diasporic literature and politics and inspiration to guide us forward in our next 30 years. Read more in our AAWW at 30 notebook here.

Among her many contributions to AAWW, the writer Eileen Tabios edited one of the organization’s first print books, Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress. Published in 1998, the book is a unique record of Asian American poetics and craft. Each chapter of Black Lightning features a different poet and the drafts of one of their poems, accompanied by an essay by Tabios in which she analyzes the poem’s drafts and includes commentary from the writer. The collection opens a window to the process and thinking of fifteen artists with vastly different styles and concerns: Meena Alexander, Indran Amirthanayagam, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Luis Cabalquinto, Marilyn Chin, Sesshu Foster, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, Tan Lin, Timothy Liu, David Mura, Arthur Sze, and John Yau. Black Lightning also shows Tabios, an emerging poet at the time, encountering the possibilities of poetry and thinking through the impact of artistic choices both small and large within a poem. As she wrote in the book’s afterword, “Black Lightning is many things: a miracle, an exercise in trust, a conversation, an experiment, a matter of idealism, and, ultimately, a love affair.” 

More than twenty years later, Tabios—who has since become an accomplished poet and published many collections—revisited Black Lightning and put together a new installment with Arthur Sze. Sze was an integral part of Black Lightning: he is the first featured poet, penned the poem from which the book takes its name, and wrote the collection’s intro. “By illuminating the creative process of [fifteen] poets, Black Lightning widens and deepens our understanding of what it means to be an Asian American writer today,” he wrote in the introduction. “At the same time, Black Lightning makes an important contribution to contemporary American poetry and poetics.” 

This new installment of Black Lightning deepens that contribution and shows how Tabios’s close engagement with the drafts of a poem remains a unique path into the mind and craft of a poet. The pair look at Sze’s poem “The White Orchard,” which was first published in the Kenyon Review in 2018 and later appeared in The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Sze’s follow-up to his National Book Award–winning Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Their conversation reveals how Sze came to invent the form of the poem, which he calls a “Cascade,” and how he embraces uncertainty. As Sze says, “Language can be a thicket and brambles, and I usually have to lose my way in order to find it.” Tabios and Sze retrace that path together and show how a piece can emerge from a “field of energy” and become a spontaneous, sonically elegant, and luminous poem.  

Eileen Tabios

Arthur, it’s a delight to celebrate AAWW’s 30th anniversary with you by conducting a new poetry-in-progress conversation as we did for the Asian Pacific American Journal in 1996—an article so momentous it seeded an entire book, Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress. It seems apt to note the tenure of this historic organization with a still not replicated project like Black Lightning. For me, the book was special for capturing a moment in time when I was so new to poetry that my questions resulted from an unmediated engagement with your poem we discussed back then, “Archipelago.” I’d only paid attention to poetry perhaps a year before we had our first interview. So I recall that as I was questioning you about “Archipelago,” I was privately also asking questions about this in-the-wild creature—and blessing—called Poetry. In a way, it was “Archipelago” that persuaded me that Poetry was/is a worthwhile companion, then Life, to experience. 

I stress the “unmediated”-ness of my experience with “Archipelago” because I came to it without any preconceptions about poetry or the poem. I read it simply based on what the poem presented on the page, not on anything about you and poetry in general. In fact, I stumbled across your poem as the title poem for a manuscript sent by your publisher, Copper Canyon Press, to AAWW; the manuscript was a print-out, not yet in book form. And from that “slush pile,” Archipelago caught my eye. On its own, Archipelago was a powerful collection so that even the younger, untutored me was moved to engage with it. I don’t know that I can ask such “pure” questions today because I’ve since spent two decades with poetry and undoubtedly have formed opinions and hold biases. But I do wish to try again with your newer poem “The White Orchard.” Thank you for giving me and AAWW the chance to repeat the Black Lightning experience.

Arthur Sze

Thank you, Eileen. It is a great pleasure to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop with an in-progress discussion of my recent poem “The White Orchard.” As I look back, your book Black Lightning was a seminal collection, because it featured the diversity and vitality of Asian American poetry through a personal and wide-open lens.

ET

Before we continue, I’d like to thank the other poets whose generous participation helped bring Black Lightning to fruition: Meena Alexander, Indran Amirthanayagam, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Luis Cabalquinto, Marilyn Chin, Sesshu Foster, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, Timothy Liu, David Mura, John Yau, and (through John’s article) Tan Lin. 

Let’s discuss your poem “The White Orchard.”

ET

I appreciated “The White Orchard” when I read it in your book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). It’s notable that “The White Orchard,” the title poem for the section of new poems, was included in the 2020 Pushcart Prize anthology and also The Best American Poetry 2019. But I appreciate “The White Orchard” even more after seeing just about half of the drafts you wrote. The first logical question would be about the poem’s impetus and/or inspiration. How did you begin?

AS

I began this poem by listening, looking, and playing with language. I didn’t have a particular theme or direction in mind. Instead, I was trying to discover where an image, a musical phrase, a fragment of memory might take me. As I worked through drafts and let phrases emerge out of my consciousness, I started to play with patterns of repetition and created a new form with its own strictures. In this way, the poem that emerged can be seen as an experiment in repetition, musicality, rhythm, and keen attention to silences. If I had to give this invented form a name, I would call it a “Cascade.” 

I want to point out how the “Cascade” formally works. Instead of each line starting with the same word, as in anaphora, I decided to see what would happen if each line, including the title as a line, picked up a word or words from the previous line. So line 1 picks up “orchard” from the title. Line 2 picks up “into” from line 1. Line 3 picks up “into” from line 2. Line 4 picks up “on” inside the word “once” in line 3, etc. Sometimes the single word “a” or “the” is picked up. Sometimes “the” is picked up from inside the word “then.” The last line picks up “branches” from the previous line. The title picks up “white” from the last line. The main points of this singular structure are (1) to experiment with varying repetition and deepening musicality; (2) to employ a structure that embodies line and circle: each line picks up an element from the previous line and moves it forward in a particular direction, but it all circles back to the beginning, so thematically there’s the issue of progression and return; and (3) to experiment with whether this formal stricture creates some rigor and reveals some underlying necessity to how the language moves, since the poem is not bound by linear narrative.

ET

I’m delighted we can share the news of your poetic invention! And I feel you’ve named the form quite aptly, given how a reader’s response to a single poem also can be a cascade of a variety of feelings. Now, you shared about 41 of the original 88 drafts before the final or published version of “The White Orchard.” It’s amazing—and wonderful!—to compare Draft 1 with the final version as it shows how “far” your writing process ranged to get to the final draft.

DRAFT 1

While each of Drafts 1 through 17 without doubt can be a stand-alone poem, the drafts also reveal a sense of a gathering of lines with the understanding that they will be subject to future choices as regards inclusion. Is this what was happening with this poem, and perhaps is a general approach given your use of the “list poem” form? I ask in part because these drafts imply an openness to what you may not yet know will unfold, and a welcoming indeed of that uncertainty at the beginning of creating the poem.

AS

Drafts 1 through 17 can be seen as a “gathering of lines,” but I would prefer to see them as phrases that rise out of the emptiness of the blank page, as an “emergence” into language. I don’t consider “The White Orchard” to be a list poem, even though it’s true each monostich has its own integrity and can be viewed as an individual poem. I certainly want to resist knowing too soon where a poem might go or what it will be, and the “openness” you mention is indeed a welcoming of the uncertainty at the beginning of creating the poem. 

ET

As I read through your drafts, I came across Draft 7. Here, I sensed that the poem suddenly matured with the second line of the third couplet, “the light-gathering power of your eyes.” Do you have some insight/background/opinion to my reaction?

DRAFT 7

AS

I agree there’s a sudden lift or maturation to the gathering momentum of the poem with “the light-gathering power of your eyes.” Although that phrase isn’t in the final poem, it’s almost an admonition to myself to trust what comes into view. And, in hindsight, it’s interesting that line 3, “the branches of apple trees under a supermoon,” is, in rough form, beginning to take shape as what will eventually become the opening line.

ET

I felt another maturation of the poem with Draft 12. Here, I felt that “connecting of dots” effect with the first and last lines. I felt the poem beginning to reveal muscle for its (completed) self. And the muscle here is epistemological? Any thoughts on my obviously subjective response?

DRAFT 12

AS

That’s such an interesting response. In this draft, I feel the connecting of dots between lines 1 and 2: the opening phrase of the poem emerges here, though I can’t recognize it yet. Yet the rest of this draft moves in a direction that will not ultimately earn a place in the poem. Lines 3 to 9 move into a specific memory of “a friend” who “has disappeared.” The lines here are about Dennis Tedlock, a friend and renowned translator of Mayan texts, including the Popul Vuh. Dennis was trained in Mayan divination (line 4), and conversations with him led me to discover the famous image of Lady Xoc, who pulls a barbed cord through her tongue as part of a Mayan bloodletting ceremony. Although none of these lines make it into the final poem, I believe a thematic tension between absence and presence starts to come forward. With one-line stanzas, this draft asserts the rhythm of language and silence, language and silence. In that way, the poem is “beginning to reveal muscle for its (completed) self.” The muscle is in part epistemological: What is it we know? How do we know it? But there is also a keen recognition of transience (“vanishing point”) that is the emotional force under and behind the language.

ET

The last line of Draft 13 reminds me that I’ve long thought that luminosity is one of your poetic strengths. But it’s not an easy achievement. When it works, the result offers an ease to its surfacing. I feel it as the darkness of text against the page becoming pure light—pure feeling so that the reader no longer grasps a white page with the dark marks of letters but pure light. I felt this effect with Draft 13:

DRAFT 13

AS

Thanks. I believe luminosity has to be earned. If a reader has the sensation of words coming from great depth up into the surface and into light, the poem becomes powerful in this experience. And it’s not an easy task to accomplish. At this stage, I’m surprised to see that the ending of the poem is already emerging. I can feel the upward pull into pure feeling and light, but I also want to say that this is only draft 13 out of 88. It is too simplistic to think that the process of writing is simply pulling apples out of the orchard of a blank page. Language can be a thicket and brambles, and I usually have to lose my way in order to find it. Although the poem at the end may appear spontaneous and polished, I have to earn that language through a path that is often thorny, convoluted, and difficult. Here, in nascent form, is that urge toward luminosity and pure feeling, but the poem has a long ways to go.

ET

I love how you describe how language “can be a thicket and brambles” and that you “usually have to lose [your] way in order to find it”! With Draft 18, you introduce the concept of “mono no aware.” Was this some turning point in the drafting of the poem? Like some way to unify the variety of your monostichs? Relatedly, was “mono no aware” placed as a first line in the draft as a first thought on what might become the poem’s title, and thus inevitably some sense of what the poem will be “about” (notwithstanding the difficulty of the term “about” in poetry)?

DRAFT 18

AS

“Mono no aware” is an important phrase in Japanese aesthetics. I don’t know Japanese, so I can’t literally translate it, but I associate the phrase with “the poignancy of things,” that there’s a keen attention to things as they are with the simultaneous recognition that they are transient. I put the phrase in brackets at the top of Draft 18 because I was starting to search for the “one” inside the “many.” I was starting to ask myself how do these single lines connect: What is the animating force behind the language? What is the underlying emotion? Where is the rigor? In this draft, you can see many phrases that will earn their place in the final poem, and you can also see lines that will be stripped out. In using brackets, I was clearly thinking that the poem would never have this title but that this aesthetic principle might be a singular thread that could help me distinguish which lines were essential and how to start to connect the one-liners.

ET

This is a classic Black Lightning question—why did you move the line “a raccoon walks in moonlight along the top of an adobe wall—” from the third line in Draft 18 to the ending line in Draft 21? And how is the switch an example of your thought process on how to rearrange the lines?

DRAFT 21

AS

In Draft 18, the first two lines are reminders to myself, and with the third line, “a raccoon walks …”, I am experimenting with opening the poem with that image. In Draft 21, I am experimenting with ending the poem with that same image. At this stage, I am searching for beginnings and endings and am inside a field of energy. In terms of my decisions as to how to arrange or rearrange the lines of the poem, all I can say is that it is intuitive. I will eventually recognize that the image of the raccoon is important to be in the poem, but I will also decide it doesn’t have the imaginative or emotional power to be located at either the beginning or the end.

ET

Why did you delete reference to “mono no aware” with Draft 24? And this deletion also reminds me that you seem to trust the reader a lot. This thought pops up because citing “mono no aware” as a line would be a more didactic line relative to some others. Are you trusting more in resonance and/or the suggestion versus the statement? My rambling question here reminds me that I ask questions that reference narrative content and yet the matter for you as the poet-author may be more of a poetic strategy/technique/form rather than narrative…? 

AS

With Draft 24, I deleted “mono no aware” because I no longer needed that kind of reminder to go by. The phrase was helpful up to a point, but now the poem was not bound by that kind of aesthetic vision. There’s a full and rich articulation to the phrases now surfacing onto the page, so “mono no aware” was no longer helpful. At this stage, I’m not following a narrative or linear sequence. Instead, I’m pursuing charged fragments and exploring how to mine them and align them.

ET

Draft 25 reveals itself as seven couplets. The obvious question then is what you considered as you switched from couplets to a “list” form or single-line stanzas. I do notice you switch back to the latter as of Draft 29.

DRAFT 25

AS

In writing a series of monostichs, I don’t consider the lines as a kind of list because each line is free-floating and has its own autonomy. Each line is a microcosm that I trust will eventually connect to a macrocosm that I can’t yet see or understand. In Draft 25, I was exploring whether the lines would have more impact as couplets rather than as monostichs. I was trying to discover if there were connections and urgencies that would be revealed if the poem moved rhythmically in couplet form. By Draft 29, I am feeling that the independence of each line is important, so I shift back to monostichs.

ET

With Draft 29, I see your first use of the em dash; you apply it at the end of each line. So what’s the significance of the em dash? Relatedly, when I compare Draft 29 with the final/published version, you add the em dash even to the last line of the poem. What were you thinking about with that choice? What were you thinking about specifically the use of the em dash at the end of the last line? (It reminds me of when I write prose poems and I delete the period at the end of the last sentence as a visual metaphor for the poem’s ongoing-ness.)

DRAFT 29

AS

With Draft 29, I am envisioning the independence of each line, and the use of the em dash at the end of each line affirms the independence and open-ended quality of that line. With that independence, I am also starting to explore the cadence, rhythm, and syntax of each line. And, yes, the last line of the poem also ends in an em dash because the poem does not have any closure.

ET

Draft 30 raises an indented first line “gazing into the orchard.” Is this the first or second mention of a title? The final title is “The White Orchard.” Please discuss the title’s evolution.

DRAFT 30

AS

Yes, with Draft 30, I am trying out, for the first time, “gazing into the orchard” as a working title. Notice that it embodies the admonition to myself to “trust the light-gathering power of your eyes.” At this stage, I’ve tossed “mono no aware” and am searching for a working title that can help direct the focus and energy of the poem-in-progress.

ET

Elsewhere in Draft 30, we see lines that will end up being deleted, like:

“landscape is autobiography”

and:

“a shrinking cabinet of curiosities whose key is invisible—

It is a singularity unpacked by the human gaze and voice—”

These, to me, are lovely lines; the first can be used easily by others as an epigraph quoted from you. Yet you deleted them, and at this point when I am reading your drafts (since my questions are created from reading the drafts chronologically), I sense a logic to their deletion. That they’re more didactic and weigh heavier than other lines. Your thoughts? 

AS

Yes, although the lines are interesting in themselves, they are more didactic. I didn’t feel the last two lines were helpful, in that the “cabinet of curiosities” leads to the whole genre of collecting and assembling visual works of art, and the “singularity” leads into an astrophysics of time and space. In a way these issues are implicitly touched on in the poem, but a direct articulation would be heavy-handed. And the first phrase is, as you point out, more potent as an epigraph or as subtext rather than as an overt assertion. Nevertheless, these are phrases worth keeping and might become seeds to another poem. That is one reason why keeping drafts is important: phrases that don’t find their way into one poem can be the genesis of another.

ET

I am struck by how you keep drafts. I certainly would keep deleted lines because the lines themselves are lovely. But I’m now thinking that it’s this process that might help create a “voice” associated with Arthur Sze’s voice which I, as a reader, happen to find recognizable. I also suspect that if this effect as regards “voice” exists, it may not have been something that was of (conscious) concern but something that surfaced after years of your poetic practice. What do you think?

I also belatedly realize that perhaps another reason your poems are so effective is precisely because you consider each line not to be (just) a poetic line but a monostich. As a single-line poem, or poem itself, this facilitates the clearing away of less-than-effective words or phrases within the monostich because the form is so compressed. After years of reading your poems, I’m almost embarrassed not to understand the monostich’s significance. Any thoughts on this?

AS

Rather than set aside deleted lines, I like to keep drafts because I don’t always know right away which ones might become seeds to new poems. Also, when I go back, if I have the context of a draft, I can catch, as you suggest, a glimmer of voice that helps me recall the emotional nuance of what’s at stake. The key phrase or line might be like the tip of an iceberg, and the draft helps me understand the subtext.

In terms of monostichs, I like the compression and intensity that the one-liners afford, and there are different effects that their usage can enact. Sometimes a series of monostichs in a sequence can suspend linear narration and raise issues of simultaneity and synchronicity (acausal meaningful connection); sometimes the monostichs increase the duration of silences and therefore have an essential rhythmic role to play; and sometimes the monostichs, as poems inside of poems, create miniature resonances that aggregrate and intensify as the poem unfolds. 

ET

With “Drafts 65-87,” you’ve compiled your edits from those 23 drafts on one page. It’s the only draft presenting your handwritten marks against typescript. I believe many readers will enjoy seeing the poet’s marks:

DRAFTS 65-87:

ET

Before reading your drafts and our conversation, I read the final version of the poem. So my last questions are based on reading this final version first, and before knowing of your poetic invention of the Cascade.

(1) The transition between the first line—“you gaze into the orchard—” is followed by a visually impactful line with the repeated shapes of circles: moon, the “o” of orchard, “blower.” Were you thinking of visuality? Because the line is so visual it picks up on the letter “o”s in a number of words and yet you might have been more concerned with sound?

(2) I adore the line “clang: a deer leaps over the gate—” because of how it introduces sound, and specifically, a type of sound that wakes up the listener. By inserting “clang” and not just having the line be “a deer leaps over the gate—” I feel you lift the reader (or this reader) off of the page and away from mere memory; here, utilizing the sense of hearing introduces a physicality to experiencing the line that’s fresh enough to enhance the physicality of the leaping deer by widening the reader’s eyes. Can you discuss the significance of using words like “clang” (and perhaps similar such words) as a poetic strategy?

(3) The line “though skunks once ravaged corn, our bright moments cannot be ravaged—” ends with “our bright moments cannot be ravaged.” The thought made me pause. Do you believe that—or how do you believe that—“bright moments cannot be ravaged”?

(4) I find the combination of these two lines in succession

opening the door, we find red and yellow rose petals scattered on our bed—

then light years—

to be wondrously romantic, for implications as to how the “we” makes time stand still to the sexiness of prolonged fidelity. I wonder what your thoughts were for this particular combination of lines.

(5) Lastly, I think the ending line is brilliant. “Killer line,” as they say. It induces a reflective meta… but really I shouldn’t be putting words in your authorial mouth. (I’m just so enthusiastic!) Please share what you wish about your thoughts as regards (re)turning the poem from worldly experiences to reading.

AS

These are all wonderful observations, and I say “Yes” to all of them. In the first and second lines, I am aware of the visual use of “o”s running through those lines, and I am also using the vowel sound of those “o”s to anchor or initiate the opening pulse of the poem. With line 7, I very consciously worked with “clang” to disrupt the flow, awaken, and lift the reader off of the page. And, yes, to the assertion that “bright moments cannot be ravaged.” Of course what happens in life can tarnish and ravage us, but the speaker is asserting what Gerard Manley Hopkins asserted, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” I’m glad the line gave you pause, because it’s an important moment to consider. And, yes, to the “roses” and “light years.” I worked over many drafts to find that very short line ”then light years” that affirms the “sexiness of prolonged fidelity.” And, finally, you can see how in Draft 13, the nascent “snowfall of this white page” becomes more physical and also how it opens up the meta dimension with the final line, “branches bending under the snow of this white page.” 

ET

Thank you, Arthur. I’d like to ask you now to compare our discussion today versus what you and I shared through our first Black Lightning conversation about 24 years ago for your poem “Archipelago.”

AS

Years ago when we discussed my poem “Archipelago,” I was excited at writing that sequence, and a lot of our discussion went into showing how the different sections coalesced, through juxtaposition, into the ordering of the nine sections. Today, in discussing a single poem, I believe we’re delving deeper into the process of writing poetry itself. And I want to thank you for reading my work with such care and insight.

Editor’s Note: As the Asian American Writers’ Workshop celebrates its 30th anniversary, we invited current and former editors, writers, community members, and workers to make new meaning from the Workshop’s archive. Together, they have awakened AAWW’s print anthologies and journals, returned to the physical spaces of the Workshop starting from our basement location on St. Mark’s, and given shape to the stories from within AAWW that circulate like rumors, drawing writers back again and again. In revisiting the Workshop’s history, we hope for insight into the ever-changing landscape of Asian diasporic literature and politics and inspiration to guide us forward in our next 30 years. Read more in our AAWW at 30 notebook here.

Where do writers find inspirations? How do they start their days? Are writers’ desks stereotypically messy?

We often would like to ask, or have actually asked, almost every writer that we’ve come to know these and many others are questions. It is fitting we try to find answers as we celebrate the Workshop’s 30th anniversary this year.

We have nurtured quite a handful of writers of color through our Margins and Open City Fellowships. Many of them have gone on to write and report for mainstream publications and publish books.

Former Open City Fellow Humera Afridi agreed to give us a snapshot of her writing life and share some writing tips. Known for her lyrical and magical prose, Humera wrote for The Margins a 41,000-word, four-part series of incisive and moving essays on Arab women in Bay Ridge who are coming into their own as activists and assimilating into Arab-American identities.

— Noel Pangilinan

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1.       What’s on your nightstand?

A Himalayan salt lamp; a handcrafted olive-pit tasbih from Istanbul; a glazed ceramic heart made by my son a few years ago for Mother’s Day; Saidiya Hartman, Bessel Van Der Kolk; Sufi prayers; a nugget of Bohemian moldavite; a blue apatite globe to inspire lucid dreaming.

2.       How do you start your day? What’s a typical day for you?

Weekdays begin early. I prepare breakfast for my son and make sure he’s off to school in good time! Mornings often include prayer and a short Sufi meditation, and 15 minutes on the yoga mat, after which I settle down at the dining table to work, or if it’s a research day, I head to the New York Public Library—Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The best days possess a sense of flow and harmony, a feeling of accomplishment. But, then there’s the eternal challenge of appointments, emails, and my own capricious mind.

3.       Coffee or tea? Why?

Both! It’s a habit, a soothing mechanism, I suppose. I switch back and forth throughout the day. I begin with a pot of brewed Assam and cardamom tea, switch to Genmaicha at some point in the day, and on especially demanding days, I make a pot of coffee blended with chicory. Better sips of tea and coffee throughout the day than munching on a bowl of peanut M&M’s (which does happen now and then)!

4.       Any book you’re reading now?  Any podcasts you’re listening to now?

There are so many, many books that I want to read (piling up everywhere!) and not enough time. I’m in the midst of a nonfiction book project that has required a tremendous amount of archival research. Currently, I’m spending hours deciphering faded handwritten letters while also reading theosophical literature from the early 1900s and learning about immigration rules for foreign visitors to the United States at that time. Specific books that I’m dipping in and out of these days include Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow, The Heroine with 1001 Faces by Maria Tatar, Mission France by Kate Vigurs and the Biography of Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan.

5.       When do you write best?

I prefer to write first thing in the morning. If the day is my own, unbroken by appointments, and especially if a deadline is looming, then the hours blur and I will work late into the night. However, that only works well while my son is on break, and we don’t need to rise early for school. I work best when the world is still.

I also work best when I don’t have a looming appointment or social or school commitment. Somehow knowing that the day is wholly mine allows for a capaciousness that I seem to really need for creative writing. During the pandemic and lockdown, it was easier to lose myself in my work, I didn’t have to keep up with the world. Writing for me is about burrowing deep, going underground, losing a sense of time. I find it very jarring to come out of that and put on a social face. It takes me a long time to settle into that flow.

6.       How and where do you get ideas for your stories?

Usually, it’s a combination of being moved or intrigued by a person or situation and feeling a strong desire to know more, a need to get to the heart of the experience, or the ‘mystery’ if you will.

7.       Do you have any tips for interviewing people? Like, what tools do you always use when reporting?

Before an interview, I read up about that person’s work, their life, and really try to get a sense of their trajectory. What are they passionate about? I might begin with asking questions around a topic that I know is close to their heart even if it isn’t the focus of the story. I like to know how a person got to a particular milestone on their life’s journey, their influences, their mentors, the obstacles they had to overcome.

As far as the technical aspect, I use my phone to record interviews, however, way back in the past when I worked as a staff feature writer for the Gulf News in Dubai, I always used mini-cassette recorders and then, later, digital recorders. The iPhone has made recording interviews simpler!

8.       How do you deal with writer’s block?

What’s that? Just kidding…

Self-doubt, along with a crippling sense of perfection and, or, ambition, can potentially become obstacles on a writer’s journey. Health traumas, financial challenges, family and work responsibilities that demand significant resources of time and energy can all impinge on that vital sense of freedom that a writer needs.

Exercising helps. Conscientiously seeking out trees, grass, and water; meditating; experiencing joy and community; breathing well; reading widely, all help! Locating that voice within, the inner knowing that you’ve got this, confident that you’re doing all you can even as you negotiate challenging circumstances–and being patient with yourself–helps. 

9.       What are you working on now, and what recent work are you proud of?

I’m writing a biography of World War II heroine Noor Inayat Khan. A book project, like raising a child, is an act of love, a commitment that requires time, diligence, energy, and resources over the span of several years.

I am proud of the creative impulse that persists and drives a work into being despite circumstances that try to shut it down. As a single mom, I am proud, too, of my son, who is now a freshman at high school! He is kind, creative, grounded, and possesses a strong ethical consciousness. 

10.     What is your fondest memory of being an AAWW Fellow?

I cherish the creative and diverse community that is AAWW! I fondly remember Noel and Jyothi and everyone at the Workshop who were so supportive and nurturing of us fellows. So much about being a writer has to do with persevering, keeping the faith, not allowing oneself to be silenced, especially by one’s own inner critic. And then there’s the culture at large that doesn’t usually seem to want to acknowledge you, that sees you as marginal at best. At AAWW, to be in the vibrant center was nourishing, inspiring, and creatively generative. I felt seen and heard, my voice was valued, and the stories I wrote mattered.

Editor’s Note: As the Asian American Writers’ Workshop celebrates its 30th anniversary, we invited current and former editors, writers, community members, and workers to make new meaning from the Workshop’s archive. Together, they have awakened AAWW’s print anthologies and journals, returned to the physical spaces of the Workshop starting from our basement location on St. Mark’s, and given shape to the stories from within AAWW that circulate like rumors, drawing writers back again and again. In revisiting the Workshop’s history, we hope for insight into the ever-changing landscape of Asian diasporic literature and politics and inspiration to guide us forward in our next 30 years. Read more in our AAWW at 30 notebook here.

I was 12 going on 13 when my family immigrated to New York from the Philippines in 1992. I remember whiling away the hours at the public library, seeking out stories about immigrant girls like me. The librarian obliged me with books by Edwidge Danticat, Sandra Cisneros, and Maxine Hong Kingston. They weren’t my immigrant story but were vital then as my only guides.

A few years later, my father and I stumbled upon the Asian American Writers’ Workshop on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. There, I found my home as a reader, discovering books by Filipino American writers like Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) and R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the Rs (1995).

The Workshop also published the anthology Flippin’: Filipinos on America (1996), edited by Luis H. Francia—poet, playwright, nonfiction writer, filmmaker, and adjunct professor at New York University—and Eric Gamalinda—poet, novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, filmmaker, and adjunct professor at Columbia University—who was then the publications director of the AAWW.

Flippin’ was the second anthology published by AAWW’s historical Small Press Division and among only a handful of anthologies published in that decade that celebrated the prolific cultural output of Filipino and Filipino American writers. It wasn’t about “arriving” on the scene but rather reasserting a literary lineage dating back to the turn of the 19th century of Filipinos writing on America. Or as Francia puts it, “that Rushdiean empire writing back … taking ‘flip,’ the slang, derogatory term for us who would insist on the primacy of our selves, and yes, flippin’ it.”

On the occasion of the AAWW’s 30th anniversary, and Flippin’s 25, I spoke with Francia and Gamalinda over email about their memories of that first decade of AAWW, how Flippin’ came to be, Filipino and Filipino American literature then and now, and their thoughts about its future.

□ □ □ □ □

Vina Orden

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop has grown and changed over 30 years, from its location to the personalities involved. What are some of your salient memories of the Workshop?

Eric Gamalinda

I was part of the Workshop back when our office was in a basement on St. Mark’s Place. I remember the street well for its rather seedy character back then, the block teeming with drug peddlers, tattoo artists, and sex workers, and right there at the corner with an almost invisible sign was this place, buzzing with activity and artistic energy. I think a news article called it one of the coolest places in New York City. We had a fold-out futon that I slept on many nights because our work ended late if we had events, and I had to be in meetings early the next morning. All the staff back then were unforgettable characters to me, and I am still in touch with many of them.

Luis H. Francia

I loved the Workshop space on St. Mark’s. It was a neighborhood I was familiar with, as I had lived there, between First and A, before moving to Soho. From Soho I could just walk to St. Mark’s and hang out. You went down a flight of stairs from ground level, and, as Eric points out, there was the Workshop full of like-minded people. It had a bookstore that actually sold books! And whenever there were readings, one could hear the footsteps of the customers above, shopping in what I think was a Gap store.

The Workshop also had cubicles it sublet to help pay the rent. Nearby was the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church on 10th Street, and there were still a couple of cinemas in the hood, and Gem Spa on the corner, famous for its egg cream, now sadly gone. As is the East Village that nurtured so many of us, with its cheap rents, eateries, and above all, a lively arts scene. 

VO

Can you tell us more about the genesis of Flippin’, particularly in the context of the literary landscape at that time? What do you think the anthology’s impact was then and now?

EG

Americans still know very little about the Philippines, their former colony, and back in the 1990s, we were largely invisible and underrepresented and misunderstood. It’s gotten a little better now, but I think we’re still a community that is misinterpreted or that mystifies a number of people. And I think many people still don’t know about the Philippine-American War, which redefined the destinies of both the Philippines and the United States.

When (then Executive Director) Curtis Chin launched the Workshop’s Publications Department, we decided we wanted to publish anthologies focusing on underrepresented communities within the Asian American community, and I was happy to work on an anthology of Fil-Am writers. In the Philippines, Luis and I were part of the Philippine Literary Arts Council, which published a quarterly poetry journal called Caracoa. One of the issues was devoted to Filipinos writing about America. I thought it would be interesting to extend that and see what Fil-Ams thought about America. The anthology aimed to seek and publish promising writers along with more established ones. I’m glad we were able to publish authors who have since made their mark in the literary world. I do hope it has served to shed a light on our native and diasporic culture.

LHF

In 1993, an anthology of Philippine literature in English I had edited for Rutgers University Press came out, Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English. The writers included all had to have been born in the Republic of the Philippines, though a number of them subsequently moved to these shores and furthered their careers here. I believed the anthology would introduce readers here to writers from there.

So, when Eric proposed this anthology, it made total sense. That would be the theme: the empire writing back (I think Nick Carbo edited an anthology with that title). The process would be a literary manifestation of Langston Hughes’s double consciousness, and part of that was to take the word Flippin’ and claim it for ourselves, investing it with a power not intended by those who used it to denigrate us.

I’d like to add something about how we fundraised for the anthology. We held an event at the restaurant Cendrillon, the forerunner of Purple Yam in Brooklyn, owned and run by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan. Cendrillon was in Soho at that time, this was 1996—it was new, and a whole lot of folks showed up to support the intended publication. A wonderful, fun event. At that time, we had someone working with Eric and me, like an intern, who was also working for the fashion designer Josie Natori. So, we asked this person, whose name I forget, to approach Natori for some funding. She did. And guess what we got? I’m sure Eric remembers this as well. Lingerie! And oversized lingerie at that, meaning it probably couldn’t be sold. What were we to do with the lingerie? It was hilarious and maddening. I guess we weren’t sosyal enough for the Natori crowd.

EG

Fundraising really brought the community out, with so many people, young and old, donating services or cash. Friends introduced us to friends, writers to other writers, and I felt really blessed to expand my own “circle,” having just immigrated to New York a couple of years earlier. And yes, I will never forget Natori’s donation. We thought of selling the lingerie at the bookshop but decided to let the women on the staff have them. They were so thrilled, and I was happy to see them rummaging through the boxes and getting all excited when they found something of their size. It was a small way we could repay them for their hard work. Too bad we didn’t get underwear for the guys, though. 

VO

The image used on the cover is of a painting, Manong, by Venancio C. “V.C.” Igarta, who also painted portraits of some of the writers in the anthology, including Ninotchka Rosca and Eileen Tabios. Who was V.C. Igarta, and why did you choose Manong for the book cover?

LHF

V.C. Igarta, bless his grumpy soul (though he was really a sweetheart) was a GI, Genuine Ilocano, a true-blue manong—hence, the title of the painting for our cover—who escaped the punishing fields of the West Coast and traveled to New York where he found he could paint, and so became a painter. He had a flat in Chinatown, supported himself by being a color specialist for mixing paints, and played the stock market—and apparently, he was successful. By the time I and some other friends met him, he lived off the stock profits and, I guess, social security. By the way, he did a portrait of me, but alas this was destroyed in a fire that wrecked my West Broadway rent-controlled flat in the late ’90s. Sayang!

EG

Luis introduced me to the work of Igarta, and I loved the painting the moment I saw it and decided we simply had to have it on the cover.

VO

While featuring mostly contemporary Filipino authors in the United States, the anthology represents multiple generations of the literary diaspora. Why was it important for you to include mid-20th century writers such as Carlos Bulosan, NVM Gonzales, and Bienvenido Santos as well?

EG

It was important to let readers know that we didn’t just come out of the blue, there is a historic lineage that we follow, and there were trailblazers who made their mark decades ago. Looking back, I wish we had access to the works of even more Filipino immigrant authors from the early 20th century—there are many who are sorely missing in this anthology, like Stevan Javellana and Wilfrido Nolledo.

LHF

The writers you mentioned of course had to be in Flippin’. A great deal of their writing is all about their response, their interactions with America. They were our literary manong. And writing about their compatriots, the working-class or of peasant stock manong. And Bulosan was a peasant lad from Binalonan in Pangasinan province, whereas NVM (Gonzales) and Bien (Bienvenido Santos) were college graduates and scholars as well.

Flippin’ in a sense was a response, for me at any rate, to Aiiieeee, the Asian American anthology put out in the 1970s, in which the Fil-Am section was the sparest. That also speaks—though today, to a lesser extent—to the view held by so many Asian Americans that Fil-Ams are kind of suspect as Asian Americans. Probably due to a large extent of the dominant image then of East Asians representing Asian America.

VO

Can you speak more about curation and the challenge of representing what Filipino and Filipino American writing is? For instance, Jose Garcia Villa, whom Luis studied with, is missing from the anthology, and Edith Tiempo,who studied at Iowa and whom contemporary scholars like Conchitina Cruz criticize as propagating “colonialist and classist ideas about language and literary production,” is included. Then, there’s the matter of F. Sionil Jose … Would you make the same curatorial decisions if Flippin’ were published in 2021 rather than in 1996?

LHF

I may or may not have approached Villa, and if I did, he probably would have asked for a fee, and we weren’t paying anyone except in copies. I know for Brown River, White Ocean, Rutgers did pay him a fee, but of course Rutgers is a university with money. Besides, Villa’s poetry gave the reader no idea of the writer’s situation in and response to America, except perhaps in the most oblique way.

I don’t know why Flippin’ wouldn’t include Edith Tiempo, as the question seems to imply. So what if she studied at Iowa, and, with her husband, Edilberto, began the program at Silliman University? Quite a number of writers back home studied at Iowa, including Pete Lacaba, who is as anti-imperialist as you can get.

As for Sionil Jose, Eric and I thought it was a good story, and so we included it. Anyway, at that time he wasn’t the obnoxious, bitter, anti-Chinese, wannabe Nobelist that he became.

EG

Villa was a difficult one. He himself refused the ethnic-identity discourse and refused to write about the immigrant/exile experience. But an entire anthology of his works was later published, edited by Workshop alumna Eileen Tabios. Obviously, curating a similar anthology today would be much different.

Today, many Fil-Am and Filipino writers have had more success than in that dark, distant past. An anthology alone of excerpts of published works would fill an entire volume, and it would include authors who have been recognized with major awards. But personally, I would also seek out emerging and under-the-radar writers, which was the main intent of Flippin’ in the first place.

LHF

In addition to Eileen’s anthology of Villa’s work, in 2008, Penguin Classics issued Doveglion: Collected Poems, compiled by his literary executor, the late John Cowen, and to which I wrote the introduction. In this regard, I’d like to give a shoutout to Elda Rotor, editor of Penguin Classics. She’s responsible not only for the Villa collection, but for the reissuance of the two Jose Rizal novels, an anthology of Nick Joaquin’s writings, and a new edition of Carlos Bulosan’s canonical work, America Is in the Heart. Elda has used her position judiciously and illustrates the absolute need of having editors of color bring into the mainstream writers of color and thus render the domain, the kingdom, of American literature more than just a bastion of white writers. Of course, much, much more needs to be done. Brown Writers Matter! 

VO

A number of writers in the anthology recently have or are coming out with new books, including Gina Apostol, Luisa A. Igloria, Zack Linmark, Bino Realuyo, Lara Stapleton, and Eileen Tabios. At the same time, there’s an exciting new generation of writers across genres, from poetry to memoir and nonfiction to fiction, including children’s and young adult literature, representing the diversity of experiences of Filipinos in America. Where do you think Filipino and Filipino American writing is headed and what most excites you about it?

EG

The most important thing is to create what I call critical mass, a number of authors large enough for the mainstream public and the industry to finally recognize that there is such a thing as Filipino and Fil-Am literature; and there is such a country as the Philippines, and it’s not what Americans have presumed before but is a complex, evolving, multilayered culture. The more writers are published, the louder our voice in the public sphere, where we still tend to be erased. In the discourse of Asian American literature, for instance, we hardly ever get any space.

How we wound up in America is still a puzzle to Americans, even if now and then a book like Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire comes out to explain it to them. And our collective is still not fully explored. I hope that, someday, someone will write about the Filipina nanny experience, because that community is still looked down upon but is part of our evolving identity, along with the economic and political forces that have created that unfortunate phenomenon.

LHF

In the New York Times Book Review section today (November 24), there is a favorable review of Patrick Rosal’s new volume of poems, The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems—a whole page!—which is great, and last week or perhaps the week before, a review, again in the NYT, of a memoir, Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes, by Albert Samaha, a Fil-Am writer who grew up in California. The reviewer was quite knowledgeable about the Philippines having been a U.S. colony. He’s the exception that proves the rule, for how many in this vast nation are aware of this imperialist history?

As Eric points out, we are still a puzzle to so many Americans. There is Immerwahr’s book, and there is also Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream 1899-1999 (NYU Press), that Angel Velasco Shaw and I edited and that came out in 2002. Eric has a wonderful essay in it, with the cheeky title of “English Is Your Mother Tongue /Ang Ingles Ay Tongue ng Ina Mo.”

Where is Filipino and Filipino American writing headed? I hope in as many and diverse directions, themes, subject matter, etc. as possible, not to be constrained by what is currently in vogue, whether in academe or the rarefied world of the literary gatekeepers. And it’s encouraging to see more attention in Manila being paid to writing in the other languages we have in the archipelago.

VO

What advice would you give to aspiring or emerging Filipino American writers?

EG

When I first came to America, a number of people advised me to stop sounding “foreign” or “too Filipino” and to learn to write “like an American.” I realized quickly enough that wasn’t what I wanted to do, and if I did, it would kill all the joy in writing. So, my advice, to them and to myself, is: Tell your story in your own voice, on your own terms.

LHF

Write like hell, don’t be too burdened by identity. Steal as much as you can and make it your own.

“We live in the dregs of Queens, New York, where airplanes fly so low that we are certain they will crush us,” begins Brown Girls, Daphne Palasi Andreades’ debut novel about second-generation women of color from immigrant families coming of age in Queens. Having immigrated from the Philippines to New York City as a teenager, I was struck by the profound sense of place in Andreades’ book from that first line. The novel is told from the collective “we” perspective of the “brown girls,” voicing experiences that also resonated with me—a love of literature unrequited by representation on the page; a perpetual sense of being in between cultures and never enough as an American or, in my case, a Filipina; walking the tightrope between our parents’ dreams for us and our own visions for ourselves.

Andreades considers Brown Girls an ode to women with a background like hers. Her parents had immigrated from the Philippines in the 1990s and planted roots in Queens, a majority middle- and working-class borough and the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world. Brown Girls began as a short story, which went on to win the 2019 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest, judged by Filipina American author Mia Alvar, and most recently an O. Henry Prize, selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Andreades found, however, that she couldn’t stop thinking about that world and those characters; so, she kept writing, and the story kept growing into what she reluctantly decided to call a novel. Over email last fall, we spoke about Brown Girls as well as reading, writing, teaching, and navigating life in a pandemic.

Vina Orden

You’ve cited the Toni Morrison quote, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” as motivational in writing your debut novel. Can you speak more about your experience as a reader? What was the first book you recall reading that gave you hope that there was a space for you as a reader and a writer?

Daphne Palasi Andreades

As a reader, one huge influence on me was the Queens Public Library. I’d go there after school or on the weekends. I was in middle school when I gravitated toward authors I came across in the Classics section: Orwell, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Fitzgerald. I remember really liking their sentences because I sensed each word was chosen with care in order to build these characters and worlds. Still, those Anglophone writers and their characters felt removed from the world I knew. In high school, I had a fantastic English teacher, Mr. H, who was intense and set high expectations. For one semester, we studied Black literature—works by W.E.B DuBois, Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. Reading these authors was incredibly formative. Although I recognized my experiences as a Filipino American girl living in the twenty-first century were vastly different from these writers’ experiences, I identified with the racism, marginalization, and the effects of white supremacy that they illustrated in their work. These works helped me understand the solidarity and interconnectedness that could exist between people of color, even across different races and diasporas, which is central to my debut.

It wasn’t until later in high school and college that I began to seek out books by and about first and second-generation immigrants. Edwidge Danticat’s novel, The Dew Breaker, Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, and Julie Otsuka’s novel, The Buddha in the Attic—which greatly influenced the “we” voice in my book—were some of the first works by women of color authors that reflected communities I knew intimately. These authors also helped me envision a path for myself as a writer.

VO

There’s an urgency and currency in what’s covered in Brown Girls—for example, you allude to gentrification, the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, the war in Afghanistan, and the COVID-19 pandemic. What was it like writing in a time of so much upheaval? What made Brown Girls the book you had to write then? 

DPA

I finished writing Brown Girls during the first wave of the pandemic in the United States. Writing was a practice that kept me sane during this difficult time. It was a space that held the entirety of my emotions—the despair and grief I had for the world during this time, my fear for family members throughout New York City who are healthcare workers. During these months, I questioned the purpose of art and my desire to write; both seemed, to me, unhelpful to others in a tangible way, not to mention financially precarious. But out of a combination of compulsion, stubbornness, needing structure, and a way to maintain my mental and spiritual health, I wrote—not for anyone else, but for myself. Brown Girls is an artifact of how I felt during this time, as well as everything that was going on in the world. And now, I still can’t wrap my mind around my debut being out in the world for readers!

VO

In writing a novel rooted in a very specific place, what do you hope readers come away with understanding about Queens, regardless of their familiarity with the borough and its people?

DPA

I hope readers come away with the sense of Queens being this extraordinarily vibrant place that’s bursting with life and filled with people who are striving. I felt compelled to write this story set in Queens because, although it is the most ethnically and linguistically diverse place in the whole world, it’s one that is underrepresented in art and literature. I wanted to expand the narratives that exist and allow readers—if I may say so—the privilege of entering this place and these characters’ lives, in all their beauty and complexity. I view a place like Queens as emblematic of both the ideals and failures of America: Queens has this beautiful mix of people, cultures, languages, and beliefs, all co-existing; yet many of these people are invisible within American society or perceived as outsiders when, in fact, they belong just as much as anyone else. My debut confronts this pain, challenges it, and asks questions about how to make sense of these different parts of one’s identity as a person of color and immigrant living in the United States today.

VO

Did you always envision writing the novel from a collective “we” perspective? What was your intention in blending the girls’ experiences of intergenerational family conflicts, racism and classism, love and relationships, and their journeys of self-discovery?

DPA

After writing the first sentence, I knew the novel couldn’t be told from any other point-of-view except the “we.” The “we” is a chorus of women’s voices, in which characters within this chorus are free to come and go as they please—sometimes they have whole paragraphs dedicated to them, sometimes they show up in one scene and reappear in others, or sometimes an entire life is expressed in a single sentence, and you never hear from them again. There’s a fluidity to this choral point-of-view, an ability to expand and contract at will, that I found really fresh, a challenge I wanted to pursue. Julie Otsuka’s 2011 novel, The Buddha in the Attic, executes what I’m describing so deftly. The “we” was a method of capturing the solidarity and shared experiences of women of color of different diasporas from this particular neighborhood—of being immigrant daughters, of feeling a deep obligation to their families yet wanting to pursue their own paths, of grappling with cultural and gender expectations, of being hyper-visible and invisible in America, and trying to make sense of the seemingly conflicting aspects of their identities.

VO

Another way that Brown Girls sets itself apart from a conventional novel is its hybrid form—you can read it in part as a prose poem or even a lyric essay. What does poetry allow you to do that a conventional novel doesn’t?

DPA

My background in creative writing actually began with poetry. My poetry classes impressed upon me deeply and influenced how I approach my fiction, especially my debut. Poetry taught me about concision and precision, as well as paying attention to rhythm and musicality. Before fiction, I also spent several years painting and drawing, though I always kept a journal. Poetry and visual art taught me about the importance of having striking images and evoking an atmosphere, which I brought into my fiction.

In college, one of my poetry professors introduced me to Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson. These writers challenged and expanded the notion of what I thought writing—not limited to one genre—could do. Their work wove visual art, quotes from interviews they conducted, history, philosophy, and much more. Their approach, which I saw as representative of an artistic freedom and voraciousness, stayed with me.

Brown Girls uses vignettes to structure the story; it incorporates lists, song lyrics, snippets written in Spanish, Tagalog, Hindi, Arabic, and more. I interviewed friends as preliminary research to the book; I used their responses as a springboard into imagining scenes, conflicts, an atmosphere. Parts of the novel were drawn from my life and others were invented. I love that the word “novel,” as an adjective, means “new.” I think the novel as a literary form should embrace innovation, which is often born from an artist being unafraid to combine disparate elements. However, I would say that the book’s formal choices are merely a reflection, and an extension, of the characters’ hybrid identities.

VO

As a Filipina, I too identify as a brown girl, and something that resonated with me was this idea of contradictory expectations, which set us up for failure, and being in a constant state of “in-betweenness” rather than “belonging.” For instance, we’re chided for being too American but aren’t supported when we want to learn our own language, history, and culture. What were you trying to convey by choosing to present these vignettes in the book?

DPA

These contradictions are mind-boggling, aren’t they? Of being American but not American “enough”; of being, simultaneously, for instance, Filipino but not Filipino “enough.” But this myth—the damaging idea of “purity,” which is the polar opposite of hybridity—was one I wanted to expose and critique in my work. Our identities are made up of many, often conflicting parts, but are of us, nonetheless. In Brown Girls, the characters ask: Am I the colonized or the colonizer? Am I American, or can I claim ties to this other country my parents left behind? Do I stay in my hometown, or do I leave—and if I leave, does this signal a betrayal? Yet, phrasing these questions as binaries are limiting, incomplete, and in the end, false. Our identities are myriad. It’s a myth that we have to choose.

VO

A number of scenes take place in the classroom, showing the dynamics between students and teachers whose authority they can’t help but question or defy. In an early chapter, “Musical Chairs,” teachers routinely mistake one brown girl for another, calling them the wrong name. Then, there’s the chapter “Western Epistemology,” where the narrator reflects on characters in Shakespeare and Greek classics who look nothing like them. What were you hoping to illustrate through these classroom scenes?

DPA

Through these classroom scenes, I wanted to examine how educational and academic institutions act as modes of assimilation. Schools have the power to pass on the beliefs and values of a culture—often of those who have historically been in power. I wanted to convey the invisibility that the characters experience, whether by teachers who don’t know their names, the Eurocentric syllabi, or at universities where the characters’ peers and teachers are predominantly white and wealthy, which contribute to girls feeling alienated. Of the different manifestations of structural racism that Brown Girls examines, how it appears in our education system is one of them.

However, I am thankful that my personal experiences aren’t identical to that of my characters. I attended New York City public schools from kindergarten through undergrad, and while they have problems of their own—overcrowded classrooms, teachers who work their asses off but don’t get compensated enough—I had many amazing teachers who encouraged me to think critically, and whose syllabi were quite diverse and comprehensive.

VO

On the topic of education, as a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Fiction program and as someone who has taught creative writing, what would you say to other women writers of color who are considering an MFA program but doubt whether they or their writing belong in such programs? Is there a piece of advice you wish you’d gotten sooner in your writing career?

DPA

My advice to other women writers of color is to write what interests you, and to remember that your experiences, whether or not you bring them into your art, are incredibly valuable. I’d recommend seeking out art by and about historically marginalized communities and finding community—mentors and other artists—who identify as BIPOC. Seek allies, as well. It was my community who helped me look beyond my fears and focus on my art. I’d tell my younger self to be unafraid of claiming space for herself, and to remember that it is necessary for her to do so. I’d tell my younger self that, though the arts can feel very white and wealthy, money and whiteness do not define an artist—inventiveness, curiosity, drive, and persistence do. I’d tell my younger self to trust her vision alone, and to let this guide her.

In a year as devastating and full of loss as the last, Michelle Zauner’s words could not have come at a better time. Crying in H Mart, her book debut from April 2021, is a memoir in essays that is both vulnerable and brave, much like the eclectic, dreamy music she makes under the name Japanese Breakfast. Zauner writes eloquently about grief, identity, and Korean cooking as a biracial Korean American who lost her mother in 2014. In the first essay, which shares its title with the book and originally appeared in The New Yorker in 2018, she questions, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” 

For me, crying in an H Mart seemed like a very relatable activity, so much so that my mother texted me a link to the New Yorker piece the week it was published, asking, “Isn’t this just so well written?!” Shortly after reading Zauner’s essay, I made a quiet, short film about H Mart that nobody saw. I wanted to encapsulate the feeling of home and memory on film, along with Zauner’s lyricism about the supermarket chain that stocks essentials for many Korean Americans’ diets. 

Zauner writes with verve and depth about the dishes she enjoyed with her mother as a child and the dishes she learned to cook in the aftermath of her mother’s death. But the collection is not just an homage to food—it is also a tribute to the relationships between mothers and daughters. Zauner writes about the last years she had together with her Korean-born mother, Chongmi:

“Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities.”

Zauner’s book is not all that debuted in 2021—her Grammy-nominated album, Jubilee, which radiates joy and calls for commemoration, was released last June. With nostalgic openers, like “Paprika” and “Kokomo, IN” and the vulnerable closing tracks “Tactics” and “Posing for Cars,” Zauner is making exceptional contributions to art that honors the Korean diaspora. 

We spoke last year, the week of the book’s release, and talked about YouTube star and Korean cooking celebrity Maangchi, attempting caretaking alongside her mother’s best friend, The Sopranos, and psychological undoings. Since then, it was announced that MGM’s Orion Pictures would be adapting Crying in H Mart as a film to bring the story of a young biracial Korean American girl’s artistic journey visually alive on screen.

—Ruth Minah Buchwald

Ruth Minah Buchwald

I’d love to start off by talking about the titular essay of the collection, Crying in H Mart. My Korean mother actually sent it to me when it was first published and we both couldn’t stop talking about and crying over it because the essay captures the complex relationship between Korean mothers and their half-Korean children. How did it, and the rest of the collection, come about?

Michelle Zauner

It actually started two years earlier, with this essay called “Love, Loss, and Kimchi” that was published in Glamour in 2016. I was writing that essay while I was working in New York as a sales assistant for an advertising company, and I found a real therapeutic joy at the time in learning how to cook Korean dishes with Maangchi. I don’t think I understood why exactly I was doing it then. It seemed like this very cute, Korean Julie and Julia moment. I thought it was funny that Maangchi, this person on the internet, impacted my life so deeply and had no idea, and I wanted to write an ode to this woman who helped me during such a hard time. So I wrote that essay and got a lot of encouragement after it was published.

In 2017, my band went on tour in Asia and I stayed behind in Seoul for six weeks and started writing what I thought could be a book. The first chapter was “Crying in H Mart” and it’s kind of an “if you give a mouse a cookie” situation—because I was cooking with Maangchi, I had to go to a Korean grocery store and because I went to the Korean grocery store, I was having this overwhelming realization of how special that place was for me and how it was really helping me have these memories of my mom that I wasn’t able to have before. 

“Crying in H Mart” started off as the first chapter of the book before it was published as an essay. We had gotten in contact with The New Yorker, who asked to see some writing, so I polished up the first chapter and sent it off. It had such an overwhelming response, so I started putting together a proposal and working with an agent. From 2018 to 2020, I worked very intensely on the book, largely on tour, and then I took another retreat to Seoul in May 2019 and over three weeks I finished my rough draft. It was a long process and a big part of it was understanding why I was doing what I was doing.

The first line of the book reads, “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart,” and the whole book is answering the question, “Why do you do that?”

RMB

This collection feels like an homage to identity—you write about your own, your mother’s, and other Korean American mothers referred to by their children’s names in your community. How has your sense of identity evolved since writing this book?

MZ

When my mom was alive, [being Korean] felt like such an inherent part of who I was. It was never something that I really questioned and engaged with so actively. Now that she is gone, I feel that in order to maintain that part of my culture and identity, it’s something that I have to put work into. That’s why a lot of it is through writing or even engaging with different types of media, or cooking Korean food or eating Korean food regularly, or going to the grocery store. Those are all little rituals that I keep up with to preserve that part of my identity. It is definitely a new thing and something that I have more of an understanding of since I’ve written this book.

RMB

A line that really resonated with me is when you talk about how your mother said, “I’ve just never met anyone like you.” This is something I have also heard from my mother, and initially, it brought me a lot of shock and confusion. So much of this book is about the generational, cultural, and linguistic divides you both had to deal with. How did that statement affect you and/or guide this book?

MZ

That’s something my mom said to me that has stuck with me forever. It was a real turning point in our relationship. It fully encompassed everything we had gone through up until that point and was as close as I was ever going to get to an “I’m sorry.” That moment will always mark a real return to one another. This is a funny reference, but there’s a line that Tony Soprano says to his wife, Carmela [in the pilot of The Sopranos], “Girls and their mothers. She’ll come back to you.” Even in other cultures, that’s just a really common thing. A lot of mothers and daughters have really intense relationships.

Ultimately, [mothers] can make you feel the most loved and cared for, but they’re also the people who can then hurt you the most. That can be a very confusing thing. A lot of what mothers do to try to protect you is completely misunderstood as them standing in the way of your desires and passions. 

I knew that line was going to be part of the book. I felt like a lot of people would be either struck by it or relate to it because it was such a strange thing for my mom to say. She had a really poetic way of saying things. For me, that line meant, “I didn’t realize how much this meant to you. I didn’t realize how I should’ve given you space when you wanted it. I’ve just never met someone like you! I didn’t know how to navigate that.”

RMB

I love Maangchi and the essay in the book that is dedicated to her. The Vice Munchies video you both did was such a wonderful explanation of how Korean dishes, like budae jjigae, came to be during a period of war and desperation. One of the most beautiful scenes in this book is when you finally made jatjuk on your own for the first time using Maangchi’s recipe. You write about how empowered you felt after demystifying the dish that your mother’s friend from Korea, Kye, chose not to share with you after she became your mother’s primary caretaker. Can you speak more about finding solace in Maangchi and in people you didn’t expect to find it from?

MZ

I feel like this whole book is [an] unexpected solace. When you take care of someone, it becomes a very intense process. It can overtake people in a curious way. I really don’t blame Kye for how she handled things. I think that she didn’t realize how much importance I had bound up in this role reversal, of preparing foods for my mom—how much I wanted to take that role. 

Turning to Korean cooking was this psychological undoing of the failures I confronted when I was taking care of my mom, and making [jatjuk] for the first time was the full circle moment of feeling full for the first time. It was a very strange desire, to eat what my mom had eaten during her illness after she died. It was a very curious experience that I found great solace in.

RMB

What were you reading at the time, and which books that you’ve read at any point in your life helped prepare you to write yours?

MZ

There were all sorts of books that I read. I love  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Rock Springs by Richard Ford, Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, and any book by Lorrie Moore. These were all books that were really formative in my college years and taught me the style of writing that I was interested in pursuing. They were the books that my professor Daniel Torday taught at Bryn Mawr and informed so much of my writing and what I pay attention to, the details and movement and pacing.

To prepare for this book, I was interested in a lot of David Sedaris books and how he treats family and memoir. I loved Richard Ford’s Between Them: Remembering My Parents, which explores parents who are somewhat ordinary and takes a magnifying glass to them. I love Joan Didion’s memoirs on grief. The Year of Magical Thinking is just devastating and it’s such a perfect book about grief.

I reread Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes, Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, and This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff. I really love this book by Shin Kyung-sook called Please Look After Mom. I liked Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker. I read Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, which I loved. I also love Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. And then I read a lot of musicians’ memoirs just to see how everyone was handling all of this stuff.

RMB

I’d love to talk about your music, of which I am an immense fan, especially your album, Jubilee. When it comes to representation, you and Karen O—one of my favorite musicians and who you talk about in the book—are obvious icons for Korean girls. Who do you make your music for and how does representation play into your process, whether it be music or writing?

MZ

I write my music for me, honestly. I just chase after my interests in a very intuitive way and I feel like that is the only way I can think to write anything, really. My ideal reader and listener is myself, and anyone who finds themselves aligned with that taste is my ideal audience, you know?

I actually got to have a conversation with Karen O recently and we were talking about how neither of us wakes up every morning and is like, “Feeling very Korean American today!” I try to think about my human experience and put it into words, and the representation part comes afterwards because I just am those things and they’re attached to the art I make, whether I want to be or not.

RMB

How do your songwriting and narrative writing influence each other?

MZ

I feel like they are pulling from the same pool of memory. There’s a similar feeling you get, a shared sensitivity that you lean into just to observe people, experiences, and moments, and jot them down for later use. I think that they’re very similar.

Structurally, music is a little more intuitive and a little more heart, while writing a narrative is a little more brain and requires an analytical approach. It felt harder to write the book than the album, but a lot of people who’ve listened to my music will find that there are a lot of borrowed lines and lyrics and song titles that make their way into chapter titles or lines in the book.

“Writing is easy,” Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Red Smith once said. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open your veins, and bleed.” Putting pen to paper (or fingers to a keyboard) is never a simple task, even for seasoned writers. Even our Margins and Open City Fellows–and there’s quite a handful of them–can attest to that. Many of them, though, have gone on to write and report for mainstream publications and publish books. In this series, we reached out to our former fellows and asked them to give us a glimpse of their writing lives and to share some tips on how they navigate this creative process called writing.

Chaya Babu was an Open City Fellow in 2015–2016 and covered the South Asian American community. In “A Stranger in Our Midst,” she tells the story of how her writing group was robbed at gunpoint while having a workshop in a Brooklyn café, and her apprehension over subsequent harsh police and community reaction to the incident. “Who owns public space?” she asks in her 2016 story, “Men Loiter, Women Cloister,” about how young South Asian women in Brooklyn struggle with the culture that dictates that women have no business outside the home.

Here’s Chaya.

—Noel Pangilinan

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1.       What’s on your nightstand?

I love this because I didn’t have a nightstand before, but I just moved—to Santa Fe, literally five days ago, and I have one now. Currently: earplugs, a small globe lamp, the Tarot de St. Croix deck, a crinkly aluminum tube of hand cream (it’s dry here!), sage mist gifted by a friend, my journal and pen, and a copy of Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell. I haven’t started reading it just yet, but I’m excited to.

2.       How do you start your day? What’s a typical day for you?

I lie in bed for a long time. I feed the cats. I pull a card or a few. I check my phone to my detriment. I don’t have a typical day, which is how I like it, but part of this move to a slower and quieter place is definitely the intention to keep to a few specific rituals. Reading more, breathing more. Maybe walks in the arroyo in my new neighborhood.

3.       Coffee or tea? Why?

Walking to the bodega on Church Avenue in Brooklyn for coffee used to be part of my late morning ritual, but I’m definitely a tea person at heart, and always return to that. I think because I’m Indian. If I could have multiple cups of masala chai a day, I would.

4.       Any book you’re reading now?  Any podcasts you’re listening to now?

I’ve been slowly making my way through The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan. I only have the last essay left. For weeks, I’ve been taking pictures of whole pages and posting them on my Instagram because I read passage after passage and am underlining everything, needing everyone I know to get a chance to glimpse her analyses. I find her brilliant; she basically speaks directly to the politics and issues I’ve been thinking about through so much of my adulthood as a woman, especially in this time.

On my cross-country drive last week, I listened to Sweet Bobby, recommended by a friend, about a case of catfishing and coercive control. At this exact moment I’m listening to an interview with Tricia Hersey on an episode of For The Wild. The Nap Ministry is my jam right now. They’re doing really radical work around rest as resistance to capitalism and white supremacy. I will promote their messaging every chance I get!

5.       When do you write best?

I’ve realized I’m an obsessive writer, and I have ebbs and flows. When I’m writing, it’s all day almost, or every chance I get. When I’m not, I’m kind of just not. I’m finally okay with that, I think. Or still, even in those phases of writing fallow, maybe it’s always happening; I’m never without a notebook or at least my Notes app in my phone. The one thing I will say is that as I get older, the late-night writing is not so much of a thing anymore.

6.       How and where do you get ideas for your stories?

Watching the world and people. But more so actually my feelings. My triggers. Whatever gets a rise out of me, I know there’s something there that isn’t just about my own s_ _t. Figuring out what that thing is may be an entirely different process. But it typically starts with that noticing that I’m experiencing a charge. That’s life force. There’s a story there.

7.       Do you have any tips for interviewing people?

Staying present. Intuition is my main tool. Trusting that I don’t know what the story is, but if I listen and let go of my preconceived ideas of what I wanted to find, I will stumble upon it with patience.

8.       How do you deal with writer’s block?

I surrender. I’m not the kind of writer who can push through by just writing any words or trying to discipline myself. I think because, based on whatever conditioning I have around the concept of pausing or not-doing, the belief that I should keep going feels linked to harshness or a punitive energy. So, I tune into my body and typically glean that it needs rest, pleasure, or something else seemingly unrelated to writing (hint: it’s not!).

If I’m honest, I’ve felt like I’ve been in a years-long block. I don’t know what it means for the future, but I will say that believing in the notion of completion and then regeneration feels more important to me right now than actively writing in and of itself.

9.       What are you working on now and what recent work are you proud of?

In spite of what I noted above, I did work on an essay this summer that felt like a massive release of whatever had been incubating in me for a long time, perhaps creating the aforementioned block. Like a dam bursting; it was a beautiful experience. Godly almost. But that still doesn’t mean that the creativity is now flowing. I’m sort of still processing that writing. I also have a piece forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue. Other than that, I’m not working on anything right now. I’m going to see what strikes me in my new terrain.

10.     What’s your fondest memory of being an AAWW Fellow?

The walking tours through our respective neighborhoods for sure. I remember going to the gurudwaras in Richmond Hill. And to Greenwood Cemetery. Lots of chai all around. I loved my cohort; I love watching where they are now.

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You may also be interested in these related stories:

Writer’s Block? What’s That?
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Even though I grew up going to public school in Manhattan—one of the few places in this country where young people are lucky enough to receive sex education that goes beyond abstinence—my memories of formal sex ed include little beyond being handed a bag of condoms and told of the imminent dangers of gonorrhea. I learned about sex the way most kids do: reruns of Degrassi, whispered midnight conversations at sleepovers, shitty porn, Tumblr, and fumbling teenage hookups paired with 40s, blunts, and a friend’s free house. When I got my period at eleven, I had no idea what it was, and convinced myself I was gravely ill and headed to my death bed. When, at eighteen, on a visit home from college, my mom found a roll of Trojans in my bag, she broke down and cried. I would never be able to tell her that that college boyfriend wasn’t my first or, more importantly, share with her the joy, possibility, and safety that a true sexual connection had brought to my life. 

Most of us spend years, if not lifetimes, unlearning and countering the shame and confusion of early cultural lessons around sexuality. Nationally recognized Filipinx-American sexuality educator Justine Ang Fonte is here to change that as a champion of intersectional sex education. Based in New York City, Justine is dedicated to advancing a sex-positive education that prioritizes consent, safety, and bodily autonomy, an education that begins at an early age and includes critical conversations about gender, identity, race, pleasure, boundaries, self care, and communication. 

Justine’s education and advocacy work has garnered her fans as well as skeptics. Last year, she was the subject of a smear campaign led by “concerned parents” at prestigious Manhattan private schools Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School and the Dalton School after teaching topics like porn literacy in her courses. Since leaving that position, she’s looking to spread her message about the power and possibility of radical, inclusive sex ed through children’s books, podcasts, giving talks in and outside of school settings, and consulting for media projects. 

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Justine to talk about sex and her upbringing, decolonizing sex ed, how to get in touch with our own desire, and more.

—Senti Sojwal

Senti Sojwal

Tell me a little bit about the work you do and what drew you to becoming a sexuality and intersectional health educator. 

Justine Ang Fonte

I started my career as a seventh-grade math teacher, and in my training I was tasked with teaching a summer school class of eighth graders in Houston, Texas, which is an abstinence only state. As I was trying to teach math, I saw directly how the health gap was infringing on academic achievements. I had students in my eighth-grade class who were already parents and who were currently pregnant as I was teaching them. One student in the five weeks I was teaching was absent for two, because she didn’t know that having a period was a normal thing for someone her age. When she returned to school, she told me that she was sick. She didn’t know what to do. She said it happens every month and that she’s “broken down there,” and then I deduce that it was menstruation and ask her, “How long has this been happening?”  And she said, “Since I was in sixth grade”. She was sixteen years old, but in eighth grade. She had failed eighth grade two years in a row because she was missing half the school year. She likely had endometriosis, given how much pain she was in. It made sense in her mind why she thought she was sick because it was happening so often. And so in my brief time at that school I experienced how ineffective I can be as a teacher if students aren’t fully present in a classroom. 

That’s when I had decided to teach sex ed. I had three days left in the summer school, and I talked to the principal. I had some experience because I had been a peer health educator when I was in high school, and so I had lesson plans. They were super well received. That planted the seed in possibly doing this work in the longer term. I was placed in Hawaii for my two years of teaching and the situations weren’t that different from Texas. So after my teaching program, I got my master’s in education. I decided to pursue a master’s in public health focusing on sexuality. 

SS

Most Asian Americans that I know grew up in sex-negative households or had families that just never spoke about sexuality. Many of us hold intergenerational trauma around sex. How did your family deal with sex? What impact did that have on you? 

JAF

My family didn’t deal with sex, and I went to Catholic school. I remember there was a class in fifth grade that was called Family Life Education, and it was about the importance of having and growing a family to expand the Catholic community. We were separated by gender. One classmate asked, “I heard boys get boners, what do girls get?” And the response from our female teacher was “periods.” So that was the most “sex ed” I had gotten in school, and at home there was no discussion of sex. I would be watching Nickelodeon and if there was a couple kissing on the screen, my mom would be like, “Turn that off.” If we ever saw people demonstrating any type of public displays of affection my mom would say, “Don’t they have a home?” 

So I just knew, kissing is maybe something that’s supposed to be private. But that also there’s something shameful about it, right? So showing affection is wrong. Someone in our extended family had an unplanned pregnancy, and there was no discussion of it except for my parents saying, “God’s will it never happens to you.” That was it. I had my first romantic partner when I was in my junior year of high school. My parents were very much, like, you can’t do this until you’re finished with medical school. I was sixteen—their thought was, if I do this I’m going to lack focus. I lied about my relationship the first year. The second year, I got the support of my brother, and when he was home for the holidays and we were around the table, I told my parents. To them, it was such a surprise. Their story was very much, you’re not going to study and this is going to be a gateway to all these other bad behaviors. And I said, if that is true, I feel like it would have already happened in the last 365 days and you haven’t noticed anything, right? I’m still crushing it at school. Still crushing it at tennis, and still crushing it socially. So, what now? That was a coming-of-age moment for me because it showed my parents, she’s not our little child anymore. She’s clearly making decisions without asking us first. And she’s doing it in such strategic ways. 

SS

I love how explicit you are about the importance of building sex ed curriculum that’s explicitly anti-racist. What do you feel like you are responding to in the way sex ed is taught in the mainstream?

JAF

In mainstream sex ed, the message is, you will get a disease, nothing good comes of sex, and you now have less worth as a human being if you engage in some type of sexuality. White supremacy espouses rigidity too—that there’s really only one way to be, that some of us don’t belong, that not everyone is worthy and valid. Mainstream sex ed enforces binary thinking—you’re a boy so you like girls. A nuclear family is the only family. There are only certain “valid” ways to live. That rigidity holds people back from being able to explore safely and freely, and to be their authentic self. This type of sex ed is not fulfilling, it’s not effective, and it’s certainly not joyous.

SS

As a counter to that harm—what does it mean to you to “decolonize” sex ed, and how might we do that for ourselves and our communities?

JAF

It starts with recognizing bodily autonomy as the core pillar of this education, with knowing our body parts and what they do—the right anatomical terms, no shaming. That’s the first step of exercising our own agency and boundaries. Imagine if a six-year-old already had the confidence to say, “I don’t feel like hugs today but we can play with my Legos.” And what that would mean for that six-year-old to become a sixteen-year-old and have that level of assertion skills. And that sixteen-year-old becomes a twenty-six-year-old who is able to say those things to a boss, to a coworker or partner or family member. All of this adds up, because we haven’t been exercising bodily autonomy from the get-go. Why? Because we have been taught that there is power with age, that you don’t have a say when you are young and you have to conform to others’ comfort. 

SS

Your education work around boundaries is revelatory to me. We often think of consent as solely physical—“I’m not comfortable doing more than kissing”—but consent is necessary for emotional matters, too, and often that’s a boundary issue. You’re a ghostwriter who people can hire to support them with difficult conversations, often around asserting boundaries, and you document this on your @_good.byes_ IG account. Can you tell me how this project started, and how ghostwriting has had an impact on those who hire you and their relationships? 

JAF

This work definitely ties into a health lesson that I have done with my first graders about how to listen to your body. As a child, you have to do things you’re uncomfortable with all the time and have your boundaries crossed because it’s a cultural thing or it’s an expectation. And so we’re used to not listening to our body because we’re told by the outside world, this is what’s expected of you and you have no validity in going against that. We experience our feelings as uncomfortable, so we don’t communicate how we really feel. Instead of listening to what our gut is really telling us, we’ve been so used to catering to somebody else’s needs, in which case boundaries can’t be asserted. In other words, we don’t protect our energy, time, and peace. I’m thinking of that Audre Lorde quote where she says, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” 

I started ghostwriting because I have been someone who listens to their gut, and I have a good skill set when it comes to communication. My friends would tell me that my rejection texts were especially gracious and honest, in a time when most people just ghost. Everyone deserves human connection and dignity, even if you’re rejecting them. When I decided to be single for a bit, I thought I could continue to use that energy to help other people communicate better.

People need to become more comfortable with rejection because this is where learning and growth happens. When someone is rejecting an aspect of you in relation to them, it allows you to really assess yourself. It’s important to ask, did I cross a line? A lot of the messages I write have to do with people going on dates or being in encounters where someone really violated a boundary. It’s often straight men who don’t understand what “no” means, which makes the other person feel disempowered. As a sex educator in the field for more than ten years, it’s been interesting for me now to be “on the ground” with a survivor, for example, to help them with the intention of healing, and for them to experience justice through asserting a boundary by text message. I’m honored to help do that—and the account has gone beyond dating experiences, and extends to family and work experiences. The fact that it’s accrued almost ten thousand followers in one year shows that people struggle with this—they’ve been convinced they need to set a boundary, but they don’t know how. Writing a template for people makes them feel safer and more in control. It’s so close to the liberatory kind of work I do in sex ed, and I’m happy with how much it’s resonated and connected with others. 

SS

I see a lot of the platforms that I’m part of whitewashing sex positivity. What does sex positivity mean to you, and how might living and conceiving of a sex positive life be different for people of color? 

JAF

Someone can learn what it means to be healthy, but that doesn’t mean they have equal access to being healthy. “Comprehensive” sex ed might look like correctly defining an IUD or implant. But beyond medical accuracy, intersectional health education looks like talking about barriers to access in terms of class, race, gender, and our identities. Whiteness is dominant in sex positivity because we live in a whitewashed world and because whiteness is determined to commodify sex positivity. Capitalism and white supremacy are best friends. A simple definition of sex positivity is positive attitudes about sex, which includes accepting someone not wanting to have sex. But we need to go deeper and examine the barriers to being able to live in a sex-positive world. 

SS

It’s always amazing to me how infrequently pleasure is centered in sex education. What are some things we can each do to become more attuned to our own pleasure and desire?

JAF

Again, this is so tied to bodily autonomy. I teach about pleasure in my elementary school classes, but it doesn’t sound like what I would be talking about to an adult, right? It’s about what feels good to you, what makes you happy when you’re alone and you’re feeling low or sad. Some kids will say, playing with my toys, petting my dog, talking to someone. I ask, what happens in your body when you feel that happiness? They might say, it feels like butterflies or excitement or, I feel like I forget all of my other problems when I’m playing with my dog. I ask the same question of sixteen-year-olds: What are the things that make you feel good in your body? Experiencing pleasure begins with having a mastery of how your body works. 

When we talk about pleasure, we have to start with our ability to experience it in a range of ways, as a young child all the way to an adult. The reason people don’t explore pleasure or feel like they deserve it is because they’ve been told to silence those parts of themselves. We are taught to prioritize somebody else’s pleasure, but never our own. It’s okay to ask for an orgasm! Understanding pleasure begins with us saying, you have permission to experience it. You have permission to experience joy. And you always did.

The first time I heard Ibi Ibrahim’s voice, it was through a song. A friend had sent me a track by Kabreet, the electro pop duo that the Yemeni American artist forms one half of, and I had spent the following week walking the streets of Bay Ridge, nodding my head to its ominous hook—“Ana mashi fil leil, adawwir ‘ala jawab (I walk through the night, in search of an answer).”

When the same friend offered to introduce us a month later, in the backyard of a bar in Bed Stuy, I expected to spend the time discussing Ibrahim’s next studio album or the banalities of commercial Arabic pop. Instead, he launched into an impassioned critique of the Arab art world, which he argued does a generally poor job of making space for the work of Yemeni artists. He emphasized that many of these artists work under the most trying conditions: in cities under bombardment, with frequent power outages, and a general lack of support from the dominant cultural benefactors of the region. 

I found these critiques compelling. Like many Arabs, I had never sought to look beyond what I perceived as the cultural capitals of the region—Cairo, Beirut, Damascus—to discover new music, film, and visual art by Arab artists. Our conversation challenged me to. 

Ibrahim was bursting with ideas of how to use his new home base of New York City to push for greater visibility for the Yemeni art scene and the Yemeni American community at large. 

Over the past year, I have watched him turn many of those nascent ideas into fully-funded projects, published artwork, and community events. His documentary short A Few Minutes with Hakim, which tells the story of the young Yemeni American entrepreneur behind the popular Sunset Park coffee shop Yafa Cafe, will be on display at the Arab American National Museum in Detroit beginning in February. A selection of photographs from his ongoing photo series, “How Do You Want to be Portrayed,” was recently added to the collection of the British Museum. And earlier this month, he was announced as one of the 2022 Create Change Artists-in-Residence at the Laundromat Project.

Since our first encounter, I have learned that Ibrahim is far more than a musician. His art spans a variety of mediums, from music to film to visual art to creative writing. In addition to his artistic practice, he is the founder of the art nonprofit Romooz based in Sana’a, Yemen. 

I sat down with the Bay Ridge–based artist to reflect on the evolution of his practice over the past decade and to discuss his future plans for artwork and community engagement in New York. 

(This interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity.)

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Lylla Younes

Before the pandemic, you were based in Yemen, making art and working on community engagement projects. How did you end up moving back to the U.S.?

Ibi Ibrahim 

When the pandemic erupted, I was visiting Berlin for the Berlin Film Festival. Because I was working and living in a conflict zone, I was trying to take a breather every five, six months and I’m very fortunate and privileged to have an American passport and the resources to be able to get out. It was around March 2020, and the world started shutting down. I was stranded, basically, because I couldn’t find a flight back into Yemen. I tried to stall for a while, but my tourist visa ran out, so finally I booked a one-way ticket to America. 

LY

Since you arrived, you’ve been creating art about Arab America. Although you were born here and have an American passport, you grew up mainly between Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and the UAE. How has existing somewhere between immigrant and American guided the work that you’ve been producing over the past couple of years? 

II

I hear a lot from my fellow Arab Americans about challenges they faced growing up in this country and having to navigate those two identities. I don’t let it become a struggle. I position myself based on the environment I’m in at any given moment. Who are the people around me right now? Those are the people whose stories I want to tell, the art I want to make. When I’m here in America, I’m not going to do something on Yemen. It has to be Yemeni American. It has to be about my own community here. 

LY

That reminds me of your ongoing photo series, “How Do You Want to be Portrayed.” Can you talk about the origin of that work?

II

That project happened by coincidence. In Detroit, while in an art residency at the Arab American National Museum, I had this idea to interview young Yemeni Americans, men and women, and just to have conversations about our history and navigating it, and how to document our stories of coming to America. And every time I interviewed a woman, the conversation diverted into something different entirely, into questions of justice for women in the Yemeni American community. Maybe this happened because those women saw me as an ally, I don’t know. 

So in the summer of 2020, I started speaking with Yemeni women about how they want to be seen in their own communities, and I titled the project, “How Do You Want to be Portrayed.” I started doing something new that I’m not used to, which is giving the people I’m photographing control over the picture. After we take the photographs, I engage with them, see what photo they feel closest to and why. I used to be very protective of my work and I wanted full control over what photos to select, but now that practice has shifted. 

LY

Does that have something to do with what you were saying earlier about shifting from being the individual artist to being more interested in creating a collective voice?

II 

Exactly. And I think eventually, I’d like to see others—Syrian women, Afghani women, for example—replicate this idea. Or host panel discussions as we’ve done for my series—just bringing women around a table and asking them these questions. This is what I’m trying to do. Because when you put ownership on a project, it’s very much associated with yourself. And I find that to be in some cases problematic, and it doesn’t inspire others in the way that it does when you say, “This is our project. This is our story. This is our voice.” 

LY

What response have you gotten? 

II

Some people have told me that this work is groundbreaking, that it’s giving these women voices. But there’s a misunderstanding here. These women are not voiceless, there is no such thing as a voiceless Arab woman in my humble opinion, these women are fucking loud. It’s just that their voices need spaces.

LY

In addition to that project, you’ve also started photographing Bay Ridge, where you recently moved. What drew you to Bay Ridge, and to using it as a setting for your current work?

II

Well, it’s really special. I don’t want to be cliche, but when I walk out onto Fourth Avenue, it’s a reminder of home, a reminder of the people I love most, the people I grew up with. You know, to walk down the street and see a Yemeni flag hanging in the window of a store, that’s a big deal for someone who comes from a country associated with war and conflicts. A country that there is so much prejudice towards. 

But these feelings get complicated too. I walk down the street and I want to pull out my phone and take photos of the storefronts and so on. You love to see yourself represented in this world of New York, but then my attention immediately goes to a woman dressed in full black, and I have this question mark. My mind goes to all the conversations that I’ve had with Yemeni women in New York and the Detroit metro area, who say that the conditions for them are harder now than they were for women who came in the sixties and seventies. 

How can I put that into perspective, that the condition of a Yemeni American woman in the seventies in America was far better than where she is today? There’s no better place to explore these questions than in Bay Ridge. All neighborhoods in New York are exciting, but there’s something about this neighborhood that you can’t help but wonder where it’s gonna be in ten years. 

LY

You’re the singer-songwriter of the Arabic-German pop duo Kabreet, whose song “Film Faransi” has become hugely popular since the summer. And in addition to music and photography, you have experimented with painting and video work. I’m curious, just from a practical perspective, how you juggle various mediums as you work across them? Is there a cost to context switching?

II

I remember back in 2012 telling my peers that I wanted to start doing video work. And they all said, “Don’t. Don’t do it. It will harm your career. Just stay on your current route.” 

And I’m glad I didn’t listen to anybody, and I ended up making a film. Then in 2014, I really wanted to experiment with something new. I was fortunate to be in a residency at the Cites des Arts in Paris. I was buying a lot of paper to make my coffee paintings, and every time someone visited my studio they said, “Don’t do it. Don’t move away from photography to painting.” 

But then I try to remember that if I don’t enjoy it, I won’t do it. So I try not to listen to those voices. I do acknowledge that I have paid the price, career-wise. But I think what helped me so much was constantly reminding myself that I was staying true to myself. I’m not a commercial artist. 

LY

It sounds like technical craftsmanship is not your primary interest. 

II

It’s not. I have this fear that I would get bored. What happens if I’m thirty-four and I master this photography? Where do I go from there? I like to be constantly experimental in that sense. For example, my bandmate, Hanno, and I are making new music. I feel like I’m starting from scratch, because I haven’t made new music in a year, I’m like, “Oh my god, where do you put this wire?” But there’s this excitement too, right?  

LY

Speaking of your experimentation with various mediums, I remember watching your short film Departure at a film festival last year. Can you describe it?

II

Departure is a video that highlights the struggle of Yemenis stranded in Egypt and Jordan as the war erupted in Yemen. This struggle is told through the voices and stories of women. I found that as the war erupted, we didn’t hear many Yemeni women’s voices even though they were the people providing safety nets to their families during the war, since many of the men either went to war or were killed.

LY

What was the origin of that idea? 

II 

Funny enough, the pandemic was not the first time I got stranded in Berlin. In the summer of 2015, I was at my first ever institutional exhibition at Colorado College when the war in Yemen broke out. My original flight back got canceled so I went to Jordan, thinking that maybe I can enter Yemen through there. And I’ll never forget this moment—I was sitting on a bench in this area of Amman called Paris Circle, which was known to have a lot of Yemenis around it, and this woman sat down next to me. I could tell that she was from Yemen. 

And I remember just wanting to ask her how she was feeling. Where was her home? Was she trying to go back? Was she stranded like me? So I found myself in Paris Circle asking these questions. I wanted to go home but I couldn’t so I booked a flight to Berlin thinking, “Okay, this is my home now.” But I kept thinking about that woman, and she became the inspiration for my film Departure.

LY

A conversation with you would be incomplete without a discussion of Romooz, the initiative and nonprofit that you founded in Yemen to promote the development of Yemeni art and culture. Romooz has hosted trainings, residencies, workshops, literature events, film festivals, and artist talks. What motivated you to start the organization?

II

Well, when I arrived in Berlin after the war broke out, I realized that Yemen had suddenly become this country that was perceived as a warzone and nothing else. And at that point I had never even observed that war. All I knew of my country was the experience of living there before the war. 

So I had the idea to bring together Yemeni artists to share their experiences at that time. I hosted conversations and events at an art salon I started in 2015, just really small self-funded events. And through that I realized that there was a hole that I had to fill. There were simply no spaces for Yemeni artists to discuss their art and artistic practice. 

LY

What’s next for you?

II

Lately I’ve been thinking, a little over a year after returning here, that I am finally able to navigate the resources available for New York–based artists, knock on doors of art spaces and be heard. I am excited about the upcoming journey of diving further into my art practice in this new environment, the stories of immigrants I want to tell and the spaces we can collectively create as we claim our own narratives.

This year, I will be creating a photo and oral history project documenting the images and experiences of Yemeni Americans. The project “Reclaiming Realities” will be developed as part of my Create Change residency at the Laundromat Project. I will photograph and interview Yemeni bodega workers across New York City, creating space for each subject to tell their personal story of coming to America and building a life here. Please join me at the Laundromat Project for my open studio on April 6. 

I should also mention Arsheef (the Arabic word for “archive”), which is a collective I’m launching in early 2022 that will host programs and events focused on Yemeni arts and culture, promoting the work of Yemeni artists living in Yemen while also creating a space for the Yemeni American community to celebrate their culture here in America. I am really looking forward to the launch of the collective and to developing it with other creatives. I am always excited about this part, about the journey of creating art and artistic spaces. 

It’s always been about the journey for me. That’s my joy.

SJ Sindu’s second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods (2021), follows a blue-skinned, black-blooded child-god narrator, Kalki, who is named after the tenth avatar of the Hindu god, Vishnu. Kalki’s father, Ayya, sets up an ashram in Tamil Nadu, India, and makes a living off the many pilgrims who flock there for the healing power of Kalki’s blessings. But Kalki must negotiate the friction between being a child-god and his very human desires—his love for Roopa, a young girl he cures early in the book, and for Kalyani, a trans girl who is part of a thirunangaigal troupe. The narrative engages with queer sexual and gender identity, queer kinship, toxic masculinity, familial abuse, superstition, and faith. It ricochets from Tamil Nadu and Delhi in India to New York, New Jersey, and Charleston, West Virginia, in the United States, looking at the ways in which a perpetual outsider comes of age on his terms. 

With a vast cast of intriguing characters as well as two powerful climaxes at the end of the book—thematic and emotional—Blue-Skinned Gods demonstrates Sindu’s narrative power. I reached out to Sindu earlier this winter to discuss their sophomore novel. During our video chat, Sindu and I discussed the careful choices they made as a writer in creating the world of Kalki, one that is filled with despair as well as joy.

Following Blue-Skinned Gods, Sindu has published a hybrid fiction-poetry chapbook, Dominant Genes (Black Lawrence Press, 2022) and written a forthcoming middle-grade graphic novel, Shakti (HarperCollins, 2023). The author is currently working on a third novel, War Child, that traces the journey of several Sri Lankan Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka to Toronto.

—Sanchari Sur

Sanchari Sur

I’m interested in your motivations behind writing this book. For example, your first novel is set partly in Sri Lanka, your country of birth. Why was a large part of this book set in India?

SJ Sindu

I wanted a place where Hinduism was the norm, where it was expected and where it was dominant and hegemonic. In Kalki’s childhood, it would have been the late ’90s, and then into the 2000s. We see this rise of Hindu nationalism, or the beginnings of the rise. I wanted to set it against that backdrop, because I wanted any sort of critique of religion or religiosity or cultishness to reflect back directly on Hindu nationalism and Brahmanism. I think the other motivation was that my family is extremely religious and I’m not, and I wanted to understand them better. I wanted to understand their pull toward faith because I don’t feel that pull. I do feel a connection to my culture, but I feel it’s devoid of religion. 

SS

Tell me a little bit about what the journey has been like from when you began dreaming of this book to its release. In an NPR interview, you mentioned that you were a teenager when this idea came to you. But you have also mentioned the 2011 documentary Kumaré as a direct inspiration in a recent interview in Chatelaine. 

SJS

I was interested in writing about religion. From the time I was a teenager, me and my family were heading in opposite directions in terms of our religious beliefs, but I wasn’t really thinking specifically about this book until 2014. I had just finished Marriage of a Thousand Lies (Soho Press, 2017). I sent it off to my agent, and we were getting ready to send it out to publishers. I was also getting ready to move to Florida for a PhD. I started writing a novel about a hate crime that happened on the heels of 9/11, and I thought that was going to be my next book. I wrote twenty thousand words of it and ended up turning it into a short story instead. 

But then, [there was this other] short story I wrote during that time. It was about a boy who grows wings, who is then believed to be able to heal people if they have one of his feathers. And so people end up devouring him and stripping him of his feathers forcibly. I really liked writing that story. And I liked the kinds of critique it made toward religiosity. I watched Kumaré, and I saw a headline in the news about a young girl born in India with multiple limbs, who is believed to be a goddess. I had also watched Dasavatharam (2008), the Tamil movie with Kamal Haasan, this terrible movie. I was sort of thinking about all of these things, and I conceived of Kalki as a young child-god because I was also thinking, “How do I situate this within mythology that makes sense?” He’s not just a random child-god, but specifically the tenth incarnation of Vishnu. 

I started writing the book when I moved to Florida, because I knew it was going to be my dissertation. I was living alone for the first time, and I had this and me and my cat. And I just wrote, from beginning to end, chronologically. I think it’s the most consistent writing schedule I’ve had, maybe ever. I was writing almost every day, churning out words. It was a great experience. 

Unlike many other projects I’ve worked on that have changed significantly over the course of time, I’ve felt like every revision of Blue-Skinned Gods seemed to be about capturing Kalki’s voice, because if I could capture that, then everything else would fall into place. It was a lot of very ephemeral, language-based, voice-based stuff I was doing in every draft. 

SS

Since you mentioned a Tamil movie, I was very struck by Ayya, Kalki’s father, and the almost South Asian pop culture–villainesque violence he exhibits towards Kalki, Roopa, his brother and his family, and even his own wife. Who or what was your inspiration for Ayya?

SJS

I don’t think I had a specific person in mind, but I can’t help but be inspired by the Tamil movies that I watched. I wanted Ayya to take on characteristics of not just the stereotypical villain, but also the ways in which Tamil heroes sometimes act specifically toward women. They’re sort of self-righteous, religious, very confident in what they think is right and wrong—how women should act, how their family should act. I wanted to incorporate those aspects, too, because I think they are villainous, and to combine aspects of the typical Tamil heroes, specifically from Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan. I wanted to show what is traditionally accepted as heroic behavior in Tamil culture in a negative light, to show its sinister side.

SS

I don’t think it’s just limited to Tamil culture. I’ve seen this in Bollywood and Bengali movies—this kind of toxic masculinity of the father that has been normalized, and where emotional violence is so normal that the physical violence is not even surprising. I think the fact that I wasn’t surprised by the physical violence in the book shocked me more. 

SJS

The critique a lot of people have of this book is that they don’t understand why Ayya acts the way he does, why he’s so terrible. As a fiction writer, I maintain that having a reason why people are bad is not true to life. Some people are just greedy. Or just mean. And I wanted to have that too. It’s not really about Ayya. It’s about how Kalki reacts to him. It’s not Ayya’s story. The fact is, Kalki is telling the story, and he doesn’t care why Ayya is the way he is.

SS

Thematically, I found that the book explores trauma and overcoming multiple traumas while coming of age. How difficult—or not—was it for you to encounter trauma that wasn’t your own, as traumatic moments you inhabited while writing them?

SJS

I think it was a more pleasurable experience to write this book than it was to write the first one, because Marriage of a Thousand Lies is my trauma, right? It’s very close to the kinds of trauma I have. So, it was difficult to write that book, whereas this one is more of a head book than a heart book. 

I really liked the character of Kalki. I found him to be a good headspace to embody even when he was processing trauma, because he is a fairly resilient kid and has all of these weird ways in which he copes—part of that is his training, part of that is the fact that he thinks he’s God, and part of that is his relationships with other people who are supportive to him. 

That said, I was resistant to inhabiting the interiority of Kalki. My agents could tell, and I could tell. They kept pushing me by saying, “You’re not doing it, you’re not mapping his psyche the way he needs to be.” I got really, really frustrated because I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. We went back and forth for a year, and I finally decided to seek out a therapist who could help me. I’ve been in therapy most of my adult life, but I’d never thought about seeking therapy specifically for this reason. I did find a therapist who was able to help me break through that psychological barrier and access Kalki’s interiority. And I think that completely transformed the writing, that allowed me to fully embody him in a way I hadn’t been able to. I think it was mostly that I had my own traumas to deal with, and I did not want to inhabit or take on traumas that weren’t already there.

SS

Kalki seems to interact only with two avatars of Vishnu, Ram and Krishna. But there are so many other avatars that you mention in passing, notably, the nonhuman ones of Matsya, Narasimha, and Varaha. They did not make an appearance. Can you speak to your choice of limiting Kalki’s interactions to only Ram and Krishna until the very end?

SJS

I wanted the interactions to be able to be explained away logically. Kalki imagines Ram and Krishna when he’s young—he sort of “feels” them there. He never sees anything. But then later whenever he sees them, he’s really high or just blackout drunk. I wanted it to be him talking to himself, essentially. He’s outsourcing his own interior monologue and making it into a dialogue. It didn’t quite work to have any nonhuman versions. 

As a kid, Kalki idolises Ram and Krishna. Ram is serious, he comes from a book [the Rāmāyana] that doesn’t have a ton of interiority in it and is sort of like, “This is my dharma. This is what I’m supposed to do. This is duty.” And then Krishna comes from a book [the Mahābhārata] where it’s all interiority. He is like, “No one is fully good. No one is really bad. Everyone is in the middle. Everyone has grey morality. In some way, everyone is implicated.” I love that sort of moral ambiguity in the Mahābhārata. I wanted those two to be the two poles, with Kalki right in the middle.

SS

Let’s segue into the ambiguity of Kalki’s gender and sexuality. In his body, he’s already visibly queer because of his blue skin. In his desires as well, he seems to be pansexual—there are his attractions to thirunangaigal [trans] Kalyani; his cousin’s bisexual trans roommate, Han; a former Kumari [a worshipped child-goddess in Nepal] Sunita; the gay man he meets in a bar, Julian; and sometimes in fleeting moments, even to his cishet cousin, Lakshman. You state in your Chatelaine interview that Kalki is nonbinary. Can you speak to the ambiguity of Kalki’s gender and sexuality?

SJS

I wanted Kalki to have a little piece of me, and he got it in little bits. He’s sort of bookish, he’s a little awkward. He’s not always sure what the right thing to do is. But he also got my pansexual feelings, my nonbinary identity. And it made him much easier to write. It made him closer to me. But I also think that if you truly believe yourself to be a Hindu god, you can’t really have a strong attachment to gender or sexuality, because everybody changes. Does a god have gender? We ascribe certain genders to Krishna and Ram, but they don’t actually, in truth, have gender. I was thinking about all of that while at the same time thinking if gods embody the energy of the universe in some way, which is feminine, then they all are sort of fluid. I wanted Kalki to think of himself that way, but I didn’t want it to be about gender and sexuality. I just wanted him to be queer in many ways, but that’s not what the story is about. 

SS

For me, the most alive scenes in the book were Kalki’s interactions with queer and trans characters like Kalyani, Han, and Sunita. Can you talk about your thought process behind crafting those interactions?

SJS

I specifically wanted this to be a feminist work, and I felt weird centering what seems to be a male story. I wanted the women around Kalki to be the lifeblood of the story. They provide the wisdom, the complications, the complexities. They push him on his beliefs and everything he’s been taught. And they provide the other perspective, the non-patriarchal perspective. If there’s nobody to provide that, then I don’t know how Kalki would access it. 

Most of them happened to become queer in the writing, including his mother. But I think the proliferation of queer women is important to the story because not only are they outside of a male perspective, they’re also outside of a heteronormative perspective, and they pull Kalki out of his ascribed maleness or prescribed maleness and heteronormative thinking. I wanted him to have enough encounters where his mind and heart expand. And for me, my experience has been that my mind and heart have expanded through interactions with queer woman, cis and trans and nonbinary. So that’s what I know and what I know of the world, and that’s how it came out in the book.

SS

I’m very struck by the absence of actual sex in the book. The scenes start with kissing and touching, and the sex is over. And I’m curious to know why we never see the characters actually having sex.

SJS

It’s a good question [laughs]! I think it’s more of a personal take. I grew up writing a lot of very explicit erotic fan fiction, and I read a lot of erotic fan fiction, and most of it is just bad. I know how hard it is to write a sex scene that’s sexy. I still haven’t figured out a way to do it. I did it once in my first book but even then, it was in very ephemeral terms. It wasn’t explicit. I still haven’t figured out a way to do a good explicit sex scene. Maybe, eventually, I will be a good enough writer to do it. But right now, I am not [laughs]!

“Writing is easy,” Pulitzer Prize–winning sportswriter Red Smith once said. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open your veins, and bleed.” Putting pen to paper (or fingers to a keyboard) is never a simple task, even for seasoned writers. Even our Margins and Open City Fellows—and there’s quite a handful of them—can attest to that. Many of them, though, have gone on to write and report for mainstream publications and publish books. In this series, we reached out to our former fellows and asked them to give us a glimpse of their writing lives and to share some tips on how they navigate this creative process called writing.

Astha Rajvanshi was an Open City Fellow in 2019. Her first story, “The Absence of Atta and the Dearth of Dal,” talks about how the scarcity of these staples gave rise to a food pantry offering culturally appropriate South Asian food in NYC. In “No Longer ‘Apu,’ Not Yet Beyond ‘Mindy’,” Astha asks, “How can we reimagine South Asians on the big screen?” She also wrote about a priceless gesture that a deli in Manhattan offered to mostly immigrant taxi drivers in “Taxi Cab Drivers Have Nowhere to Go.”

Here’s Astha.

—Noel Pangilinan

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1.       What’s on your nightstand?

My wrist watch, a bottle of water, my phone and charger, and a copy of Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, and My Life in Full by Indra Nooyi.

2.       How do you start your day? What’s a typical day for you?

I start my day with a cup of coffee and a long shower. Typically, I’ll be at my desk or in a cafe writing and reading until about 5, when I go for a long walk at dusk in Bandra, my neighborhood in Mumbai, which is right by the Arabian Sea. Then, I’ll return home and watch mind-numbing reality television with dinner.

3.       Why coffee and not or tea?

There’s no compelling reason for why (coffee), it’s just a habit I’ve cultivated since I was in high school, and now, I can’t imagine my world without coffee.

4.       Any book you’re reading now?  Any podcasts you’re listening to now?

I’m reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. As someone living and writing about marginalized communities in India, this book has given me so much to think about comparatively! 

5.       When do you write best?

I don’t have a set time of day, but I’ll write whenever motivation strikes, though I think my best writing happens in the afternoon.

6.       How and where do you get ideas for your stories?

I read as much as I can about a place or a topic—the news, articles, tweets, street signs—and then I try to talk to as many people as possible who may have something to say about it. Sometimes, if I’m traveling, I’ll get ideas from observing the small details of everyday life.

7.       Do you have any tips for interviewing people?  Like, what tools do you always use when reporting?

What has worked for me is to try and have a conversation with them, rather than bombard them with direct questions about any particular issue. Often, I find that the most revealing, surprising or delightful details in a story come from the person first describing their day-to-day, which can then expand into looking at the wider context in which they operate. I also always try to be upfront with the subjects about what I’m working on and why I’m talking to them, so they don’t feel misled by my intentions.

8.       How do you deal with writer’s block?

Melissa Febos once wrote, “I don’t believe in writer’s block. I only believe in fear,” which I think is so true in my case. The only thing that works when I get in that state is to write a sentence—any sentence—no matter how bad it is. It’s a start, which is better than nothing.

9.       What are you working on now and what recent work are you proud of?

I’m currently working on the first chapter of what will hopefully come together as a book on migrants in India. Recently, I wrote about displaced climate refugees in the Sundarbans, an ecosystem of fragile islands in Eastern India which has now become the global epicenter of climate change. I’m proud of it because it is the kind of writing I always hoped to do.

10.      What’s your fondest memory of being an AAWW Fellow?

AAWW gave me so much: community, encouragement to pursue my passion, the brains, hearts and feedback of smart and generous people. My Open City Fellow cohort made a trip to Brooklyn once for an immigrant food tour—it was both delicious and educational!

□ □ □ □ □

You may also be interested in these related stories:

Intuition Is My Main Tool by Chaya Babu
Writer’s Block? What’s That? by Humera Afridi
Write Like a Fugitive by The AAWW Interns

As a Filipino myself, I was quite elated about the publication of Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines in March 2021 and grateful to its publisher, Jee Leong Koh of Gaudy Boy Press. I am very thankful for this transpacific dissemination of Filipino voices that are otherwise unheard, not nationally celebrated back in the Philippine archipelago. 

The publication of Ulirát is a moment to experience how dignified, how communicative, and how diverse spoken and living languages are in the Philippines. Readers will encounter stories translated from Akeanon, Cebuano, Filipino, Hiligaynon, Ilocano, Kinaray-a, and Waray. Carving out a space for authors of regional languages—and not just Filipinos who write in English—in the context of postcolonial Philippines is difficult and rare. Questions around the legitimacy of languages persist, frozen in internal debates between language and dialect and the challenges of resisting classist and colonialist ideas of language put forth in creative writing classrooms. These ideas are residues of imperialism that render our voices endangered by neoliberal commerce, myopic state-designed mechanisms to promote art and literature, and the limited support writers receive from institutions supposedly built to protect all voices and not just some. The publication of Ulirát is a feat many of us will remember for a long time—a collection of writing that upholds writing as a creative practice not an event, and that shows the human condition of the Filipino as plural and widespread. 

With diverse stories from twenty-nine authors and translators and a foreword by Gina Apostol, the anthology is poised to challenge some stereotypes about Filipinos and to compound Filipino identities within and out of the country. The anthology gives the world another way to witness that the Filipino all have a language of their own.

I am absolutely thankful to the editors of Ulirát for giving me this chance to ask questions shortly after the anthology’s publication about the processes involved in its making as well as their aspirations for and with it.

—B.B.P. Hosmillo

B.B.P. Hosmillo

The Philippines—a country with an estimated population of 110 million people in 2021, all sharing in various degrees a long complicated history of violence, sexual prejudice, and migration—definitely has so many stories to tell. I wonder what makes Ulirát the “best” contemporary stories in translation. This is not to say that the stories in this anthology are not of high quality, but because of the attached othering of this very political term “best.” I wonder about the intention: Why is Ulirát the best contemporary stories in translation from the Philippines?

Tilde Acuña

The term “best” indeed makes the anthology explicitly ambitious, to say the least. If anything, we are trying to “other” the already familiar Philippine fiction in English and Filipino, in order to provide literal spaces for othered Philippine languages. Hence, the decision to punctuate the anthology with the piece from Allan Derain’s The Next Great Tagalog Novel as an invitation to interrogate anything that claims to be “best” or “great.” Even our very own offering to Anglophone readers who are interested in reading works in translation.

B.B.P. Hosmillo

How do you locate the publication of this anthology in the context of recent Philippine literature?

John Bengan

Books that have recently been published in the Philippines include works in translation. Meanwhile, the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language) has been translating works by Tolstoy, Kafka, Chekhov, and other writers in the public domain into Filipino. Ulirát brings some of our many languages into one anthology and makes them accessible through translation to readers in the country and abroad. It happens that there is now a growing demand for works in translation. Nevertheless, we hope that more anthologies of verse or prose back home would attempt to publish writing translated from our many languages. 

B.B.P. Hosmillo

What’s very interesting about this publication is its transnational dimension. Ulirát is authored and translated by Filipinos not all living in the Philippines and published by Gaudy Boy Press, an emerging Southeast Asian presence in the United States that has a strong intention to honor works of Asian heritage. What is the story of Ulirát’s transnational journey?

Kristine Ong Muslim

Because there are at least 150 languages in the Philippines, I knew I could not create a comprehensive anthology of translations alone. When I approached John Bengan—who I already know for his fine translations of short fiction from Cebuano—and Tilde Acuña, that’s when the vision, the guiding principles for the anthology, developed a more cohesive and more practical shape. And by “practical” I mean something that addresses a present need that can be realized in book form. Something that is grounded not just by the desire to see the ways of the old being done up in new or interesting ways. The book has to be something that has never been tried before because of the difficulty involved in creating it. It has to be a book that dreams big.

When Daryll Delgado and Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III agreed to coedit, we were able to adequately cover more ground. Eventually, it became less about what we want and more about how we can strike a balance between where we are being led by the materials available to us and what is achievable at the moment with our individual skills, network, and resources.    

B.B.P. Hosmillo

In making the anthology, what did you consider in selecting the texts to be translated? What were the choices and decisions involved in your creative process regarding the selection of translators and subject matter? What kind of book did you try to form during Ulirát’s conception, and what kind of book did you want the rest of the world to hold?

Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III

Translation is always an act that presupposes and interrogates existing structures and establishments of power. The most fundamental question in considering which works to include was that of availability of the material and its compatibility with the anthology’s core vision. As mentioned by Kristine, while all of the editors had the freedom to pitch a text for translation, at the end of the day, it’s all about striking a balance between the materials available to us and our individual skill, network, and resources. The latter is particularly true in our case since Ulirát—while greeted warmly by a number of writers in the Philippines—was and still is a project that can ruffle a lot of feathers. As mentioned in the book’s introduction, we wanted to come up with an anthology that will not only carry with it the force of the “best” (though this epithet and aesthetic category is also questionable in most occasions) stories in translation from the Philippines, but also change the ways Philippine literature is produced and presented outside the country. And while I think there’s a long way to go before major changes in Philippine literature can be felt, we can at least say that we started the ball rolling.

John Bengan

While language was our priority, we tried to come up with a book that could be as inclusive as possible, although yearning for such is bound to fail. We wanted to offer readers outside of the Philippines an anthology that would give them a better idea of the multilingual aspect of living in these islands. Paradoxically, translation serves as a conduit of sorts, funneling these different languages into one dominant language. However, since the editors and translators in this book are aware of the kind of translation we were going for—one that always refers back to the source, a translation that never presents itself as if it were an “original” but rather carries traces of its transformations—we are able to cover a gamut of experiences that have been described first in local languages. In the context of the Philippines, there are still deeper layers of marginalization not represented in this book. However, in the context of literature translated into English, the likes of Firie Jill T. Ramos of Tacloban, Leyte, and Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano of Matanao, Davao del Sur, have been given a chance to be heard. 

B.B.P. Hosmillo

Airport, traffic, the experience of transforming houses and cities, the drastic changes in Filipino mobility—these images and themes are quite succinctly presented in the anthology. With these literary devices, we get to stare at the questions: Who needs to leave the Philippines? And who cannot go back home? When we think of Ulirát, how important is it that we think of labor issues and the entangled histories of different forms of poverty? How can we use Ulirát to understand the relationship between Filipinos and the industry of cheap service? What does Ulirát say about powerlessness and the powers that sustain it?

Daryll Delgado

I think it is always important to think of labor issues all the time anyway, not just when thinking about books and literary production. What does it mean for an anthology of Philippine works in various Philippine languages to come out of the Philippines, a place better known as a major source of cheap labor for the rest of the world? I guess we can only hope that it also serves the purpose of countering the homogenizing impulse of labor capital to reduce human beings into units of production capacity. Will it change the way migrant Filipino workers are perceived and treated? Not by a long shot. But it might provide a more diverse context for understanding what drives people to leave the country, what they risk and what they stubbornly bring with them, and what insults and injuries their bodies are subjected to once they become part of a foreign labor force.

The politics of survival is an important context to Ulirát, as is how keenly aware Filipinos in general always are of how to navigate and negotiate their relationship to power (and powerlessness). This is also apparent in how we have to speak multiple languages, use different official languages for convenience or for power, while nurturing a mother tongue for a different kind of survival. 

B.B.P. Hosmillo

After putting all these stories together and publishing the anthology, what do you remember long after putting the book down?

Kristine Ong Muslim

One of the recurring themes in the stories in Ulirát is precarity. Manifestations of economic precarity, to be specific. And these manifestations are not talked about as mere philosophical abstractions. Rogelio Braga’s “Fungi” had us smelling a mountain of garbage. Doms Pagliawan, in his story “Manila-bound,” looks into an elderly couple’s adjustments as they move from their quiet life in Samar to the country’s capital of Manila with its associated third-world dystopic conditions. Elizabeth Joy Serrano-Quijano’s “Can’t Go Out” captures the precarious circumstances of village life in southern Philippines. Additionally, microcosms of this “precarity” are represented, as in the case of Allan N. Derain’s story, which reveals the dynamics of working within and without literary institutions, for and against which aspiring writers define and contrast themselves—negotiations between agents and structures that shift from time to time. Ulirát, even its stories that rattle with absurdist and mythical takes, can also be used as lines of inquiry into how Filipinos can begin to imagine the post-human/trans-human era, even a post-capitalist Philippines (as some of the stories can aid in understanding the past and present state of Filipino workers).

Tilde Acuña

Also reflective of popular concerns are Timothy Montes’s “The Fishmonger’s Love Story” and John Iremil Teodoro’s “Why Berting Agî Never Smiles,” which share the theme of a beloved’s return that turned bitter. Interestingly, both stories are situated in rural poor communities, where the characters look forward to reuniting with former friends and acquaintances—be it at a town dance (in Montes) or a wake (in Teodoro). Such a theme is reversed in Pagliawan’s “Manila-bound,” which begins with a high regard and awe for the promises of the capital and ends with such a delusion being somewhat thwarted. Another theme common with these three, and possibly other stories in the collection, is a fatalist worldview that merits necessary wagers. In third-world “developing” countries stunted by first-world “developed” ones (imperialists), one needs no less than to dare to struggle and dare to win, whether in re-establishing connections with loved ones in the past or constructing a better society for future generations.