“We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe. Although the Congressman was joking, we probably did know white people better than they knew themselves, and we certainly knew white people better than they ever knew us. This sometimes led to us doubting ourselves, a state of constant self-guessing, of checking our images in the mirror and wondering if that was really who we were, if that was how white people saw us. But for all we thought we knew about them, there were some things we knew we did not know even after many years of forced and voluntary intimacy, including the art of making cranberry sauce, the proper way of throwing a football, and the secret customs of secret societies, like college fraternities, which seemed to recruit only those who would have been eligible for the Hitler Youth.”
My professor told me to read that book, she said, after I told her that I was reading The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen But I’m not Vietnamese, she said. Just because I’m Asian, he thinks I should read this?
“What was that line from Marx? the General said, stroking his chin thoughtfully as he prepared to quote my notes about Marx. Oh, yes. “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” Isn’t that what’s happening here? Marx refers to peasants but he may as well refer to us. We cannot represent ourselves. Hollywood represents us. So we must do what we can to ensure that we are represented well.”
But how do we represent ourselves? and how do we speak to ourselves? How do we speak to the structures of resistance? For the struggle of belonging? Or is the sense of belonging the Asian Diasporic Fundamental Fantasy that we must cross before we can be fully ourselves— that is, nowhere, and nothing. Maybe there, we will live, together. —Dec 1, 2023