Quiz: Which Queer Book Should You Read To Close Out AAPI Month?

I’ve gathered suggestions from the Autostraddle team and consulted my personal reading list to offer you a very unique reading recommendation! Please enjoy a captivating queer read by an AAPI author as we move into the season of leisurely reading by the pool and generally being gay.

Editor’s Notes: On AAPI Heritage Month 2021

An inside look, just for A+ members, from Autostraddle’s editors on the process, struggles, and surprises of working on what you’re reading on the site. We learn so much from this work before it ever even makes it to your eyes; now you can, too!

The last time I did anything remotely like this was fifteen years ago, when I edited my high school’s literary journal. And then I graduated, set my sights on other pursuits and stopped writing.

But, now, I’ve found my way back.

Fifteen years ago, I had deeply disconnected myself from being Asian. By that point, I had long stopped watching Bollywood movies, hated eating Indian food and never told anyone I was obsessed with anime. The notion that I might actually be queer was beyond anything I could possibly imagine. So, I can’t help but smile, albeit a little sadly, that what’s pulled me back into this world of writing and editing is my desire to make sure that the stories of queer and trans Asians and Pacific Islanders are told in ways that feel true to us. It took me fifteen years to bring all these threads together, but I suppose — at least, I made it?

I haven’t been on the queer part of my journey for very long, but when my relationship ended two years ago, the first thing I did was look for queer Asian stories. I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone, that the things that felt impossible to me were things others could relate to as well. I found some of what I was looking for, but what quickly became clear was the scarcity of API perspectives in queer and trans discourse. API identity is, for better or for worse, a massive umbrella covering large swathes of the world, and yet the breadth of it barely registers in a cursory search for queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islander content.

When I started thinking about the theme for this year’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, I was reminded of words Karen Lee had shared with me in an interview about the pandemic last year. Karen is one of the co-chairs of Q-Wave, a NYC-based community organization for queer Asians who identify as women, nonbinary and/or trans. Reflecting on what it means to be queer and API she said:

“Often times, you think of queerness as a white thing, and then when you think of Asian-ness you don’t see any room for queerness in that.”

Her words resonated deeply with me, and I’ve held that thought for well over a year now. As I watched anti-Asian violence come to the forefront in the wake of the pandemic and saw Asian communities contend with their relationship to policing after last summer’s protests, I witnessed both the vulnerability and the strength of being queer/trans and Asian/Pacific Islander. Some of the most marginalized members of the API community, facing the dual or triple threats of racism, homophobia and transphobia, were also the ones trying to move their communities to find new ways to protect themselves from violence without relying on increased law enforcement. What does it mean to exist in that liminal space, constantly pushed to the margins on both sides, told that you are neither Asian enough nor queer enough, and yet to be the one propelling both of these communities forward?

As we discussed the theme for this year’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, Autostraddle’s trans subject editor and co-editor for the AAPI Heritage Month Series, Xoài Pham gently nudged me to move past mere reconciliation. She said:

“We are always reconciling our identities as queer Asians. What happens when we move beyond that and begin taking up space as our whole selves?”

And I realized, this was Karen’s point as well. That to exist as a queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islander means to put your stakes in the ground and to say, “I am all of these identities, and I exist, so therefore these identities are me. They must be.”

From start to finish, this year’s AAPI Heritage Month has been about queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islanders laying their claims to all of themselves. Over the course of the last month, over a dozen queer and trans writers and artists from all over the API diaspora have shared what it means to them to hold all their identities in all the pain, pleasure and power that entails.

It’s truly been an honor to have been trusted with these stories, and the stories of dozens upon dozens of others who pitched to be part of the series as well. There is so much richness and so much nuance and so much depth to being queer/trans and Asian/Pacific Islander. In this year’s AAPI Heritage Month, we’ve been able to hold space for a small sliver of it in the hopes that through sharing this work, queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islanders from all over the world feel a little less alone in taking up their own space, as well.

The Right to Breathe

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

I’m struggling. More so than usual. What over a year of grieving through a pandemic has given me: the courage to let go of the stories I told myself as coping mechanisms.

I am not okay. Most of my life, I thought I would be okay if I got pretty enough, successful enough, had enough friends. If I looked like I had myself put together, maybe it’d be real somehow. But I’m not okay. I am scared. And many days, I think happiness is impossible.

The average person, at rest, breathes 12 to 16 times a minute.

A few weeks ago, a Vietnamese man in Indiana offered two men a ride home. He was then killed and dismembered in his own car.

“Did you hear what happened to Shane Nguyễn, Ba?” I ask my dad. “Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t let anyone near your car. Don’t go outside alone.” He’s the type to be generous to strangers. There are many people who want to see my father dead more than anything else. I tell him I’ll be ordering self-defense keychains for the family.

Babies cry when they’re born in order to expand their lungs and eliminate fluid blocking their airways. They cry to breathe. “Your baby will cry as long as he needs to in order to start breathing normally,” pediatrician Ana Machado told Romper.

I cry at least once a day, sometimes wailing. I think of the moment I was born, how I must not have cared at all how loud I screamed. I needed to breathe. I needed everyone to know I was here. At times, I wash my face before bed and the sight of my face, so exposed like I’m seeing myself for the first time, brings me to tears.

It’s been six months since I decided to download a dating app. After being in a relationship for two years, I forgot how bleak romance is for trans women. I am distorted, bent into different shapes by the whims and fantasies of men. Some men find trans women repulsive. Some just want to know if I have a dick. Some want to experiment to see if they’d like what they see. I am a sex toy expected to have endless customizations. And all I want is someone to hold me. All I want is to know what someone out there will hold me. I admit to myself, wholeheartedly for the first time, that I want a storybook romance.

At the moment, there are over 100 bills restricting access to public life and healthcare for trans youth in U.S. state legislatures. They don’t even want us to have healthcare, let alone experience love.

I walk home, my thumb on the trigger of the pepper spray. I stroll past a family playing music on the sidewalk, the children’s giggles making the air lighter. Then, two bikers speed along my left, the rush of air from their bodies brushing across my cheek.

I turn the dark corner, and here is my light-strewn block. My relief ends quickly when a man also turns the corner. I look back at him and he says, “Hey, baby.” My breath quickens.

I start to walk a little faster. Sarah Everard‘s name crosses my mind. In March, she was walking home from a friend’s house in London. She was last seen on a main road at 9:30pm before she was reported missing and later found dead. I pull out my phone: 9:42pm.

His voice feels close, “You’re so beautiful. Come talk to me.” He says other things I can’t make out. I pretend to be observing something to my left and try to catch how far he is from me with my peripheral vision. I’m only about 20 feet away from my building. I observe how far a bystander might be. There’s someone on the next block who’d hear me if I screamed.

“Let me get your number, beautiful,” he continues, even though I have yet to say a word in response.

I turn into the entryway of my building and sprint, scrambling to get the key fob to scan. I’m frantic now, I can hear my heavy breathing. I look back to make sure he hasn’t caught up. The door buzzes and I crack it open just enough to slip inside quickly, so it can close and lock.

It’s been shown in studies that marine mammals, like bottlenose dolphins and pilot whales, synchronize breathing to reduce tension and stress. The synchronicity increases in highly social situations where many whales are present.

In humans, strong bonds produce what scientists call “interpersonal synchronicity.” Couples sitting together would unconsciously align their breathing rates and heartbeats. Dr. Pavel Goldstein’s study with the University of Colorado, Boulder found that when one partner experiences pain, it interrupts the synchronicity. But when the couple is allowed to hold hands, physical touch reduces the pain and allows them again to fall into sync.

“Aloha is not just a greeting,” my sister explains. “It means we’re exchanging breath, or what we call hā. Our breaths are connected.”

Derek Chauvin was a rare case: police officers are rarely convicted of the murders they commit. In his last moments, George Floyd said “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times. The final words he uttered were: “They’ll kill me.”

Mhelody Bruno was a Filipina trans woman who died of what the court called “erotic asphyxiation” in 2019. Her boyfriend at the time, a corporal in the Royal Australian Air Force, pleaded guilty to killing her by choking.

Five years earlier, in October of 2014, another Filipina trans woman named Jennifer Laude was killed by asphyxiation at the hands of a U.S. Marine. She was found slumped lifeless over a toilet.

Three months prior, in July of 2014, Eric Garner‘s last words, too, were “I can’t breathe.” Like George Floyd, Eric Garner was a Black father. The police officer who killed him with a chokehold, Daniel Pantaleo, was not indicted.

In November of 2020, my dad caught COVID-19. Luckily, I was home for the holidays. His condition worsened quickly. He spent all day in his bed, reading and eating the little bit that he could. We delivered food to his door and he’d hobble over to retrieve it. We started placing the tray of food on a high chair when it was clear he couldn’t bend down.

I bought a pulse oximeter to measure his blood oxygen levels. “Ba, can you breathe?” I asked him every morning, afternoon, and evening.

He didn’t have the air to speak. So he started texting me. “Oxygen level up and down today,” he’d write. My childhood nebulizer, a hulking machine that felt like a hospital’s version of hookah, was placed in his room. He spent 15 minutes inhaling vaporized medicine every night before bed. I remembered all the times he was the one preparing the medication for me, when my asthma was a daily pain.

The roles were reversed.

I wrote him letters every day. It felt urgent to tell him everything I wanted him to hear: I love you. I’m proud of you. I want you to forgive yourself.

There’s a Little India in South Africa

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

Five years ago in Colaba, Mumbai, my jaw dropped as I surveyed the artwork in a Maharashtra gallery depicting Hindu deities with dark skin. In a state of bewilderment, I complained, “Back home in South Africa, in all the years that I snuck into my grandparents’ prayer room, I’d never seen anything like this. They were always depicted as light skinned or blue!” A Mumbai based artist herself, my friend Priyanka nodded her head and explained the whitewashing and colorism in Indian art history and society. It didn’t surprise me, given the frequency with which I had personally experienced this from Indian family members growing up.

“Tell me something I don’t know!” I said, and she explained how Raja Ravi Varma’s artwork circulated India and the Indian diasporas. Born in 1848, Varma gained acclaim and criticism for his work depicting his interpretations of Hindu mythology into the European realist historicist painting style. Amongst his extensive collection, works like Shri Rama Vanquishing the Sea offered viewers an opportunity to put an image to moments in mythology as Varma interpreted the stories of Hindu deities and characters in the epics and Puranas. In 1894, he set up a lithographic press, allowing his work to be reproduced en masse at a low rate. The innovations in technology created an affordability for ordinary people and his work began to circulate homes of people on every continent. While some write him off as a “calendar artist,” his work has had a significant impact on Indian popular art, influencing Indian religious art for generations after his death.

Raja Ravi Varma, Saraswati

“So white Krishna is like white Jesus, then?” I asked. She laughed, explaining that although Varma’s work was far more contemporary than the depictions we’ve come to know in Christianity, it could lead to the same type of white-washed depictions that have no grounding in scripture.

We left the gallery and walked around Apollo Bandar until we reached the gateway of India, which arches over the Indian Ocean, creating what feels like a portal. Inscriptions on the wall read, “Erected to commemorate the landing in India of their Imperial Majesties King George V and Queen Mary on the Second of December MCMXI.” I sighed, heavy-hearted, wondering what secrets those waters held.

On the Southernmost tip of Africa, the East Coast is met by the Indian Ocean. Salty and humid winds pass through the hills of greenery, which seem luscious and never ending. Whenever I land in Durban, South Africa, there’s no feeling as sweet as home nor a drive so bitter, as we pass through sugarcane plantations for miles on end. Outside of India, Durban has the largest population of Indians in the world. The population is heterogeneous, with each family line arriving at different times and under different circumstances, ranging from people who were enslaved during the Dutch colonial era, to “indentured laborers” who worked on the sugarcane plantations, to “free Indians” who immigrated at their own expense.

Apartheid-era laws had segregated the population into racially homogeneous areas. Due to the notorious Group Areas Act, Indian communities quickly formed their own worlds within South Africa, almost completely separated from the experiences of other populations and cultures within the country. To create further division amongst people of color, the Apartheid government insidiously established a racial hierarchy which placed black and indigenous people at the bottom of the rank, enforcing superiority complexes and anti-black stereotypes. To suffocate less under the Apartheid regime, one had to try their best to gain a closer proximity to whiteness through assimilation.

The caste system within Indian culture adds fuel to the fire of white assimilation in South Africa. While the caste system is specifically related to a hierarchical system of social organization within Indian culture, colorism becomes intertwined as privilege and esteem is often assigned to lighter skinned Indians. Although skin color diversity exists within each caste, historical biases towards dark skinned people remains prevalent to this day.

South African Indians have also creolized the rhetoric around the subcultures within Indian culture. People are identified amongst the group through their surnames and family histories to name a few factors. For instance, Tamil people became known as Porridge O’s (Porridge people) for their involvement in prayers known as Marie Amman Poojay. While the experiences and history of Tamil people in South Africa is not homogeneous, colorism and caste bias arise within the Indian community through anti-dark skinned slurs which are used to stereotype and demean Tamil people by associating them with the embodiment of evil from the Ramayana. And, While Roti-O’s (Roti people) are broadly defined as Hindu people, there is a distinction between religion, culture and caste as Hindu Tamil people are not considered as a part of the group. Roti-O’s are often stereotyped as lighter skinned, more affluent and while the group is not homogeneous, there is a potential for a more privileged historical introduction to South Africa due to their higher social status within the caste system in India.

When I was born, my grandmother tried to squeeze the blackness out of my nose. She was horrified at the size and shapes of my features, scanning my infant body to find evidence of “non-Indianness” as quickly as possible, while I was still malleable. My mother walked into the room one day in protest, to which my grandmother responded, “There’s no bridgebone! You must pinch it like this everyday while the baby is still small, and it will form!” Astounded yet unsurprised, my mother pulled me away and yelled, “You’re suffocating the child!”

As the years went by, I slowly grew into my skin with a sense of pride. At school, kids bullied me for my features. “Hey Phuthu lips.” (A staple in black communities in South Africa, Phuthu is a dish made from ground maize meal.) When I told my mother about my nickname at school, she laughed, “Tell them it’s called Hollywood lips,” and although I never did, I watched closely as she affirmed everything she was criticized for, wearing it like a crown.

My high school had an Indian majority population, with students from different castes and historical backgrounds. As people aged and entered the dating scene, an underground market for skin whitening creams emerged at school. The “boys” bleached their hair blonde and secretly sold whitening creams out of their backpacks, in an attempt to win the attention of “girls,” with their Jonas Brothers inspired aesthetics.

While I witnessed high school cisheteronormativity and colorism dominate the scene, I was met with an array of people across the color and gender spectrums who stood proudly in themselves amidst the noise. From owning their sexualities in a homophobic climate, to acknowledging the beauty in being dark skinned, the process wasn’t neat, with negative self talk recurring in the process of affirmation. Regardless of the tumultuous nature of the cycle between affirmation and negative self-talk, it’s impressive to imagine the generational cycles that high school children were beginning to break with their shifting perceptions of self.

Deep within queer confusion and grey asexuality, I found myself in pockets of LGBTQ+ community, avoiding the dating scene and the school culture altogether. As I recluded into myself, I connected with a Hindu non-binary femme, who told me of her acceptance within the temples of Durban. Growing up, I’d quiver to imagine Muslims or Hindus in my family responding positively towards my transness. She explained, “I’m not just accepted, I’m celebrated. I’m in charge of all of the food preparation, and I’m part of the rituals for certain prayers like Kavadi.” She explained her process of praying and fasting as she prepared to embody the goddess Kali and carry chariots during the festival.

I began to notice the gaps between the transantagonism I experienced in daily life and scripture as I learned about the existence of trans people within Indian and African societies throughout time. There is a pattern in the way colonization has distanced people from affirming the diversity within their own cultures. On one hand, colonial influence had led to a progressive cultural whitewashing, and on the other hand, it buried the layers of gender diversity that was accepted in ancient culture and religion.

Transness, though often stereotyped as a Western innovation, has existed on the African and Asian continents for as long as humans existed. The more I spoke about LGBTQ+ elders amongst friends and studied the history through articles and photographic archives, I saw the way my ancestors looked down on me with love, instead of shame. In a similar way that my jaw dropped when witnessing dark skinned deities represented in Mumbai, I find myself enamored at the richness in gender and sexual diversity, which has been buried under years of colonial influence across cultures.

The streets of Coloba, Mumbai are lined with Banyan trees that hold offerings in their trunks. Garlands of flowers are hung in ceremony as sages and ordinary people pass them by. Priyanka had said that it’s a holy tree that sages sit beneath in prayer. In Durban, there is a Banyan tree in my mother’s backyard. It had been there for years before we moved there, and in all the time that passed us by, we never guessed it’s origin until Priyanka had explained its significance in India. Somewhere down the line, someone from India tried to carry a piece of home with them to South Africa for familiarity and possibly, a place to pray under.

The Birth and Death of a Name

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

I.

This is the story of the birth and death of my name, which means that it is a story about transition, which means that it is necessarily a story about the border between two places and the force with which one rends it. Which means that if you must trace this story to the very beginning, back across three languages, two continents, and countless bodies of water, you will find that this is the story of a boat.

The first boat left a hundred and ten years ago. It left alone, and at night, from a few boards nailed into the dirt with the audacity to call itself a port. Those who stepped on it would never return. All the songs that remain from that time are lamentations. The destination of the boat was not west, but south, toward the equator, where seasons were rumored to have disappeared and even the rain fell warm onto the ground.

If you were the Dutch men in the port awaiting the boat, here is how you would describe what you saw: a small sea of bobbing black heads within a larger sea. Shallow mud in shallow mud. Fair skin, cheekbones that melted into their faces, taut little mouths that crowed even from afar. They were different from the natives of the land you were colonizing, and so they posed a different kind of threat. You had plans for them.

The boat swelled with men and then spat them onto the land. These men tumbled out, dragging their wives off the boat by their wrists and into the land where the ground steamed with heat and seeds sprouted from it unbidden.

They birthed their children and tied red string around their wrists. They did their best to fill their mouths with the language they brought with them. They built churches. They built schools. It all worked: though they never returned home, the language persisted. Among the children of these people were my grandparents.

Illustration by Joyce Chau

I call it the first boat, but this boat was not first in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not the Mayflower, though the people came for the same reasons. It was small and cramped and almost certainly very smelly. Shit wedged its way between the floorboards. Phlegm dried into the railings. The ledger is long gone. So there are no records of this story I can show you, no proof it occurred.

Nevertheless, my grandfather is here, and I am here, and this is what he told me when I asked. And so, at least in this story, this is how it happened. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

Indonesia was dark and warm. The streets were lined with palm trees and cracked dirt. You could buy fruit that sliced into stars, build yourself a thatched room with a dirt floor, find a body of water anywhere you looked. Nevertheless, Indonesia was not a paradise for the Chinese. Tiffany Tsao, a Chinese-Indonesian scholar, translator and writer, notes that common perceptions of the Chinese in Indonesia were as “money-minded, shrewd, and hoarders of wealth.”

Though people of Chinese descent have migrated to the 17,000 islands that comprise what we now call Indonesia since the thirteenth century, systemic national discrimination only began in earnest with Dutch colonization of a place they named the Dutch East Indies. It was an undignified name for a country, derived from the capitalist and colonial enterprise that was the Dutch East India Company. Like many other colonized places, it could not even name itself.

Tsao notes that when the Chinese immigrated during the early twentieth century, the “Dutch administrators segregated Chinese areas from the native population” and deployed “Chinese traders as merchant middlemen” to reify the reputation that they’d invented. This is how the Chinese came to be perceived as a wealthy, penurious, grasping people, a belief that still continues in Indonesia to this day, long after the Dutch have left.

The Chinese found ways to keep their dignity, as people always have, and perhaps even more in more dire circumstances. One of these was through their names. In China, neither women nor men changed their names, even upon marriage; this tradition continued in Indonesia. So though my grandparents were born in Jakarta, they were given Chinese names, and each could well expect to keep their name for the rest of their lives.

Amidst the loathing, the discrimination, the humiliation and ignominy of having a Chinese face, a name was that inviolate thing that would reverse the motion of the boat, slow the inexorable crush of history. Nothing — not migration, adulthood, family, privation, or even death — could take it away from you. In an environment with so little record-keeping to tie one to their past, the name was a way to remember.

In the parts of China I came from, all the members of a family’s generation would share the same first syllable of their given name. So with little else than a name and patience, you could approximate a person’s age, reconstruct what village and province they belonged to. More than being the contents of an archive, the name was a small, complete archive unto itself.

This changed in 1965, when Suharto, the general of the Indonesian army, wrested power over the Indonesian government in a military coup. Scholarly retrospectives of his 32-year reign would call him the most corrupt political leader in modern history, as well as the orchestrator of wholesale cultural genocide of Chinese-Indonesians. Suharto did not delay in fashioning such a reputation: in 1966, the Indonesian government passed Cabinet Presidium Decision 127, a law that commanded all Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent to change their names to Indonesian ones.

Theoretically, there was no consequence to disobeying this law. Yet the staggering majority of people still changed their names, that thing that had once been sacrosanct. There are many forms of consequence that do not require penal intervention, and to not change one’s name came with a steep social price that could lose a person their job, get them rejected from university, turn them into a social pariah.

The stakes were too high for most to keep their names. There was, however, some form of preservation, however meager. The Chinese snuck their old names into their new surnames, often by concatenating the old surname with an Indonesian-sounding prefix or suffix. The name “Wong” might become “Widjaja;” “Lim” could turn into “Halim.” In this way, people tried to remember themselves, even if through a poor rendition of what they once had. The name itself would become that marker of a distinct Chinese-Indonesian identity, separate from both a native Indonesian and a mainland Chinese one.

At the ages of 26 and 30, shortly after the birth of their first child, both of my grandparents sent in their name change papers. My grandfather tucked his old surname into the first syllable of his new first name. Other than that, however, every other syllable was new. It sounded strange in his mouth. It still does.

Sometimes I wake up in a panic, hands clawing at my chest. I think of how it must have been to be called something new that far into your life; how a foreign name was precisely what made you not a foreigner anymore.

Sometimes I wake up in a panic, hands clawing at my chest. I think of how it must have been to be called something new that far into your life; how a foreign name was precisely what made you not a foreigner anymore. One night, I called my grandfather to ask him if he would have given my mother a Chinese name if the 1966 law were not passed. He laughed when I asked this, as if it were obvious.

In fact, he had prepared for her a Chinese name, when my mother was still gathering herself in her mother’s womb. He did not consult the elders in the village as to what the generational syllable of her given name would be. That particular ability of a name to tie a person to a set of similar people was already gone, the process of assimilation well underway even without Suharto’s intervention. Nevertheless, it was a Chinese name, and perhaps even a good one.

But my mother was born in 1966, the year that Cabinet Presidium Decision 127 was passed. So when it came time to write her name down for the birth certificate, they followed the government’s orders. They made something else up. My mother was the first person in her family to have an Indonesian name. The Chinese name lives nowhere now. It exists on no document, on the heading of no school paper, on no birth or marriage certificate. My own mother does not know it.

I asked my grandfather if he still remembered what it was. He told me the name, and I wrote it down. He said it was the first time that anyone had ever done so.

II.

The word “slur” comes from the Middle English “sloor,” meaning “thin or fluid mud.” The mud, and the dirtiness that mud entails, led to the word’s modern, prevailing definition of “an insult or slight.” And the fluid nature of the mud, conferred that other definition: that of a set of notes or words to be played legato, without the cruel interjection of silence. Drunkards slur; so do violins. A slur is a crucial element of music, and not just any music, but the most beautiful kind, where notes gather together to form the raw material of hymns and lullabies.

It is a difficult form to perfect, the slur. Much constrains it. It demands brevity: one, two syllables at most. You must be able to spit it, also whisper it under your breath. It must stand as a complete sentence unto itself.

In the United States, there are all sorts of slurs for East Asian people. Few stretch the imagination; few have that fulminant energy that really reveals the dual nature of the word, explodes an insult into song. But still: the English slur has always demanded at least a minimal form of creativity.

Not so much in Indonesia. Over there, it’s sufficient to use the name of the thing itself. Specifically: Cina, spelled just like that, with a hard “ch”, untempered and uncompressed by the “ai” the way people say it in English. “Chee-nah”: the inflection is all it takes to move it from innocuous descriptor to a mouthful of splinters. It is propulsive — say it enough times, and it will send you back to where you came from. Sometimes, it will even send you forward.

After the 1966 Decision, an identifiably Chinese name would itself become a slur. To keep such a name immediately outed a person not only as ethnically Chinese, but also a law-breaker, a person actively opposed to assimilation and the new government under Suharto. It was only right that as the name itself was the evidence of the crime, the name would become the thing spat at its owner.

With all that regulation, there wasn’t much room left for dignity. Our names were gone. We were still targets for extortion. Our schools were shuttered, our churches razed. Dignity was not given to those who were vilified by their colonizers, loathed by the colonized, respected by no one. Dignity could not be traded, sold, hoarded, packed away in vaults. No, it was no longer economically viable to traffic in dignity.

We trafficked in vulgarity. Hands shoved into pockets, skin that withered in the sun, mouths in a constant state of rudeness. We went into business, exactly what they had accused us of doing. The myth was building itself.

First, the Dutch had helped. Now, Suharto’s government was helping. Tiffany Tsao notes that during this period, the Indonesian dictator “cherry-picked a small handful of ethnic Chinese businessmen to build the nation’s economy, utilizing their capital, networks, and expertise.” In return for the prosperity of a few, Suharto used them as examples to prove malignant stereotypes of Chinese people.

My father tells me what people said to him when he was growing up in Jakarta. Or rather, he tells me what he would have said back to them, if he had the nerve. Instead he only ever says it to me. When he says it he looks so far away.

You call me Cina, Cina, tapi saya yang punya uang; kamu enga punya uang, he gloats.¹ He does not say it in Chinese. No one in my family speaks Chinese anymore.

There is both glee and intense bitterness in his voice. It almost emits a smell. His shirt is full of holes where the sleeve meets the armpit. He has worn this shirt thousands of times. I was the one who benefited from it. He used that money on me.

I find him both very desperate and very brave. But I wish he would behave better.

Here is how the Dutch would have written his story.

There is a Chinese man. And Chinese men crave money. This one is no exception.

He has no money. All he does is think about money and how far away it can take him. He applies to the university. There is a quota for people like him, but he is bright and shrewd, all the weakness wrenched and natural-selected out of him. So he makes the quota. He studies; he studies so much he stops having dreams. He graduates. He becomes a businessman. Of course he becomes a businessman.

Whenever he visits us in America, he buys used textbooks online, back when books were one of the few things you could buy online. He tapes them back up in tattered cardboard boxes, wraps the whole box in tape, leaves not a single inch of cardboard exposed. He ferries them back to Indonesia, sells each book, piece by piece. He hoards the money. He devises a long, patient, multigenerational plan to protect his children from ever being called <em>Cina</em> again.

We permanently moved to America shortly after I was born, sixteen months before the 1998 riots that marked the end of Suharto’s regime. Or, rather, my mother and I moved. My father stayed in Indonesia. He had a business to run.

But he gave me a white name to take with me. It was a prosaic name, a common name, a cautious name, and he gave me no other one. The sort of timeless name listed on the top 200 girls names in the United States for a hundred consecutive years. The sort of name that could be worn like armor.

It worked. I learned the reason for the name’s enduring popularity firsthand; it was practically unweaponizable. I received no slurs. The smell of my Asian lunch offended no one. In America, my parents had found one of those sufficiently affluent neighborhoods for me to grow up in, full of enough well-to-do immigrants, that rendered such concerns as overt racism, at least toward Asian-Americans, obsolete. Even in those early days, we were poor but not vulnerable. And then, time passed, and we weren’t poor anymore.

I have never been called a chink until I moved into a city well into my twenties. I have only been spat on once. I frequently walk alone at night. To say I fear for my safety would be disingenuous.

I have a young, able body that answers to me, and I know the terms of this game. I know not to open my mouth and reveal the ugly surprise of my voice. And so, for the most part, when I follow these rules I do not feel fear.

III.

Life, however, always finds a way to introduce new kinds of shame. The first was the shame of a girl. The second was the shame of a disobedient girl, the kind who wielded a razor on her hair both too little and too much. The last was the shame of a girl who stopped being a girl at all.

I don’t want to justify myself. But my mom laughs whenever she sees me. She tells her friends her daughter looks like a boy and every time it feels like rubbing sand into my skin, turning myself into liquid by the sheer force of it. But I stay quiet. I keep cutting my hair. Sometimes I think of doing more.

After I had meditated on the idea of my transness for a sufficiently long time, I thought that I should change my name. It felt like the trans thing to do. For many trans people, it is the right thing to do. These are the people for whom transition feels like “coming home.” For these people, changing a name can prevent a person from getting misgendered. It can assure a person’s safety. I’ve been told that it feels a lot like walking from shade into a hot square of light.

But what does it mean to change your name when your home does not want you? And what does it mean to change your name when you know nothing of your home? To change a name also feels so violent, hurts so much. It feels like not remembering, when all that I want to do is remember.

To change a name in the service of one’s transness is that act of transforming one’s birth name into a slur. The “birth name” becomes a “dead name”, and to call a person by such a name is unconscionable. It can destroy a relationship. It can end a family. It could end my family. And, however much white people say it, it is not true that I owe my family nothing.

So is this what I want — to end a family?

I don’t consider myself to be transitioning anymore. I’ve stopped trying to go home; I get things all mixed up. It physically tires me to read Indonesian. I use a translator whenever I have to read anything with a word longer than two finger-spans length.

Cina, jorok, berisik: these are the sorts of small words I know; I use them to become someone else. I was not taught them, but I heard them anyway. I know how to be furious in this language. I know how to call a man an idiot four different ways, and the exact degree of nuance to each of those words. I know the words for foam and dirt and spit and water. Also pain. It is so easy to be angry in this language with the few words I remember.

I have a friend, a trans man. A trans elder, really, one of those people who transitioned long before any of our modern day trans influencers came into being. When he transitioned, he sloughed off the name that his parents gave him. But not the first one; the one they gave him when they moved from China to the United States.

He changed his name back, or perhaps forward, to his birth name. For him, transitioning was not migration. It was a return from exile.

He changed his name back, or perhaps forward, to his birth name. For him, transitioning was not migration. It was a return from exile.

I am jealous of him. I wish that I had an Indonesian name, or a Chinese name, or a true birth name, and not this white thing, all sanded edges, all watered-down mud. I want a name that burns the back of a throat. I want to dismember a man using only my blade of a name. I wish I had something more true to come home to.

The story of the birth and death of my name ends here.

In it, I have a name that has sewn me to a history of migration — one of those ageless tales of power and violation. It is not a particularly superlative story, but it is mine.

All of the family photos are gone. My grandfather threw them away this year when my grandparents moved in with their daughter, my aunt, to live the quiet years of their life. It was too late to stop him, but in the end it didn’t matter. He did not weep at their absence. He did not mourn those incinerated paper faces. He forgot about them. His memory was loosening its grip. And the documents — well, those were long gone, lost to time and the wastebasket. There was so much to remember, and so little to hold onto.

So here it is: the remembering, the last archive of what I have left. It’s small enough to fit in your mouth. Hold it there — this name that contains an entire girlhood, and my grandmother’s disappeared name, and the last name my dead violin teacher would know me by, which makes me cry every time I think of it, and her. A name that holds the whiteness thrust upon me, and all the hope of my family — to move us forward, also to stay the same.

My first name, my given name, my birth name, that small poor shriveled unwanted thing — I want to cup it in my hands and tell it: Do not be afraid. Do not rend yourself. Do not falter. I’m here. I will stay with you, just a little longer. And so I answer to it, and so I will answer to it for as long as my body allows. This is the name with which I tell my mother I love her. This is the name by which my mother summons me. Whenever she does, she slurs the words, spits a little. Every time, it sounds like singing.

¹ “But I’m the one who has money; you don’t have money.”

Mourning the Loss of Indigenous Queer Identities

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

I recently came out as gender-fluid, straddling the Western gender binary like it’s about to give me the ride of my life. I grew up hearing that I looked more like a boy than a girl, all while being told how I’m too feminine to be a boy. For a while, I thought that was me just being bisexual, though I could never settle into that identity. It was somewhat right but ultimately wrong because labeling my sexuality didn’t feel like enough. I tried pansexual, and after that, I was just queer for a while. Nothing settled. I thought I could find myself somewhere in this rainbow of colors, but something just always felt off.

That bizarre feeling is something that’s a staple in my American life. I say this because there’s still a degree of separation there, like the dash between Asian and American. It’s a zealous reminder that I am somehow incomplete, that the words I’ve chosen to describe myself are not enough. In each moniker, be it bisexual or pansexual or queer, I searched for some ounce of truth to who I am. And as I grow older, I find it more difficult to truly accept myself because I don’t feel like I have the right words to describe myself. It’s taken me years to realize that I likely never will.

I am part of the Filipino diaspora, though my identity is entirely defined by a strictly Western perspective. I am an immigrant, my English is so good, and the words I’ve used to describe my gender and sexuality are words I learned from Americans. There are parts of myself, however, that cannot fit within the confines of Western language. Words have a history and language has connotations that go beyond definitions. English is a colonizer’s tool, so it does not always have the right expression for who I am. As an immigrant, I thought perhaps that looking back into the history of my people would give me a better way to express my identity.

Growing up in the Philippines, words that meant “gay” and “weird” were always synonymous with each other, and bakla was used to describe the sinners who couldn’t be nailed down by “gay.” My mother and her mother, my Lola, were both devout Catholics. They taught me that Jesus hates The Gays and Probably the Baklas Too in tired monologues ripped straight from our local priest’s mouth.

Someone wrote about the word bakla in The Guardian and how maybe Western members of the LGBTQIA+ community could learn a thing or two from Filipinos. Bakla is our third option, they claim, but even then, it’s not a label: it’s a standalone concept, kind of a catch-all for anyone who isn’t strictly man or woman, gay or queer, and one that Western minds should embrace. And I might agree to that if I wasn’t still so incensed by the fact that we ourselves don’t have a better understanding of the term bakla at all. There is no need for the Western gaze to embrace that fact now because they never did in the first place. Why offer up more of ourselves when the rest of the world has already taken so much from us?

Illustration by Leanne Gan

The Philippines is a beautiful country, but it is a world where nothing, not even our language, was nailed down or set in place because our people are so deeply traumatized from centuries of imperialist brutality. We spoke Tagalog with English and Spanish mixed in. Some of us knew other languages, such as my Lola’s Ilocano, though these languages were not widely taught. I was only told that Ilocano was an old language and that nobody except my Lola could speak it in our family. I learned about how wonderful the U.S. was for saving the Philippines from the Japanese during World War II. At the same time, I constantly heard about how unhappy we were that Americans continued to meddle in our government.

Our collective consciousness mirrors our country’s muddled history. The Philippines I knew was a mashup of the charming East and a forceful West. Lola would occasionally tell me stories about her father, about how the Spaniards were terrified of our people, about how I was one of the last of the Ibaloi Igorots. Our people, according to her, were simple farmers and warriors. We used every part of the animal, always prayed to the land and gave the Earth our respects. Apparently, when outsiders first came to our shores, we welcomed them with open arms.

But we were uncivilized. Lola would cite that marriages were not “sacred” to our people before the Spanish came. Our people were wayward. Our warriors were never strictly men, as they should have been. Women may have laid with other women in “unnatural” ways and so did men. There were probably even people “in between,” though that concept went beyond What God Intended. And though the Spanish tried to “correct” this through the word of their god on their muskets, we would kill them too easily when we felt threatened, which Lola would say was “unfair.”

Though we had taken them in, they always called us savages once they got back to their homelands. We were easy pickings since we were so naive not to see the value in our fertile lands the way that the Europeans did. Our soil was perfect for sugar and tobacco. They did not understand how we had so much gold in our mountains but did so little with it. They thought our mangoes and purple yams were the perfect exotic treats, served up on the backs of the few of our tribesmen they took back to their countries in chains. And the location of our islands were perfect for taking on the East Indies spice trade by storm.

The Spanish were the first to take over. The Dutch sent missionaries on Spanish naval vessels, aiding in the efforts to civilize us. Americans took part in their imperial games and proceeded to “steal” us away. By the second World War, we were finally called a “nation” by the Japanese and Americans who pillaged our homes. But by then, we were broken. Entire cultures that had coexisted for ages were wiped out within a century of constant war. Most were murdered in their homes. Some were dragged abroad in chains and cages to be shown off like animals at carnival exhibits. The Catholic God replaced all of our deities, especially the genderless and intersex gods. Buried alongside countless slaughtered natives were languages that no one cared enough to understand or preserve. The word bakla became an umbrella slur with a history no one can remember.

No one wrote down what happened to the people before my Lola. She didn’t have a birth-certificate because that’s how turbulent things were in her childhood. No one knows who my ancestors were, if they believed in genders, or what their sexuality was. Now my Lola is long gone. I can’t ask her.

But the death of our people, our cultures and the true history of our people is a slow and painful process.

But the death of our people, our cultures and the true history of our people is a slow and painful process. Many miles north of where my Lola and I said goodbye for the last time, tourists drive up the mountains to meet Whang-Od Oggay. She is the last of the Kalinga mambabatok, a tattoo artist within her old tribe, and the tattoos she puts on these tourists were meant for the Butbut warriors who fought to defend our people. Those warriors are long gone, but these travelers will go back to their home countries to complain about the smell of our food. They will return West, where they scoff about immigrants stealing their jobs. Those tattoos are just reminders of an adventure that never happened and a people they will soon forget. History is not kind to the losers, but modernity is worse.

This is the legacy of colonization. It is far more painful than knowing just how many millions were murdered because they weren’t good enough for others to accept. It is the mass extinction of identities and languages that can no longer exist because someone else said they were bad.

We only vaguely remember our ancestors being warriors and forget that they died in horrific ways. Their efforts to save their countrymen or fight for their freedom will be watered down to tactical studies for soldiers and myths of bogeymen hungry for blood. No one will bother to spell their names correctly, if at all, let alone remind the world that many among our ancestors were people who were beyond “queer.”

Children are born into their people’s slow and steady massacre and are given “better” names. They are told they are either boys or girls and that’s all there is to it. Schools teach them that their ancestors were barbarians. The society cobbled up around them tells them that their desires must adhere to the rules of their colonizer’s beliefs. They learn that their nation is in ruins, and that it’s better to live somewhere else. When they do live elsewhere, they stop speaking their language. Ilocano is ugly, after all, and so is Tagalog, so it’s better to speak English.

Our identities are built on the graves of perspectives that would have better embraced who we truly are. We gladly spit on them when we leave, but look back with sorrow only if we realize just how much we’ve lost and continue to lose.

I was taken away from my homeland so my mother could find “better opportunities” for us in the States when I was seven years old. In elementary school, white classmates would pick on my “smelly food” and spread vicious rumors that I ate the neighborhood cats. The Philippines was mentioned once in only one of my history classes my junior year of high school. If I ask my friends now what they know about my home country, they ask me how to say “Duterte.” My spouse will tell me about how his mother has traced their family’s name back centuries. And if I google my name, the Brazilian singer I was named after pops up. At home, we only occasionally eat Filipino food because some dishes are almost impossible to make without an hour-long trip to the nearest Filipino store. If my elders speak to me in Tagalog, the best I can do is shake my head and enunciate that I can’t speak it anymore.

Somewhere along the way, I’ve become less Filipino. I am part of a diaspora. This is supposed to be “normal.” Immigrants are bound to naturalize themselves in their new countries. We work on our accents by speaking our colonizer’s languages more than using the tongues we were born to speak. We form better relationships with the “natural” citizens of our foreign homes. We move forward, we continue to forget, and we cannibalize ourselves even more to fit into molds that were never intended for us.

In the Philippines, a large part of our identities are defined by the gender binary of the West. Many in my home country, just like my Lola or my mother, believe we were “saved” by their civilization. It took me years to realize that salvation was just slaughter. The right words for who I am died along with our people, our cultures and who we could have been. We were whittled down to little more than a passing mention in a history book. I’ve already lost so much before I was even born, so there should be comfort in the cold logic of assimilation and taking part in the agonizing death of a people.

I am non-binary. I am queer. I am one of thousands of Filipinos who have left the Philippines. When labeling my sexuality, I still write “queer” because I don’t know what else to say and bakla feels like a slur. I suppose I have the vague luxury of separating my gender and sexual identity from my race if I don’t think about it too much.

This is the best that the West has to offer me after all this devastation. For this identity and language, I am not content. I never will be.

These Portraits Depict the Radiance of Asian Trans Leaders

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

As a Vietnamese trans femme, the threat of a violent encounter looms over me constantly, like the swinging sword of Damocles. There is an invisible toll that many trans people are forced to pay daily. The price to be authentically ourselves means facing the most direct forms of violence in the wake of a brutal world. More recently, with the increased targeted attacks on Asian Americans, this real threat has seemingly increased twofold. Being far too familiar with the language of violence, it is important to state that these manifestations of hate are continuations of a historical legacy.

The same mechanics that perpetuate hatred against Asian communities are the same ones that endanger the lives of trans people. As both trans and Asian American activism each reach a so-called “tipping point,” we must sharpen our understanding of how the two are connected.

I want to dignify those in our community as trans Asians who are getting us closer to a liberated world. For this portrait series, I was inspired by Jose Barboza-Gubo’s own photo series, titled “Virgenes de la Puerta”, which elevated the role of trans women by depicting them as saints and religious icons. Each portrait is done in a different style – both to push my own personal boundaries as an artist, but to convey a particular character from the subject.

It is crucial to celebrate our lives as trans and Asian people, and uplift each other wherever possible. Within this particular moment, who else may tell our whole stories, beside ourselves?

Sasha Alexander

Artist, Educator, Healer

“As a nonbinary trans Black South Asian person and as an adoptee so many of my ancestors/names have been stolen from me. As a result of the state’s refusal to accept my right to information and upon the trauma that my ancestors navigated across oceans and lands, I do this work as a seed nourished by the sun and moon and water of their spirits and their struggle. I work as celebration in sake of their names, tongue, and histories for futures, pleasure, rest, care, accountability, and to nourish possibilities of mine and theirs; our histories woven. I do this work for Juan, for Phoenix, for L.L., for the many transcestors who loved me and guide me, for all of us who will be ancestors one day hopefully having made the world a little sweeter, more joyful, sustainable, and just.”

Loan Tran

Storyteller, Educator

“Home is south. Big and brilliant and messy. It is where my people are, they are my refuge. Home is laughing and crying and apologizing and kissing and messing up over plates of food. It is me belonging to more than I could ever imagine, to more than myself. It is the miracle and hard work of family. Home: Slow Sundays, sitting in the sun and relying on the inevitable breeze to come.”

Andy Marra

Human Rights Activist, Strategist

“It is with profound love for my community that I have committed my life’s work to social justice so future generations of trans and queer people inherit a world that our ancestors could have only dreamed of.”

Fei Mok

Climate Policymaker, Artist, Community Organizer

“As settlers of color on indigenous land, it is important not just to acknowledge the history of colonization here on Ohlone land, but also our role as settlers and visitors. Our liberation as people of color is intimately tied with the liberation of black and indigenous peoples and this includes return and rematriation of land and reparations.”

Trang Tran

Healer, Food Historian

“When I think about what liberation tastes like, canh khoai mở (yampi root soup) comes to mind. A simple soup with earthly flavor and mucilaginous texture. The longer you simmer it, the sweeter and better it tastes.”

Richie Shazam

Model, Photographer, Media Advocate

“The goal of all of my work is to center the needs and the vision of my queer family. My work, whether it is my photography, modeling or show Shine True, is not only about representing queer and trans people. It is about building a space for us to flourish, heal and grow.”

Meredith Talusan

Author, Editor, Journalist

“It’s been difficult for me to envision the future for us in the wake of so many challenges to our communities, but what gives me solace is the knowledge that so many of us are descendants of peoples who believed not only in our humanity, but in our sacredness. Whenever I face challenges to my existence, I recall the spirit of my ancestors whose wisdom grew out of their existence beyond prescribed gender.”

Kiyomi Fujikawa

Community Organizer, Movement Builder

“I’ve found joy in building up the new worlds we want to see, creating new models out of our care, love, and commitment to each other. The experiments, the failures, the learnings are all a part of the process. I find the joy in the trust and grace that we’ll keep practicing tomorrow and the next day until we are all free.”

Kai Cheng Thom

Writer, Performer, Social Worker

“I’ve been going through a profound shift in how I relate to the world personally and professionally. This past year, I’ve stepped away from work as a conventional mental health professional and into the realm of coaching, conflict mediation, and group facilitation. I’ve had to let go of a sense of knowing who I am professionally and plunge into an unknown space in order to rediscover what I’m called to do with my life. And this professional transformation is rooted in a deep personal process as I struggle to bring the notion of ‘choosing love’ off the page, out of the theoretical, and into the world as an actual practice. It’s scary and I love it. I’m terrified and in some ways, I have no choice. I embrace this unfolding.”

Alex Iling

Sexuality Educator

“We can bring pleasure to our social justice movements by reimagining our own relationship to pleasure itself. Learning to create space for pleasure feels similar to creating space for hope, rest, and resilience. It reminds us of what is possible to experience and why we keep moving forward.”

What You Think A Woman Looks Like

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

I look like what you think a woman looks like.

Okay, that’s not fair. I don’t actually know you. What I really mean is: Every time I leave my apartment, someone calls me “miss” or “ma’am” or “lady,” even in trans-inclusive spaces. I am invited without hesitation and accepted without question into women’s circles. I offer my pronouns and receive immediate reassurance: I am welcome, my truth is welcome, my pronouns are welcome. Plenty of women who don’t look like me aren’t granted the same courtesy. Women in many of my friend groups casually refer to our group as “ladies” or “women” or, at one point, “girl gang.” Occasionally they remember me and apologize after the fact. More often, it doesn’t occur to them. I don’t blame any individual person for this. It happens with everyone, regardless of their heritage or gender. If I met me, I’d assume I was a woman, too.

It’s obvious that there’s an F on my birth certificate. My cheeks are full and rosy, my body all curves and flare: narrow waist, broad hips, small but prominent breasts. (Extra prominent because bras give me dysphoria.) For some people, that’s more than enough to make the assumption.

For others, it’s the long hair. Long nails. Long, flowy, colorful clothes. My wardrobe is a mess of odds and ends. In cold weather, I mostly wear black pants and men’s shirts, while the warm weather brings out a sea of colors and patterns. My favorite skirt reminds me of a garden: it is a long, shining green wrap skirt, plain on one side, shimmering with blossoms on the other. Mostly I wear pants, even in summer, but they are loose and brightly patterned, which Americans also associate with women’s clothes.

And the assumptions run deeper than how I look. I love cooking, and especially feeding people. I love talking to people about their feelings. (I’m a ghostwriter and a somatic coach, which means I spend a lot of time being paid to talk about people’s feelings.) I love kids and bunnies and lilacs. I swing my hips when I dance. I sing often and laugh loudly and cuddle frequently. I am the classic Mom Friend, complete with the constant exhortations to stay hydrated. Of course, none of these are exclusive to women, but they are certainly associated with them.

As an AFAB person in the U.S., being seen as nonbinary requires being seen as masculine. A rigid, colorless form of masculinity, defined primarily by what it’s not. Skirts, not allowed. Flowers, not allowed. Softness, not allowed.

Illustration by Althea

Masculinity in India looks very different. Certainly, there are requirements and restrictions, probably more than I’ll ever be privy to, as someone neither raised in India nor treated as a man. But I’ve observed that men in India are expected to be expressive in ways men in America are not: to laugh, to dance, to hug.

My loud, muscular dad has always been considered manly. Like me, he sings often and is aggressively hospitable — in India, these are seen as masculine traits. (Women are also expected to be hospitable, but not aggressive about it.) My dad also takes great pride in filling his backyard with colorful roses, and no one has ever questioned the manliness of that.

Plenty of my colorful, flowing clothes are men’s clothes from India or Thailand. I have bright kurtas, Indian men’s tunics, and loose men’s pants from Thailand patterned with feathers or elephants that are also popular in India. In the U.S. these would be considered feminine, but in India they are somewhere between masculine and gender-neutral.

Indeed, to my family in India, I am shockingly unfeminine. I’m not as social as women are expected to be; I don’t say yes as often as women should. And I certainly don’t engage in any of the endless grooming and dressing expected of women. Even my long, wavy hair is considered unfeminine, because I neither straighten nor curl it.

If the aesthetic of masculinity in the U.S. is often defined by what is not allowed, the aesthetic of femininity in India is defined by what is required: makeup, “hygiene” (which could better be described as a war on hair), modesty, fitted clothes.

My nieces and their moms are always asking why I don’t do the things women do. Questions like: Why don’t you tweeze your eyebrows? Why don’t you wear makeup? Why don’t you dress up? Why don’t you shave? Why do you sit like that? Why do you travel alone? Why do you say ‘no’ so much?

Of course, they don’t consider the possibility that I’m nonbinary. India legally has three genders, and a broad swath of identities fit into India’s third gender, but the assumption by cisgender people is that the third gender primarily consists of AMAB people who present in a feminine way — a box I don’t fit into at all.

I used to ask questions back: Why not? Why should I? Why do you?

The answer tended to be, Because you’re/I’m/we’re A GIRL, so I stopped asking.

When I was a kid, it was easy. I wore shorts and a t-shirt, cropped my hair short, rode a bicycle. My little brother called me bhai — big brother. No one questioned this: if there’s one thing Americans and Indians seemed to agree on, it’s that a tomboy phase is no big deal, as long as you grow out of it.

The struggles started around puberty. I successfully argued out of wearing makeup, and I (briefly) surrendered to wearing bras, but the biggest battleground was jeans. I hated them. They itched, they pinched, they reminded me that my body was changing without permission. My dad took me shopping regularly for jeans, and I hated all of them. Sometimes they were too tight on my hips, sometimes they were too baggy on my legs, sometimes they fit perfectly, and I had no vocabulary yet to explain why that was the most uncomfortable of all. To this day, jeans feel like prison. They also, for reasons I’ve never been able to articulate, feel like gender.

I went to college on the other side of the country. Suddenly I had no family around to tell me how I was supposed to look. My campus had an enormous queer population, and maybe as a result of that, many of the cis straight people also freely experimented with clothes and gender expression. For the first time, I could look however I wanted. But I already had clothes, and no money to buy new ones, so I didn’t change my look overnight: I just put away the clothes I particularly hated, especially the jeans.

My best friend, a white cis girl who rarely wears makeup, who wears her hair long because it makes her feel like a princess and always paints one nail a different color than the others because Cosmo told her it would pop (it took months for me to figure out if she was being facetious), introduced me to the joy of long skirts. The first time she lent me one of hers, it was a revelation: a floor-length peasant skirt with enormous rainbow stripes. It was soft and colorful and it fit, no matter what shape I was. I remember standing in the college courtyard, spinning and spinning, and marveling at how the fabric lifted and fell, never restricting my movement or clinging to any curves I wasn’t comfortable remembering I had. To this day, floor-length skirts feel like freedom.

For years of college, I borrowed her clothes regularly. She bought me a floor-length peasant skirt similar to hers, in bi flag colors, and I romped around in it gleefully, even in the winter, over very thick leggings. I tore and re-stitched it many times before fully wrecking it during a snowball fight, stomping right through it with my boot as I clambered out of a pile of snow. I was oddly delighted by the loss: what a fun way for a skirt to die.

When we graduated, my friend bought me the beautiful green wrap skirt that is my favorite piece of clothing. I haven’t torn it yet, but if I do, I hope it’s for an equally fun reason.

I never really wanted to come out as nonbinary. I’d already gone through the exhaustion of being an AFAB bisexual with a cis boyfriend and of being a person with multiple invisible disabilities and of being multiracial but not quite looking like any of those races. I didn’t especially want to go through defending one more aspect of my identity.

Then my office started asking us to put pronouns in our email signatures and to introduce our pronouns at the beginning of meetings. It had been easy enough to just never say anything one way or another, but actually writing she/her felt like a betrayal of something deep. So I put they/them at the end of every signature, introduced my pronouns as they/them at the beginning of every meeting.

No one treated me any differently, mostly because no one seemed to believe me. In my theoretically queer-friendly office, no one ever remembered my pronouns on the first try. When people listed the women in the office, my name was inevitably mentioned. My very last email to my former boss, sent after I had already resigned, was the single line, “Friendly reminder that my pronouns are they/them and have been for over two years now.”

Of course, I tried the short hair and the men’s clothes. I was pretty into them, especially when my hair was just the right length to go fwoop whenever I shook my head. But the part I wasn’t into was not wearing skirts for a full year. I missed them. I missed color. I felt restricted again, in a way I hadn’t since high school. My plain black pants always felt too tight. When summer came, I looked at people in lovely flowing skirts, purple and pink and tiger-striped, and wished I was wearing them.

And then I got mad at myself, because who was stopping me? Theoretically, coming out as nonbinary should have meant freedom, but I’d just shoved myself into a different box, desperate to feel like a “real” nonbinary person the way I’d never felt like a real woman.

So I took my skirts back out.

Coming out to my friends was a relatively easy process. My friend group is mostly Ashkenazi and East Asian, mostly queer, and heavily nonbinary. Some of them forget my pronouns more often than others, but most of them remember most of the time. Only one friend actually said to my face that she didn’t believe me: she said I just didn’t like the restrictions that come with being a woman. As far as I’m aware, no one likes the restrictions that come with being a woman.

Slowly, steadily, beautifully, people across the world are fighting to shift the boundaries of what masculinity and femininity look like. They’re fighting to acknowledge that masculinity is not exclusive to men, nor femininity to women. Some will say nonbinary people hurt that cause: that by rejecting the gender assigned to us, we’re rejecting the battle to broaden gender for everyone. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that I reject this argument. Prescriptive, exclusive views of gender hurt everyone. Nonbinary people are hardly immune from restrictions or expectations. Ideally we reject those restrictions and expectations, but I want everyone to do that. I want everyone, cis or trans or otherwise, to seize the same freedom I did.

Recognizing that I was never going to fit comfortably into my American peers’ idea of masculine or my Indian family’s idea of feminine meant freedom to throw out both scripts and write a new one. I laugh, cry, cuddle and bask in color in ways men in the U.S. are not expected to — and I think men in the U.S. should, too, if they feel like it. I don’t tame my hair, voice or opinions the way women in India are expected to — and I don’t think they should, either, if they don’t feel like it.

Someone’s always going to be unhappy with the way you look, talk, and act. That someone shouldn’t be you.

How Tam Found Empowerment in the Closet

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

Many queer people find incredible strength and power in the act of coming out fully as themselves. While being able to show up as our full queer selves in our lives is a very beautiful thing, it can also be a lot of pressure to craft the perfect official coming out. This is especially true for aromantic and/or asexual folks, who still lack a societial template to navigate their sexuality, and for queer Asians, for whom coming out has communal repercussions. So what are you to do when you are a Vietnamese asexual and aromantic woman who grew up in white, cishet, francophone-dominated Montreal in the 1980s and 1990s?

This is Tam’s (not her real name) reality. I first met the 38-year-old office worker in a Montreal-based Asian group, and was struck by how open, upbeat and talkative she was. So getting to sit down with her to candidly chat about her journey navigating her asexuality and aromanticism was an absolute blast. Over many laughs, we discussed her confusing process into finding her sexuality, her dating adventures and how she came to find empowerment in the closet.

Illustration by Joyce Chau.

To start, can you tell me how you identify in terms of gender and sexuality?

Cis female, very straightforward. I am the only Asian who is aromantic that I know of. I have not met another person who’s Asian and asexual. And I haven’t met another person who is aromantic in Montreal. There probably is someone, but I’ve not met a single person.

Tell me about your journey navigating your sexuality.

This journey was very much externally motivated. Because, being aromantic, I didn’t give two fucks. I already had close friends and family who responded to my emotional needs. I understand romantic people desire that sort of connection with another person, but I never looked for it myself. So until puberty, I just thought I was different, but I didn’t think about it much more than that.

It started becoming a more pressing part of my life when people started asking me out because I didn’t want to go on dates. So I started wondering why. At 18, I didn’t realize there was such a thing as asexuality. So I just thought I was bisexual because I really didn’t care which gender was asking me out — I just didn’t want to date. I concluded that since I didn’t care for either gender, I must have been OK with both.

At 21, I found a site called AVEN which was, and still is, the main site for asexual people. I ended up on that site, and realized I was asexual. I still didn’t date anybody, so beyond that, I didn’t think much about it at all

When I was 25, my older brother and my dad sat me down separately and advised me to try dating. Taking their advice, I started dating. I had one short queer relationship and one long term queer relationship, even though I dated guys as well. I dated my first girlfriend for four-ish months. That ended not very great, but we’re still friends. I still hang out with her, her kids and her husband.

Then I dated my second girlfriend for close to five years. This is when I realized that I was aromantic because even though I loved her very deeply, the intensity was very different. When romantic people do something nice for their partner, they feel warm inside. Their partner appreciates it and feels warm inside too. I don’t have that feeling. I’ll do something nice for you, it’ll be like a fist bump. And that’s the end of it! I would do the same thing for my family or any of my friends. I’ll shower people with love, but that intensity is completely absent.

Even though she was willing to let that go to stay with me, I didn’t feel staying together was fair to my partner because she wanted somebody who was equally as intense. But I only had platonic feelings, so I made the choice to end that relationship — I was 33, understanding I was aromantic. I realized it was not the best idea to be in a relationship because I don’t have the same capacity for feelings as romantic people. My emotional intensity doesn’t go in that direction.

Have you been dating since?

I never wanted to date to begin with. I tried it, and I have determined that it’s not for me. I have not been on any dates since. I’m not closed off to meeting people, but I make it very clear from the beginning that I’m just not interested in a romantic relationship, mostly because they will be disappointed. They’re going to see that there’s something lacking immediately.

So you don’t date, but I understand you were very involved in the club scene. A lot of people in the queer community criticize it for being very heteronormative. What was your experience like?

At queer clubs in Montreal, heteronormativity is not an issue, but fetishism is a huge problem. Like, oh you’re Asian, you look queer, you’re a girl? People have a fetishized idea of Asians. And I’m not gonna point fingers at queer women or at straight men because everybody has fetishized ideals of queer Asian women. Even a resting bitch face can only get you so far. Some people are very persistent. You can look like as much of a bitch as you want, but sometimes that’s also a fetish. What are you gonna do?

How do people react to your queerness in Montreal?

That’s a loaded question. For the most part, people are either indifferent, or very nice about it. However, one time, at work, I was at the pride flag raising event of my company. When I sat down, this lady started making pointed homophobic comments while photographers were taking pictures of us. Then, she told me that she was my ally. Since I don’t share my personal life with colleagues, she was making an assumption about me, waiting for me to confirm her suspicions. It happened because I present myself androgynously at work. It was a very negative experience.

I reported her. Now she walks on eggshells around me, and I’m OK with that. She’s still employed, and as long as she doesn’t bug me, I don’t care. The only reason I reported her is because I don’t want her to do that to other people, especially [since she is in] upper management. She didn’t hurt me at all, because I have had to deal with much worse in my life in terms of racism. So what I experienced with her is half as bad as the things I’ve lived through as a person of color in Quebec.

I think what comes up again is that you get more flak for being Asian than for being queer.

Absolutely. In Quebec, there’s the language debate. I’m anglophone — I can speak French, but I prefer speaking English. That automatically puts me on a shittier level, because now I’m an anglophone, queer-presenting, woman of color. At work, as much as people have been very accepting, I worked 20 times as hard as the majority of the people in my office to get where I am today. I’m very happy now — I have a great boss and a great salary. But getting here is incomparable to people who are white and francophone, of any gender. They’ll get to places an anglophone, androgynous-presenting, woman of color won’t get to.

What should be done to combat Asian queer invisibility, and have you personally done anything to combat it?

I think that one of the main obstacles is always going to be the older generation. The first thing is to get our parents to be more accepting. Because if the older generation is more accepting, the kids are going to be more open to reach out. Queer Asians’ relationships with their parents will always play a part in their willingness to fully put themselves out there. Being out always negatively impacts the parents, even the parents who accept them, because their parents’ friends and communities will judge them. And do you really want your immigrant parents who don’t speak English or French well to be isolated from the only community they know? So it’s a very loaded issue. It’s an insidious problem that starts with the older generation and that carries over to us.

Do I feel like I’ve broached it? Yes, mostly because I talk to my younger friends, and I’ve tried to help them navigate these conversations with their parents. If homophobic commentary comes up with my own parents or other Asian parents, I’m very direct with them. Because I don’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, they can’t accuse me of anything. I’m in a perfect position to always stand up to homophobes because it never impacts my parents. I don’t have a partner to hide.

Who have you come out to and when? Why them?

The first time, I came out to my mom at 18 as bisexual, and she completely ignored what I said. Then at 21, when I discovered what asexuality was, I came out to my mom again. She asked me if I could still date boys, and I told her yes. That’s where that conversation ended.

I came out again to my mom at 25 when my dad and my brother told me to date. But this time, she actually looked up asexuality, so she understood me a bit better. It was her first step in accepting that I was asexual. I came out to a couple of my friends because I thought they should know. Maybe three or four people because they were closest to me. Nobody really pressured me into anything romantic because they could sense I wasn’t open to it.

Between 25 and 30, I didn’t have to come out. If somebody asked me out, I just told them I wasn’t interested, regardless of their gender, without giving any reason, because it’s none of their business.

But when I realized I was aromantic at 33, that was a headache because I had to come out to multiple people. It was a lot of educating, because most people’s idea of happiness includes a partner. A lot of my close friends kept trying to set me up, and I had to tell them no. They couldn’t fully grasp that concept — it’s not their reality. And when something’s not your reality, it’s much harder to understand.

Who haven’t you come out to yet, and why?

Most people! If I don’t know you, I don’t tell you anything about my life. It’s not a big part of my identity.

I’m semi-closeted for a few reasons: one, to protect my parents and my family, and two, why do people need to know? I just don’t tell people because it doesn’t change anything. That’s my private life.

I haven’t come out to the majority of my family because we’re a nicer [version of] “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” When I was dating my last girlfriend, they invited her to every family reunion. It was unspoken that we were seeing each other, but they never said anything. So it’s accepted as long as you don’t identify what it is. I also have a cousin who’s married and lesbian, with a wife and kids. They’re also welcome [to come] over, but we just call them roommates. So to most of my family I have not come out. It’s unspoken that they understand.

How do you feel about that arrangement?

I’m fine with it. I know that some queer people feel very differently about it. I understand where a lot of queer people come from, that feeling of oppression, shame and self-flagellation. But that’s not my reality, because I just view things very differently.

Right now, how does your family deal with your queerness?

My dad is extremely accepting: if I’m happy, he’s happy. My mom is more curious. She doesn’t fully understand me, but she accepts me as I am. And that’s all I could ask for. Because, honestly, she grew up in a country where she never even knew there were gay people. They are extremely oppressed in Vietnam. I can’t expect her to suddenly just develop all the terminology and knowledge related to queerness. The fact that she accepts me and has a vague idea of my life experience is enough.

My parents have come to understand that happiness is not so much being married, having kids, having a family, but instead, being happy living life right now and being able to take care of oneself — which is all I want. Having them change that life view was very difficult, but they were able to do so. Obviously, I’m sure they still get sad sometimes. But for the most part, they don’t press their ideas of happiness on me. They simply accept me as I am.

The Complicated Nature of Sex for Asian Women

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

Jayda Shuavarnnasri is a Thai-American cis woman. I am a Vietnamese-American trans woman. Certainly, our history and experiences are, in some ways, vastly different. But we both grew up in a country hellbent on telling us who we are. The sexual narratives surrounding Asian women end up introducing violence into our lives.

We are just two of many Asian women. We represent particular lineages. And this is a conversation that didn’t begin with us. This is us adding to the chorus of many Asian women’s voices who’ve demanded that we have ownership over our bodies and our stories.

As a sexuality and relationships educator, Jayda’s work offers a different vision for how we can relate to ourselves and other people, counter to what she calls the “scam” of who we’re told to be.

Jayda Shuavarnnasri: I’m the auntie that has like wild sex stories, but at the same time, like it’s just like chilling in her, you know, like, what is it? What’s the, like, people wore like mumus or whatever, and like shower cap on and just like, yeah, let me tell you about the Dick that I’ve had. You know, like that’s like the auntie energy that I would have loved growing up, like the, like the auntie that I would feel safe enough to ask questions, too.

Xoai Pham: You’re, you’re trying to be the auntie that we all needed, that you needed.

Hi everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, theydies and gentlethems, and all people of the human species, and all the ancestors watching. I’m super excited to be speaking with Jayda Shuavarnnasri today. Jayda is a sex, love, and relationships educator. Jayda goes by #SexPositiveAsianAuntie and hosts a podcast called “Don’t Say Sorry.” Her work revolves around unpacking and redefining cultural norms around what we consider sex, relationships, love and how they impact our lives on many levels. Jayda, do you want to introduce yourself?

That was a great introduction. Yeah. I am a sexuality and relationship educator. I am Thai American. That experience informs kind of why I’m here. Why sex positive Asian Aunty? So most of my work centers around just creating spaces for people to explore sexuality. The people that I work with the most are really trying to navigate sexual shame. A lot of it that we’ve grown up with as in the Asian community. Um, and then also learning how to have relationships that feel liberating and relationships that actually feel good for us. So, yeah.

I love your work because I think that there’s so few Asian people in this space and I feel like as a self-proclaimed hoe myself, I find it really refreshing to see another Southeast Asian woman in this space. I also think I said your name wrong, even though I asked you before this interview, if you could say it for me. It’s So-Wanna-See, and I think I said So-Wa-Sa-Nee before.

It’s like, “So you wanna see?”

Okay. That’s good. Um, I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten a Zoey at Starbucks before when I spell out my name and that’s always, to me, it’s giving me like Zoey 101, but it’s just so much of a stretch that I think is really funny. I feel like one thing I’m really craving is a space for Southeast Asian women within the context of Asian women in general, right? Asian women being impacted by this moment, who can speak to some of the ways that we’re different and some of the ways we’re similar as cis women and trans women. And it got me thinking about all the, all the layers that exist that so few people get to see, except for those of us that experience it, right? Those of us who were actually Asian women who are, who are experiencing these types of things to different degrees on a daily basis. I’m thinking about how, when people talk about Asian hate, within Asian hate, there’s so many layers of East Asians having colorism towards Southeast Asians and South Asians. And then West Asians hardly being in the conversation at all. And then the ways that patriarchy or Asian men hurt Asian women. I mean, among Southeast Asians, we have some of the highest domestic abuse rates. We have some of the lowest mental health wellness rates because of most of us experiencing war across generations with the war in Southeast Asia and American imperialism. And then for me, I feel like I constantly feel this pressure on myself as an Asian trans woman, as a Vietnamese trans woman, to be repping this little bubble in my community within this, these larger structures and feeling like cis Asian women are over there. And then it’s cis Asian men over there, you know? And I just feel like I really craved the bridge. Like I want, I want to cross the bridge and I’m ready to cross the bridge. And I feel like your side of the bridge is really fun, you’re talking sex and relationships and yeah, and I want to cross it. I want to eat with you over there. That’s how I view our conversation. But I wanna know more about, I want to dive into how you came to be the sex-positive Asian auntie, I’m sure that there was a journey to that. I want to hear the story from the beginning.

Oh, everything you just said. I appreciate you so much. And I’m so glad that we’re here having this conversation, um, how I became sex-positive Asian auntie. I think a lot of it has to do with several things, but one is titles. I don’t feel good or great about any of these like “sex educator, sex coach, sex therapists” kind of titles, because so much of me coming into this work is from personal experience, right? I’m a child, I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse. And that in itself, I think positioned me as a person who was always thinking about my body in relationship to the world. So some of the things that we talked about right, of like the violence that Asian women face, um, violence that Asian children, young, Asian girls face living in this world like that, that was always a question I had without really having the vocabulary for it. And so I think that experience in itself has really shaped, like all the questions I had about the world. Like why was I being treated in this way? Why are the things that I’m seeing in the media also like telling me that this is what it means to be an Asian woman, that our bodies are exploited, that our bodies are fetishized, you know, that our bodies are used and devalued in this world. And then interacting with different types of men. White, non-white. And so that in itself is like, Oh, okay, well, this is just all around. And so that’s one layer of just like personal experiences that I’ve had growing up.

And the other layer is like, when I was doing my own healing work around my trauma, I didn’t have anyone to really talk to about it. Like I didn’t have other Asian sex educators that I could learn from. The few sex educators I did follow, like on YouTube and stuff, it was like Lacey Green and like Shannon Boodram. And they were amazing. But they, you know, definitely different experiences than my own. I think at some point I just said like, all right, I should just do it myself. Like I should just, you know, and it really just started out with like, I talk really openly with my girlfriends and we have thankfully cultivated a relationship where we can tell each other hoe stories, there’s zero shame in us sharing our experiences and what that came with us. Also asking questions of whether or not our experiences were normal. And that I think was the light bulb for me. We just need this, we just need to talk about what is going on in the world. We need to talk about what we’re confused about. We need to be talking about what has harmed us. Right. And make that normal, just make that an everyday thing that we do, particularly as Asian women. So I just started doing like workshops here and there talking about sex and it resonated with people. And, you know, I think a lot of people now are realizing how important it is to have conversations around sexuality that also center like the Asian experience. And for me, the like, I’m, you know, a lot of other sex educators that I also see in the world or saw in the world as I was kind of entering this space were very sexual themselves, you know, like beautiful boudoir photos, which I find stunning, but it wasn’t like my style. Like that’s not the energy that I feel like I carry in general.

Um, and so I think my energy is very like humorous, I want to sit in the awkwardness and then laugh about it, and I want to be able to talk about sex in a way that it feels like you’re sitting with your auntie, you know, at the table or in the kitchen and you’re cooking together and just kind of have it be fun. Very informal without this super sexy image. So yeah, so the auntie energy is like, that’s what I try and bring. I’m the auntie that has wild sex stories, but at the same time, it’s just like chilling in her, you know, what is it? What’s the, like, people wore like moomoos or whatever, and shower cap on and just like, “Let me tell you about the dick that I’ve had.” You know, like that’s like the auntie energy that I would have loved growing up, the auntie that I would feel safe enough to ask questions too. So, yeah.

You’re, you’re trying to be the auntie that we all needed, that you needed. I love that. I love that because I think that when it comes to families, families are so often the site of so much violence and suffering in our lives. And it’s so often the greatest source of joy and safety and, you know, the phrase “the revolution starts at home” comes up for me, just the idea that in these spaces where we’re really intimate with people, either by choice or by design, in some ways it ends up being either weaponized against us, or it becomes a really great opportunity for transformation. And that’s kind of how I see what you’re describing as utilizing that space, a family via the auntie figure as a space for transformation. I’m really curious though, in terms of the Asian part, right? It’s Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. And I think that I’m really curious what, what it is to you, how the Asian experience factors into your work, like what makes Asianness different in your experience when it comes to the sex and relationship world?

Yeah, that was a big one too, because I think I thought about like, am I not just sex-positive auntie, you know, to all folks, because I don’t actually work exclusively with Asian folks. I think it’s for me to name my positionality as an Asian person living in this world, right? As we mentioned, like for me, the Asianness is that we are sexualized differently. We are viewed differently as Asian people navigating sexuality and gender, you know, and also bringing the kind of historical context of Asian sexuality and gender in our histories is different than it is from like Western or European countries. Particularly as a Thai person, like sexuality and queerness there looks different than it looks like here. And so for me, I think it’s important to kind name that as a distinction. And just when I first was thinking about that question of what the Asian means in my work was just the fact that when I saw others, just to be perfectly candid, the sexuality space was very white and usually white women and the way that they were, uh, providing advice around like navigating sexuality just looked so distant from what it felt like my experience was.

I also think that there’s, there’s these elements in Western culture that talk about being direct and this direct communication in your relationships and your sexual experiences. And that is normal in maybe a Western context, but that’s not as accessible in a lot of Asian cultures. This direct communication, even when we talk about something like consent, not valuing something like non-verbal consent or kind of like learning each other’s cues. To me is still as valuable. And that’s such a big part of like moving about in Asian families and Asian communities. We’re not as direct communicators, but we still communicate with one another in these more subtle ways. I guess that to me is really ingrained in our culture. I don’t know if that makes sense, but yeah, just the style of the way these white women were teaching and were listening, not like, didn’t resonate with me a lot of times. Um, and to be honest, I’m still figuring out what that Asianess means for me as well, too, as I kind of dig back into my own roots.

What does it mean to you? I’m really curious, because for me, whenever I get asked, I say, “I’m Vietnamese,” If I am asked to broaden it, I say, “I’m Southeast Asian.” Because I just think it makes, I understand Asian-ness as an attempt to have this sort of cohesive identity that we organize around. But I think when people start to see it as a fixed identity with umbrella experiences, it’s not very helpful when we use it to describe ourselves with. I’m curious for you, how do you relate to the word Asian?

I’m glad you said that particularly around Southeast Asian. Cause I think I’ve had to figure out my feelings around being Southeast Asian, because most of the people around me that identify as Southeast Asian or at least that I grew up with learning about the war and conflict that happened within Southeast Asia, but then being Thai is so different from those experiences. So I really had to figure out as a Thai person. What does it mean to be Southeast Asian in the context of Thailand in the middle, as a “neutral” entity, you know. Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and everyone else around us experiencing so much war and genocide. Like what does it mean to be a Thai person amongst all of that? And so I feel like I’ve had to figure out, what does it mean to be Southeast Asian?

And to me it’s, we’re all of the same land, have such intricate histories with one another. And that’s, the important part about being Southeast Asian. Then being Asian to me is like, yeah, I use that here because I’m definitely not white. You know, if you were to ask, I don’t know what else to be associated with at this point. Um, and so yeah, when I say Thai-American, I definitely say American as a default, not like a “I’m American too,” nothing about that, that I’m proud of. It’s more like I’m American. I have these privileges of being an American, you know, because I was born here, but it’s not something that I’m going to, I’m not waving any flag by any means about the American part. And so the Thai part is really more honoring my family more than me. It’s just my parents and my grandparents.

Yeah. There’s definitely privilege when it comes to being American, but sometimes I definitely grumble the American part. I think that it’s really interesting because you mentioned imperialism earlier and you know, this work with sex and relationships can feel so interpersonal, feel so small in some ways, in terms of it being about individual relationships, one person dealing with another person, or maybe more people, if it’s a polyamorous situation or something like that. But there’s so many things that we carry with us as individuals from intergenerational trauma to just the lineage that we carry, whether it be good or bad, and studies have shown that it makes an imprint on our DNA through epigenetics and how we operate in our lives and it lives in the body.

And I want to turn to some research for a little bit, just get a little nerdy because I’m definitely a nerd at heart. I know that you’re aware of this as well, because I know that you’ve used it in some of your workshops, but the research of Dr.Sunny Woan has been so vital in this time in terms of detailing the sexualization of Asian women, as it relates to us imperialism. Dr. Sonny Woan is an attorney and wrote this pivotal piece in the Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice about the role of Thailand in the war in Southeast Asia. And when I say the war in Southeast Asia, I’m referring to what people call the “Vietnam War” that actually took place across many countries, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and including many ethnic groups that are still persecuted in these nation-states, that are often forgotten. I mention this because there there’s little known about the fact that Thailand had “rest and recreation facilities,” facilities where over 70,000 men visited between 1966 and 1969 during the course of the war.

And they were offered sex with local women. And that was that’s just one example. I mean, the same thing happened in the Philippines where there was a sex industry that sprang up because the U.S. occupation and the soldiers there were offered access to women’s bodies as if we were materials, as if we’re like natural resources that they needed to survive. Dr. Woan wrote that “rest and recreation facilities are a vital component of the U.S. military policy with pervasive disregard for human rights. The military accepts access to indigenous women’s bodies as a necessity for GIs stationed overseas.” And I mentioned this because I think that in our lives, our sex lives are often the subject of so much aloneness, especially when the sex, especially when the sexualized things in our lives involve trauma. And they feel so insular.

And yet there’s this, there are so many events that happened in the world in terms of international politics and imperialist wars that actually shape our individual lives to this day. Right? I’m thinking about how you and I sitting here today are shaped in terms of who we are,, what we’ve experienced in our lives, because of the decisions of men who preceded our births, and made decisions that harm many people. And how to this day, as people in the U.S., as Asian women in the U.S., we face all of these violences and the legacies of this violence that happened so many years ago.

Yeah. We say all the time that gender and sexuality is socially constructed. But we think of that as if it’s just like socially constructed onto the individual. But as you just said, right now, it expands across centuries, this construction of what humans, how certain human life is valued or devalued, how certain human life is exploited, is socially constructed. And we continue that pattern if we’re not able to see that those connections, if we’re not able to see those legacies and how they should continue to show up in the way we interact with one another, people talk about fetishization all the time, but they don’t go as often into the imperialism. And that factor, and then Asian, like Asian women who will talk about fetishization all the time, but then don’t look at the fetishization of trans women. These different layers, like people who aren’t able to kind of connect those dots. I think one of the reasons why we fail so often to move forward, because we’re not able to kind of see those throughlines between, between these identities. I don’t even know if they’re identities, but these experiences really. Between these experiences.

Don’t even get me started. So I was in Thailand for three months in 2016, and I was in Bangkok specifically for a job. And I was working for this organization that worked on sexual health. It was really interesting because I was able to observe firsthand the sex tourism that was happening in front of me. And sometimes I was asked to be a part of it, of course, because people just assumed I was Thai, because that’s how the world is, but I just thought it was shocking at first, I think I became a little numb to it, but I was just in all these spaces where I was, I was craving connection with other Southeast Asian trans women. But in those same spaces where we gathered, where in this case, Thai women gathered, there were always male suitors.

And usually they were white male suitors who had come from other countries to experience Southeast Asian trans women. And I know that that occurs like all across Southeast Asia. And there’s a really specific trope of Southeast Asian trans women being a specific type of experience. There’s the term ladyboys. And there’s all this history and these layers. I feel like there hasn’t been enough discussion about it. And I think that in order for Asian women’s experiences to be fully represented and meaningfully discussed towards some end, towards some road towards justice or liberation, we have to consider the vastness of what we experience. And that includes what trans women experience. So I’m happy that you mentioned that. I also know that you’re queer, and I feel like most of the sex educators that have become famous and have become really successful in recent times, you mentioned Shan Boodram. A lot of folks are straight and I just feel like, I feel like maybe I’m biased, but I think that straightness limits the scope of what people get to see about the human experience. So I’m really curious, you talked about the Asianness, how do you think that your queer experiences factor into your work, but also your life?

Yeah, that’s a good one, you know, to go back on like what other sex educators that are exist out there, to be honest, like even us having this conversation around the politics of sex, one of the things I was frustrated with with a lot of other sex educators is that it felt very apolitical. It felt like it didn’t have that layer of understanding that the way we move about in the world, in our sexuality and in our gender is absolutely political. And that the relationships that we have to other people are political as well. And that to me, was a piece that was like missing for a very, very long time. I definitely don’t think that’s as prevalent now, at least with other sex educators that I’m connected to, but I think that’s, that was part of my frustration and then queerness, right.

You can’t remove the politics around queerness when you’re moving about in this world. To me like how my queerness informs, my work or being sex-positive Asian auntie that like, yeah. The outlook and the frameworks that I have are it, it wouldn’t be exist without that queerness. I came into my queerness, like later, whatever that means where I’ve had to learn that my heterosexuality before was completely compulsory and that I just live in a society that assumed that’s the norm for everybody. And I was like, yeah, cool. There was never anything in me that like, you’re gay.

And I don’t think I came into my queerness until I started exploring non-monogamy actually, they kind of both happen at the same time for me, where I just had these moments of realizing that everything is a scam. All of it is a lie. I’ve been told to live life in this way, because this is what good Asian daughters do. This is the mold that you live by to survive. This is the mold of thriving or what it looks like. And so it took, it took me a minute, and it wasn’t until I was really exploring non-monogamy and starting to dismantle all the risks, like stories I had about relationships in general, that was also coming into my queerness and also just like completely unlearning everything that I was told around love, relationships, care. So that’s kind of how I came into that and that absolutely informs all of my work.

You mentioned non-monogamy and I think that is, I’m sure you have a pulse on it, but there’s a growing conversation about it. There are so many myths surrounding polyamory. I’m curious in your work, what are some of the biggest myths that you tackle with the folks that you work with?

Yeah. I talk about this one. Often I talk about this with my partner often, one of the biggest misses people think that polyamory or non-monogamy is about the sex. And it’s really ironic that how people automatically sexualize monogamy or non-monogamy and polyamory when it’s so far from it. And it makes it feel like, I think just the culture that we live in is so obsessed with sex as part of relationships. And I’m like, so when people kind of argue, “Oh, you just want to all these people. You want to cheat on your partner. Blah blah blah.” Like can’t “commit.” And it’s like, actually it’s about having multiple commitments and sex is not really on the table for all of them. There are asexual people who practice non-monogamy right. And it’s actually the world that we live in that cannot separate sex and relationships. And so that’s one thing that I find really, really fascinating when I talk to monogamous people about non-monogamy.

What came up for me when you were speaking about it is how much of it has to do with fear in terms of how people respond to non-monogamy. Because I think in relationships in general, when you’re in a vulnerable state, fear naturally comes up and we’re either going to make friends with fear, or it leads us to reactions that end up hurting us and our partners. And I think what happens is in these situations, the responses I often hear are, basically under the surface, someone is saying, “I’m afraid that I can’t handle this much intimacy or this much vulnerability,” or they’re afraid that the other person who desires non-monogamy, isn’t actually in love with them or they aren’t enough for people. There’s always this sense, this doubt about enoughness. Which is why I think this work around sexuality is also very much so spiritual work, around the soul and how we feel in their hearts and minds.

I’m curious for you, so Autostraddle‘s Asian Pacific American Heritage Month theme is taking up space and refusing to compromise different parts of ourselves. Because so much of what we hear about Asian-Americans, as people often say, they don’t feel Asian enough and they don’t feel American enough, or they feel like they are too queer to be in an Asian-American experience, or they have to choose different parts of themselves and what we’re trying to get at within our team. And what we’re trying to put out into the world is what happens when we stop compromising and we start reconciling and we take up space as our whole selves. What have you refused to compromise on recently and how are you taking up space in your life?

Oh, that’s a good one. Well, I mean, so our podcasts that I cohost is called, “Don’t Say Sorry.” That in itself is, we are here exactly the way we are, often confused, often very opinionated, definitely anti-capitalist in our episodes. We’re really unapologetic about the opinions that we have. And I think that in itself, for me, it’s I don’t always know what I’m doing and I’m still going to move through it. And I’m not really apologizing for the fact that I’m still learning and I’m still growing and I’m still being in the world. And I think before it would have been, I’m not apologizing for being vocal or I’m not apologizing for being opinionated. And I think because I was resisting so much of that Asian identity of being quiet and not taking up space, now for me, it’s like, I actually, I feel so good in my knowing now.

Like I feel so good in my, so grounded in who I am, that I don’t even feel the need to yell as often as I used to. You know? And now I’m like, actually I’m still learning and if I’m learning, I don’t actually have to be loud about it if I don’t want to. And I’m still growing. And so I think that’s where right now I’m taking up that kind of space. I’m okay not having all the answers. I’m okay still blooming. And I’m still I’m okay still cocooning sometimes when I need to. And I think more of us need that. I think we also live in a, because of everything that’s happening, we’re encouraged to have such instant formulated opinions. Like we’re expected to react to all of this trauma and news and that’s coming out. And what I feel from the collective right now is we actually need to take this break of not feeling the need to share opinion instantly and not feeling the need to be reactive to, to what we’re experiencing and just giving ourselves the space to not know, and giving ourselves a space to just sit and be with it. 

When Love Is A Matter Of Desperation

Welcome to Autostraddle’s AAPI Heritage Month Series, about taking up space as our queer and Asian/Pacific Islander selves.

Sometimes it feels like there’s a fissure running straight through my life, dividing it into a before and an after. Before we dated; after we broke up. Before I challenged the assumptions I had been making about myself; after I laid the truth bare. Before, when I didn’t think that love could exist for me; after, when I still don’t believe it — the same on both sides and yet so completely different.

In between is the time we were together. What do I even call it? — more than a few months, less than a year. It feels so distant now, like vague memories of a faraway land I visited once. I had been searching for love my whole life, but now I can’t even find my way back to it.

Instead, I’m watching from the peripheries, again. Watching as the people around me build their lives, deepen their own relationships and still, somehow, manage to leave a little space for me. But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

There’s a hole inside me — it’s been there from the start — that will never be filled. I know this. And yet the only thing I’ve ever wanted is to close it before that emptiness fully consumes me.

I was raised with no understanding of love, which is to say, I was raised with a hunger that only grew as each year passed by.

I have one memory — exactly one memory — of my mother kissing me on the cheek. A surprising brush of her lips on my skin before the door opened onto a starlit sky, and she rushed off after my father to a work social event. When she returned some hours later, she asked me about the dull red stain on my face, and then, remembering her sudden, uncharacteristic token of affection, she rubbed at it and remarked, “It’s lipstick.” I must have been eight or nine at the time and didn’t know what to make of the whole thing.

My sister was devastated when I told her. I knew our mother only ever had harshness for her: she had never gotten a caress, in fact the opposite. My sister recounted the time she had kissed our mother on the cheek years earlier, a mere child herself, imitating the loving gestures of her classmates after a school presentation for parents. Our mother jerked her face away and said, sharply, a word in Hindi that holds a multitude of meanings: dirty, contaminated, impure.

She never did it again, my sister. Our mother never did, either. Love was like a shame in my family, and I carried that message for years to come.

When we were much older, my sister observed that I have always been our mother’s favorite child. I hadn’t realized it because the small fragments of anything remotely resembling fondness that our mother doled out came at the steep price of obedience, so the daughter she favored was a child I wasn’t.

But favor is relative, after all, and something, no matter how small, isn’t nothing, and that something was just enough to make me crave more.

Do you remember — when we were together, you came and wrapped your arms around me from behind?

I didn’t expect it. I had just finished cooking us a meal I had never made before. The sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window in my apartment, I found myself taken back two decades and more. A staple growing up, my mother only cooked kidney beans on the weekends because, even in a pressure cooker, they take so long to soften.

“It makes me really happy when you share things from your childhood,” you said. And I, also, softened.

I revealed it bit by bit, that childhood, as I found myself feeling safer and safer in the intimacy we had. The childhood I had buried deep inside myself, first, in an attempt to assimilate to the white world around me and, later, in an attempt to escape that painful past. The childhood I had stamped down so thoroughly, all I’m left with is the feelings and a smattering of memories that hardly begin to capture the actual experience.

In middle school, I made myself obsessed with the only boy on the bus who spoke to me without ridicule. Having so little for so long, I had learned to wring the least bit of affection out of the smallest measure of attention. His friends picked on me mercilessly, but he never explicitly took part in their cruelty; he even talked to me on occasion. That had to mean something, and something could mean anything, and anything included the possibility that someone could give me what I never got if I just clung to them a little harder. Desperation gave rise to obsession which I read as attraction, as I buried my actual feelings ever deeper. The possibility never came to fruition, but how many times I repeated that pattern in the years to come.

In college, an older student who I generally liked showed real interest in me, and, in retrospect, I was laughably oblivious. Inviting me to sit close, to share a seat. “Walking me home” across the parking lot of the apartment complex. Video calling me shirtless. My utter indifference to it all was a tell I couldn’t possibly recognize. Because I was a woman, which meant I had to set my hopes on a man. Because at that point I only knew four queer women, and they were all white, and they were much older and oh so certain in their love. And so, I told myself, I was unmoved because he already had a girlfriend and surely he was just playing around.

Unable to imagine anything else for my life, I resigned myself to the heterosexual world I knew I had no real place in.

Do you remember — when we were together, that time you brought me camping with your friends? I was quiet and shy and tense the whole time, but I found myself growing more and more at ease by the strength of your attraction, the sincerity of your care for me.

In the early morning, listening to the rain pattering overtop the two of us in your tent, the comforting weight of your body overtop mine, I said, “I’ve never felt so at peace in my life.”

“Then, we can’t let you leave,” you replied, your voice full of smiles I didn’t have to look to see.

I didn’t say it, but the more time we spent together, the more I felt that maybe, just maybe, I could have a home in this world after all, one where I truly belonged. Not the pleasant residences of my sisters or my friends, where I would visit and we would laugh and I might rest and — invariably — I would leave. But a place I could stay, brimming with companionship and love.

As I followed the motions of a heterosexuality I couldn’t make sense of, I fell in love with the wrong people, without even realizing it. Some of my closest friends, and all I understood at the time was that I simply needed to know these women better, I needed to be in their lives and to have them in mine.

What is the line between friendship and love? Was it love that drew me closer and closer to D. over the course of seventh and eighth grade, that led me to call her week after week, even when we went to different high schools? Or the earliest sparks of love — attraction — when A. asked me “my type” during a break in high school gym class, and I told her that I didn’t have a type but sometimes I thought people were pretty, like, for instance, her? Or how about the time in college when M. invited me to stay over her place and I told her that I think everyone’s at least a little bi and she asked me why was I bringing this up now and I told her no reason and never, ever mentioned it again?

It was years after the fact that I realized it was love that led me to constantly seek out the comfort of J.’s companionship, one of my dearest friends who I met shortly after graduating college. I’ll never forget that lazy Saturday afternoon in September — the burning heat of summer past, the coolness of fall not quite set in, lying on my couch, listening to Tchaikovsky’s final tribute to despair, the Pathetique Symphony — when the pieces finally fell into place. Lying, listening, reflecting on a recent visit from J., I was consumed by nostalgia for the closeness we had and the heartbreak from when we had moved apart some years before, a heartbreak I had never acknowledged. “Ah,” I had thought, “I wish we could be together forever.” And I heard myself, really heard myself, for the first time.

“Ah,” I had thought, “I wish we could be together forever.” And I heard myself, really heard myself, for the first time.

What is the line between friendship and love? Truly, I can’t say, but I know there is one. Because one by one, my friends and I, all of us, prioritized other parts of our lives over the friendships we cherished. And every time, I felt a little something crack inside, and every time, I wondered if I was the only one who felt that way, and every time, I thought that perhaps I was too soft, and so every time, I steeled my heart a little more for the end that was inevitable.

Do you remember — when we were together, that time you lay next to me on my bed, and I said that, in that moment, gender was utterly meaningless?

You felt ambivalent about that statement, and I understood why. I hadn’t expressed myself clearly at all. Much later, I realized what I had wanted to say was that, with you beside me, I finally found myself. My relationship to gender, in terms of sexuality and identity — there was nothing left to hesitate about, no more questions to leave open, no uncertainty I could hide behind.

It’s hard, when you’ve kept your feelings locked away from yourself for so long, to not let moments like those and the relationships attached to them define you. It’s hard, even though you know you can’t, you know you shouldn’t. It’s hard because when those moments pass, when those relationships end, you’re left to find yourself anew among the shattered pieces of your heart.

I had thought that we were close friends, but she told me, for her it was more, and so, I couldn’t avoid facing myself any longer. And I thought, here at my doorstep is what I’ve been yearning for, for so long. So I took that leap, knowing nothing could ever be the same again.

I tried to live in those moments, without worrying what it might mean for the future. But you can’t love with half a heart. The longer we were together, the harder it became not to invest in the idea of “us,” quietly starting to trust that perhaps I, too, could have what had always been just beyond my reach.

But in the end, a love born out of friendship followed the same path as all my loves born out of friendship, as she, also, prioritized other parts of her future and did not see fit to build me in it. We were just travelers in each other’s lives, but I didn’t know until it was too late.

I used to say that the pursuit of happiness made me miserable. That perhaps I had no claims to happiness in my life, and so I should just stop chasing it, wishing for it, believing in it. But when we were together, I had finally found an emotion within me I could recognize in that word.

When we were together, I no longer felt trapped in the emptiness of my past. I saw a future open up before me, one I actually had a place in, where my deepest desire might finally be fulfilled.

When we were together, hope landed in my heart like a nightingale, freed from its cage made of less and less and less.

I read a story about a nightingale once.

It died because it gave too much of itself.

It died because the humans around it were selfish and uncaring creatures, as all humans are.

It died because it was a fool who believed in the lie called love.

It died.

I don’t know what happened to my little nightingale. I wish it a beautiful, dark woodland to fly in freedom, far, far away from the cynical utility of human life.

Heartbreak is, perhaps, a more universal experience than love itself. But I can’t seem to make my way to hope afterwards. People talk about being strong enough to bear it. But what about when your heart was broken at the very beginning?

When you grow up with so little, you grasp at anything you manage to get your hands on and hold it tight, try to make it last for as long as you can, for a dream of ever after. But that’s no way to love, and that’s no way to live. I know that much, even if I don’t know any other way.

I spent a year trying to make sense of the world again, and then the second year everyone’s lives shrank because it’s just safer to be alone. Each day that goes by, I’m bound tighter and tighter by my fears: break something enough times and you’ll never be able to piece it back together again, will you? So, I gingerly hide the shards I’m left holding, afraid to show them, afraid to share them, all the while desperate for love, starved for touch, staring down a future that looks as devoid of both as the past.

Some days I can’t imagine anything beyond the solitude that has defined so much of my life. Loneliness is an old bedfellow of mine; despair, my oldest friend. If I can come to embrace those parts of myself I’ve always tried to push away — perhaps, that is the only lifelong love I can count on.

Learning To Live After My Younger Brother Died

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

We pray to our ancestors asking for guidance and protection. So rarely do we imagine our ancestors to be younger than us. When my little brother unexpectedly passed away last November from cancer, he became the youngest ancestor I’ve ever known.

It started with a missed call and finding out that he was in the ICU. Several BART and bus rides later, I made it to O’Connor Hospital where he was born 22 years ago and would die four days later. See, grief doesn’t start in the present. It starts in the past, right with all the shoulds and could have beens. The frantic replaying of everything that has happened on double the speed, skipping from one frame to another in a wild hunt for answers. Why did this happen? Why couldn’t I stop it from happening?

That week in the hospital, I felt pain at every sight of him lying in that bed. His body was swollen from head to toe, especially his face. He lied prone with a tube down his throat to stabilize his breathing. He was covered in wires that monitored his vitals. We called Cha^[1] to xức dầu cho em Nguyên^[2] and prayed incessantly. My prayers carried manifestations for his recovery with no doubt in my mind that he would make it through, but by the end of the week, I learned that some things just can’t be manifested.

If death is a silent reaper, grief is the piercing wails of everyone I love in the same room, desperately clinging to a body that no longer carries a soul. It is giving myself 3 seconds, if even that, to let the news sink in before rushing over to hold my mom, already collapsed on the couch and wailing repeatedly, “Ta không chịu được đâu… Nguyên đâu rồi? Nguyên đâu rồi?”^[3] It is forcing myself to be strong though I am in indescribable pain, because the elders who have always been my pillars of strength have crumbled.

I let my face drown in tears as I explained his death over and over again in Việt^[4] and English to everyone that came—and over the phone to everyone that couldn’t. As we viewed his dead body for the first time, we soaked our love into him through tears and prayers, clutching onto whatever life was left. I held his hand until it grew cold, making a promise loud enough so my mom wouldn’t feel alone in speaking to the dead. I promised him that I would take care of our family and make sure everyone was good. I tried to reassure his spirit in case he was scared of what lay ahead—but how could I possibly provide him guidance for somewhere I’ve never gone?

For the next several months, I replayed this nightmare of his death and cried my heart out every night. Gut-wrenching sobs tore through my chest and became my lullaby. They drenched my face in tears and snot, making it hard to see or smell anything no matter how many tissues I used. I didn’t care for connecting with my senses anyway though. I was trapped in a spiral, thinking, If I had known he was sick, I could have protected him. But the truth is that no one knew he was sick, even himself and the doctors, until it was too late. I refused to accept that he had passed away even though I spent every day handling logistics about his death. I learned how to plan and negotiate the cost of a funeral and close out financial assets of someone without a will. I offered comfort to others as they processed his death, though I didn’t have space myself to scream. I needed to break down, open my mouth wide, and release the thunder from the bottom of my lungs in one loud, piercing cry. I’d just lost one of the most important people in my life. With every message, call, and saying of chia buồn^[5], the sadness multiplied rather than divided. It added anger to the equation, and I was angry that I was alone. I was alone in a world that “could not imagine” my grief even though I was waving it right in front of their faces.

I dove into stories that his friends, students, colleagues, teachers, family, and I shared. He was down for anything: hanging out, completing silly dares, and staying up late to listen and give advice. He built a magical haunted house for his students to enjoy on Halloween and looked forward to helping with their homework. He paid attention to the little things and always made sure to take care of set-up and clean-up at events because he knew how much it helped.

Through these stories, I called upon his spirit to give me strength, and this is how his past became the guide for my future. It became impossible to forget how much he loved and believed in me. Every story about him from the people in his life was a love note he had left for me—to guide me day by day. They reassured me that people remembered so much about him and wouldn’t forget him. They reminded me of how far the impact of his kindness and service went. It was the proof I needed to know that although I couldn’t follow him into the afterlife, he was settling in just fine as an ancestor. I didn’t have to worry about him so much anymore.

As the tasks for my em^[6] dwindled down, the relief of not having to deal with them anymore mixed with a different kind of heartache. Carrying what remained of his world on my shoulders wasn’t easy, but letting it go felt even harder. I feared that there would be nothing left for me to do for him. If there was nothing left I could do as his chị^[7], then what do I do now? How do I live when the one I always guided in life no longer needs me? How do I move forward when I still need him to support me as an ally when it comes to queerness, mental health, and social justice in our family?

In trying to figure it out, I cried, prayed, and wrote a lot. I prayed for the peace and protection of his spirit, for guidance, and for my family and me to be okay. To balance out the tears, I soaked up laughter whenever it came. I changed my phone’s wallpaper to his photo. I hoped he would visit my dreams though I never knew if I would wake up the next morning. Nothing made me sure that I would be granted another day because he wasn’t.

Yet somehow, the mornings kept greeting me.

As much as I still don’t know how to live life without him, I know I just have to keep going. While he was alive, he hoped for me to be well, live my best life, and always find happiness. I can’t imagine that he’s changed his mind now that he’s an ancestor. So for today, I choose to focus on that. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll choose something different. But I hope one day, when it’s time for us to finally reunite, I can share with him that all his hopes came true.

Artwork by Danthanh Trinh depicting An and her brother Nguyen on his graduation day.

^[1] Father (Priest)
^[2] “anoint my little brother Nguyên” (Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick)
^[3] “I can’t take this at all… where is Nguyên? Where is Nguyên?”
^[4] Vietnamese
^[5] condolences, to share sadness
^[6] younger sibling
^[7] older sister

The Price I Pay For(ever) My Culture

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

For Aunty Hauani
her words, my final resting place one day:
“upon the survival of the Pacific
depends the survival of the world.”

We, the biggest region on the planet.
The oldest ocean.
The heart, if this world ever had one.
How dare anyone look at a map
with Oceania sliced in half
hanging on the edges of it and say:
I know what the world looks like.

For everything that fractured us.
For my severed island,
once belonging to itself
for my chest, where Samoa is whole always
where Guahan is demilitarized finally
Hawai’i too. Northern Mariana Islands too
where the Marshall Islands is nuclear waste free
and the sins that bombed them 67 times
1000 times bigger than the one dropped on Hiroshima
remain America’s judgement day explanation,
and never theirs.

For every misspelled / mispronounced attempt
at our family heirlooms.
How people will suggest that I
introduce myself
before giving my keynote address,
rather than trouble their lazy tongue
with learning how to say it
out of respect for my ancestors.

No.
You say it
so there’s no mistake
that you can see me
and the village
I’m standing in.

The audacity
has always been violent.

The honeymoons
timeshares
family vacations
spring breaks
violence done to us
masked as gaslight

but this is for the lighting
of the match.

For the spark of my generation
settling for nothing less
than our due.
For the aloha spirit being sharper
than you last remembered.
For the locals no longer willing
to tourist trap for you.

For the love of my ancestors
how once, I read that when our colonizers
came back to Samoa the second time,
their boats were capsized
by our sea.

Oh well.
For that too.

And as always & forever more:
for the culture.

The one I come from
and the one that had no choice
but to come from me.
Indigenous diaspora finds home everywhere
my people survive.
From Cali’s coast to Oceania’s edge
from my swollen heart to the valley in my voice
the one that my love echos between forever
for the ones I intend to die for
and the ones who now understand
why they’re alive.

For the lengths I will go
to tell the truth
in this lifetime
in my writing
for us.

Photo by Kara Schumacher, Collage by Melissa Aliu

I was a third year student at UC Santa Cruz when I fell in love for the first time. The U.S. was in the heart of the 2008 recession and my then-lover and I were at the end of Fall Quarter — just around the corner from my 21st birthday in February 2009. That love held many of my firsts in the palm of its warm hand: my first real kiss, my first serious relationship, my first time having sex, and my first queer love. That was the year my queerness gained its footing long enough to experience a love that I thought could withstand my family and our Samoan culture. I was wrong. Against my decision to come out on my own terms, I fell out to my parents five days before my 21st birthday, and if I run through the vivid details of it long enough, it’s still one of the most painful days I ever experienced in my life.

I don’t make my way through that trauma the way I used to. Partly because I don’t have to, because it doesn’t traumatize me anymore. My parents and I have healed over the years long enough to own the apology I was afforded by them and honor the time (years) it took for them to not just accept me, but nurture me (and my relationships) as well. After 11 years and many poems about my queerness posted all over the internet, I’m at a place in my life where I can look back at that period of time, the language that was unspeakable to name in the midst of it, and put to rest things that I no longer feel shame or responsibility for.

But one thing that I remember vividly, as the truth about my relationship with my first love was unraveling for the first time, was something my mom asked me. At that time, it made me feel guilty, but now makes me feel more curious to unlayer and reckon with it: amidst (her shock about) me coming out, she asked, “What will the church think?” To someone who isn’t Samoan (or Pacific Islander), it’s safe to assume that she was referring to what our church would make of my queerness in the context of religion, but that’s not all that she was worried about at that moment. She wasn’t just asking me about our church, she was asking me what our Samoan church, a pillar within our culture, would think. She was concerned about the repercussions I might face not from the institution of church: but from our own culture.

One of the most remarkable things about being Samoan in diaspora is that — despite all that colonization robbed us of when Germany and the U.S. partitioned our islands into countries, declared one of them a U.S. territory, and militarized us to the point of imperialist ownership — despite all of this, we’ve still been able to maintain a strong connection to our rich heritage and sacred traditions. I absolutely love that about us. Go us! I love that I was born into an intergenerational, multiracial Samoan family in the Bay Area back in the late 80s, with our culture as my first crib. My grandparents (may they rest in peace) as our family’s culture keepers, as all Samoan elders are.

Photo by Melissa Aliu

But to understand the Samoan culture and why my mom (or any Samoan parent) would worry about it in relationship to their daughter’s queer identity, you must first understand that as Samoans, our community is a collectivist people. When we say “it takes a village”, we say it in unison and in harmony, with our entire chest. We say it standing for the actual villages our families are indigenous to. Our identity is interdependent. There is no sense of “self” without or even before the collective self. When people say, “You have to love yourself in order to love anyone else”, that’s not how Samoans move in the world (or how any Pacific Islander culture moves).

We derive our understanding of identity through the collective in order to understand who we are individually. Even in diaspora and post-colonization, Samoans live and move through life in a way that emphasizes collective cooperation over independence and self-fulfillment. We have a sense of responsibility to one another, to our families, our genealogies and to Samoa that is defined by the socio-political practice of our cultural values that we call Fa’a Samoa, or “the Samoan way”.

Our identity is interdependent. There is no sense of “self” without or even before the collective self. When people say, “You have to love yourself in order to love anyone else”, that’s not how Samoans move in the world.

Fa’a Samoa defines not just what our culture is, but the structure and codes on who we’re supposed to be in our culture, and if you’re Samoan, Fa’a Samoa is always on. We’re always moving through the protocol of it, or at least that’s the expectation. The cultural code of Fa’a Samoa is as complex and strict as it is powerful and sacred. Much of it revolves around particular behavioral expectations around showing our deep reverence for our elders, our families, our High Chiefs, our ceremonial practices, and our churches. Respect is the cornerstone of Fa’a Samoa, and is oftentimes met with strict consequences when not practiced the way it was taught to us.

It’s in the way I bow my head when walking in front of elders in my family. Or in the way I immediately sit at the feet of my parents or outside of the room that the elders and Chiefs are gathered in. It’s in the dos and don’ts of how food is served during a ceremonial gathering, and in the way I’m expected to dress depending on the formality of the event. Fa’a Samoa is all of this and more. And no other place in our lives is Fa’a Samoa expected to be upheld with the utmost respect than at church, in the presence of the faifeau (minister) and church officials.

As the granddaughter of a minister and the daughter of a deacon, I grew up attending a Samoan church, which means I grew up deeply connected to my Samoan culture through Fa’a Samoa. My upbringing as a Samoan girl, navigating both Fa’a Samoa and a world that didn’t understand it, certainly left me feeling proud for knowing how to articulate my culture to an outside world. But it also left me with a lot of questions that I felt guilty about, because it always felt like questioning my culture was its own world of sin. Plus I was questioning my culture as a Samoan-American in diaspora, another layer that leaves me wondering, if I wasn’t born and raised in Samoa, what “authority” I even have to speak on Fa’a Samoa.

To question Fa’a Samoa felt like a betrayal of the village that raised me, as valid as the questions were, or as valid as simply having a question is. Questions I had around power dynamics between authority figures in our community, gender roles and expectations, or simply why I couldn’t wear what I wanted to wear at times that called for specific attire. What I wasn’t allowed to explore out loud, I worked out on the pages in my journal in isolation. But even that had its limits. I remember times where I’d find myself in arguments with my parents, trying to understand why our culture called for certain things to be the way they were, and was met with “that’s just the way it is.”

But if Fa’a Samoa is what makes us Samoan, and I was struggling with feeling like I could be my full self — my queer, feminist, inquisitive, outspoken, independent, critical self — because of it: what did that make me? Am I any less Samoan because I challenged what constitutes being Samoan? And will my culture still claim me if I’m struggling to claim it? Does being Samoan mean I can be who I truly believe that I am, even at the risk of not being what is culturally expected of me?

And just like my mom asked me the day I came out to her and my dad: what will the church think?

Until it happened, I never realized that the very thing that would help me answer all of these questions, would come from the first poem I wrote 14 years ago, in my dorm room during my first year of college. When I finished writing it, I felt like I’d deeply exhaled, letting out a gulp of air I’d held in for far too long. When I wrote my first poem, I gave myself permission to stop paying the cost of staying silent about things that mattered to me. Even if those things were the very foundation of who I am. My earliest writing focused a lot on my experience with being a first generation queer student of color on campus. And then from there, I started writing about my Samoan identity, the utter devotion and pride I have in being Samoan, while also writing my way out of the fears and guilt of being seen as a disrespectful daughter. It felt scary to be a Samoan girl from a culture I loved and was so devoted to, while also defying expectations by voicing my opinion and expressing myself through an art form that encouraged it.

I started performing these poems all around campus. With every stage I performed on, I felt our Pacific Islander ancestors giving me permission to stretch the muscle of my voice around every microphone I spoke on. When I wrote and performed my poetry, I imagined being this brave for the rest of my years in college: brave enough to feel as intelligent as my palagi (white) classmates, brave enough to fight my insecurities with the reassurance that I deserved to be a student there, brave enough to quiet my own demons that tried to punk me into believing that what I had to say wouldn’t matter to anyone else but myself.

I also imagined being this brave in the face of my family and my culture.

I had to face the fact that it was more important to speak up and use my voice to tell my story, than it was to stay silent about the things that affected me. If I were silent about it, there’s no telling where I’d be today. If I were silent about it, no one would know when I was hurting or when I needed support. I know too many young people in my community, both in diaspora and in the islands, who have taken their lives, who suffer from depression and anxiety, who fear rejection from their families and culture, because they never had a healthy way to express themselves nor people they could trust to listen to them.

Poetry reassured me that my voice is necessary, and that what I’m speaking about is important because it’s rooted in a radical love I have for who I am as a queer Samoan woman, and who I belong to. Poetry was what helped me to speak to my parents when we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, especially after I came out to them. It helped make our relationship stronger, and helped make it easier for me to express myself with them. There was a time in my poetry career where my parents didn’t always support how open and honest I was in what I wrote and shared with the public. They would ask me questions like: “What is the church going to think about your poem?” or “Why do you have to tell all our family business?” But just like I had to do with myself, they had to ask themselves: would they rather I kept secrets from them about things that I was struggling with or things that were important to me, or would they rather I feel comfortable enough to come to them in those moments?

Thankfully, my parents are now my biggest support systems, and have come to enough of my poetry performances and watched enough of my poems go viral to realize that I’m not going to stop speaking my truth. More importantly: they’ve realized that where I speak from is rooted in where we come from.

I have poetry to thank for being my entryway to critical conversations in my community. Topics that I never believed would be on the table are now finding their way into the open, even as we fear the cultural repercussions of doing so. Topics such as sexism, gender roles, anti-Blackness in our families, domestic violence in our homes, mental health issues in our community were once things I would write about in private, but am now seeing come to light in dialogue and in action, and I can’t help but think outlets like poetry, art, and the power of social media have played a part in making that possible.

Photo by Youth Speaks

In making a career out of poetry over the last 14 years, that’s what was stuck with me the most: that as terrifying or uncomfortable as it is to speak your truth, or to listen to someone speak theirs, the cost of staying silent is too high a price to pay. Many of us have spent our lives paying for it with a currency that doesn’t even exist, and have instead jeopardized our mental, psychological, spiritual, and physical health for the sake of believing that we were better off silent and in pain, than we were vulnerable and free. We did it for reasons that make complete sense to a people who move in the world as a collective: as the village we come from and the village we will always be to each other. We did it out of protection for one another. We did it out of deep respect for our elders. Out of respect for our parents. And most of all: we did it for the culture.

Many of us have spent our lives paying for it with a currency that doesn’t even exist, and have instead jeopardized our mental, psychological, spiritual, and physical health for the sake of believing that we were better off silent and in pain, than we were vulnerable and free.

But as my professor in grad school once said as I was earning my Masters in Marriage/Family Therapy at USC: “Just because it’s cultural, doesn’t mean that it’s sacred.” The very purpose of culture is to shape itself into protecting those that depend on it to live. To thrive. Culture is supposed to evolve, because we do. I am not the same Samoan girl that I was growing up living by the values of Fa’a Samoa, and Fa’a Samoa isn’t the same either. If anything, my challenges to my culture are what deepened my devotion to protecting it for the remainder of my life. Even if it almost cost me my family. Even when my parents get frustrated at the questions I have about why we do what we do. Even in the shame and pain that I still harbor because of my inability to speak my Samoan language fully. Even through all of that, I still plan on dying for the sake of protecting, defending, and living for my Samoan people and the complexity of the culture that defines us.

Until then: if my Samoan culture is passed down through me, may it be the parts that want me alive. May it be the parts that see my future lover(s) woven into the fabric of queer Pasifika love. If my culture is to be one that I inherit, may I take the parts of it that see us wholly and call us kin, and shed the parts that our colonizers wanted for us more than we wanted for ourselves.

I carry Fa’a Samoa in my mana (power) in the face of a world where white supremacy, anti-Indigenous/anti-Black racism would rather I turn on myself and on my people than on the systems that keep us chained to our fear of fighting for a world we deserve. A world where respecting my culture means ending the anti-Blackness within it. A world where respecting my culture means gender equity towards the matriarchy that we’re indigenous to. A world where respecting my culture means going to therapy. Taking my antidepressants if it helps me to heal enough to show up for my life, so I can show up for my people. A world where respecting my culture means taking care of our youth and creating spaces for them to finally write and speak their truth, is treated with the same reverence as taking care of our elders.

A world where respecting Fa’a Samoa means one day, I’m going to be the queer Samoan elder who looks my grandchildren in their faces, and says: I was afraid the entire time that I was fighting for the world they deserve: but I did it anyway. I did it, afraid. I did it at the mouth of a mic. I did it in every poem I wrote for them. I want to be able to look our future generation of Samoan culture protectors in their faces and tell them that I devoted myself so deeply to our community, that I decided to break the cycles that we no longer need to be in survival mode for. I did it because I loved the promise of them more than I loved my silence. I did it because I couldn’t stop dreaming of our liberation, even as I know that I won’t be around to see it in my lifetime. At least I dreamt it. I want to be the Samoan elder who lives long enough to write/say:

It’s okay to have traditions that stay the same and remain a pillar within our people, but our culture around how those traditions are carried out are destined to change, and the best we can do to prepare ourselves is to be open when it does. There are parts of Fa’a Samoa that couldn’t make their way intact across the Pacific. We’ve had to adjust and adapt in order to make those aspects of our culture work for us. But as we change, and discover ourselves, and speak up, finally, and return deeply to our ancestral roots, my hope for us is that we do so in a way that never leaves any of us questioning whether we’re “Samoan enough”. You are enough. Our ancestors made it so. And as a first-gen, queer, indigenous, Samoan, woman of color in diaspora, not only do I now stand firmly in the notion that I am Samoan enough, but I am Samoan, and more. All of us are.

Lost and Found in the Fish Sauce: How I Cooked My Way Back Home

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

At ten years old, I held a Cheerios cereal box featuring a white Barbie next to my face while I asked my mom, “Can I get this, please?” Without even looking, my mom responded, “Uh huh, học giỏi đi con, as long as you do well in school.” I felt like the happiest little kid on the block. I looked down at Barbie and saw her beautiful, fair skin. Later that year, I wanted to bleach the brown off of me.

As the youngest of seven kids, I felt the pressure to live up to the sacrifices my parents made for me and my siblings. My life was indebted to theirs and felt like it was never mine to own. The sacrifice of leaving their war-torn home. The abuse they endured trying to come here. The endless hours working to feed us and put a roof over our heads. My older siblings seemed to do a great job of proving that my parents’ sacrifices were not a waste; it only made sense for me to continue that.

A photo of Sal’s family. Sal and their twin Nancy stand at the bottom of the photo.

I did whatever it took to live the American Dream: you can be whoever you want to be with the right mix of ingredients. Add one cup of bleach, four ounces of internalized racism, a slab of self-hate, and let it all braise together, you will have cooked up the perfect child to conquer anything in the American concrete jungle.

To prove my dedication to this dream, I had decided not to speak in Vietnamese anymore. With every Vietnamese word that exited my mouth, I felt the weight of shame pull me away from my sprint towards whiteness. I refused to eat my mother’s Vietnamese packed lunches of cá kho, as beautiful as that braised fish over steamed rice was. I needed to play the game: Lunchables, Capri Sun, and English were all I would accept. There was no room for the smell of fish sauce on my skin. I would rather starve with my own ego.

One day, my mom came home from a long day of work as I came home from school. I was holding a stack of books and tried to explain what I learned in school today in English. She couldn’t understand a thing.“Cái gì? Mẹ không hiểu. Con nói lại lần nữa. What? I don’t know what you’re saying. Say that again.” I fished for a response in Vietnamese. My ego held me down like a rock. “No, mom, that’s not what I was trying to say. Seriously, mom, you don’t understand?!” Frustrated, I slammed my books on the floor and looked her in the eye. “MOM, YOU’RE SO FUCKING STUPID.”

Four seconds passed. Out of all the words I said in English, she heard the ones that mattered. She held back tears as her eyes locked with mine. I could see the same shame in her eyes like a mirror to my own. She slowly crumbled. “Con đúng. Mẹ ngu. Mẹ không đi học giống con. You’re right child. I am stupid. I didn’t get the chance to go to school like you did.” As my mom walked out of the room, all I could feel was the heaviness of her absence. Nothing could describe the betrayal I had committed. I never meant to make her feel so small — to have her believe the words coming from a child poisoned by whiteness. Did I poison her too?

I perfected the art of disconnecting myself from my own body in an attempt to survive. I adopted anger as a mechanism to protect myself. I held these two skills close to me as I entered one of the whitest universities in California. Being a student unearthed what whiteness had buried in me. It brought me back to the place I was avoiding my whole life — my body. I never realized how painful being in my body was until I had the language to describe it during my undergraduate years. I finally had the tools to articulate the hardships I went through growing up: the unresolved trauma that was carried, compounded, and passed down from past generations into my own DNA. The kind of trauma that lives within the body — and when it escapes the boundaries of our bodies, it can transform into violence in the form of abuse, self-hate and mental health challenges.

To be in my body felt like not only reliving the sexual and physical violence I experienced as a kid, but to finally accept that this pain was mine to hold. To hold pain meant to create space for emotions like grief, disappointment, and sadness. I never had the chance to embody these emotions because all I could feel was anger.

But holding onto anger felt like I was holding onto a burning skillet. I failed to realize how the tightness of my grip was causing myself more pain. If I loosen just a tiny ounce of the grip of my anger, all of the violence I experienced would disappear. Or at least that’s what I believed. Anger kept me alive but I failed to realize that it never kept me safe. Safety meant cultivating a space where I could feel the full range of emotions manifested by those past experiences.

I grieved the safety that I lost as a kid. I grieved the sexual and physical violence I endured. I grieved my hatred for my own brown skin. I grieved the time I used the words I inherited from people who hated us to make my mom feel uneducated and worthless. Slowly, I embraced my anger and grief as natural responses in my queer immigrant life. I remembered the kind of knowledge that no university could ever teach me: the wisdom my mother holds through her love, her stories, and her cooking.

My mother became my anchor during one of the most challenging parts of my life, as I learned to name and navigate my trauma. When she had to escape from her home in Vietnam with no belongings, she looked to the moon as her guide in the darkness. Now, I think of the taste of her food when I need to be guided back home. Not knowing how to cook during college, I would call my mother and ask, “How do I cook this?” She replied, “chút xiêu cái nầy, cái kia. A little bit of this, this, this, and this.” Frustrated, I replied, “But like, how much, Mom?” Without pause, she laughs, “Con sẽ biết. You’ll just know.”

Sal Facetimes their mom as they cook together.

As I figured out how much of each spice to add, the only thing I had confidence in was the memory of how the dish tasted and the happiness it brought me. I knew I only needed to add as much as it took to bring me back home to my mom’s Sunday morning meals. That is when her “you’ll just know” wisdom finally made sense. That is when I knew: I’d arrive home not only with myself but with my mother and with my ancestors.

Through my mother’s recipes, I’m reminded of the resilience that flows in our blood. Instead of disconnecting from my body to survive, I nurtured it. Like me, cooking is hella queer and fluid. Every time I reimagine a dish, it can taste different depending on my mood.“How spicy do I want this dish to be today? “How sweet do I want this dessert?” It’s never fixed or prescribed. That’s what makes these evolving recipes — and the queer experience — so delicious.

The family shrine, adorned with orchids, incense, and meditation bowls.

We can’t exist if we don’t nurture ourselves. I exist through the recipes passed down by my mom, that have been passed down by her mom, and so on. Our whole lives we’ve been fed things that have disconnected us from our land, our culture, and our bodies. I will never again get lost in the vortex of the American Dream, but I’m always down to get lost in the fish sauce. Because that’s where my mother and ancestors will guide me back.

For more queer stories, food, and tears follow me on my food journey on Instagram Television and YouTube.

Trusting Abundance: A Conversation With Organizer, Sammie Ablaza Wills

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

“How does it feel to ask for help?” Sammie asked the room. Some of us shifted nervously in our seats and pushed the food around our plates.

This was my first time meeting Sammie Ablaza Wills, Director of APIENC (API Equality – Northern California). I’d recently moved to the Bay Area, and I’d agreed to help with the fall fundraiser because I’d heard APIENC might be a good place to make friends with other queer and trans API’s. When I walked into the room that night, Sammie must have greeted me, welcoming me into the space like they did for everyone. I’m sure I was too awkward to respond, too intimidated by their commanding presence and perfect makeup.

At the fundraising session, we were supposed to be calling people we knew to ask them to donate to APIENC, something everyone was apprehensive about. Sammie asked us why we felt nervous about asking people to help in this way. “Because I don’t want to bother people,” many said. “Because people already have so much going on. I don’t want to ask them for more.”

Sammie challenged us to unpack why we thought this way. As queer and trans API’s, why did we think people in our communities would not be able or willing to support us? Why were we saying no for other people without giving them a chance to help?

I laughed a little in my head when Sammie started talking about how we had all internalized a sense of scarcity and asked what it would mean for us to trust in the abundance of our communities. Those were all big, dramatic-sounding words. Had I just joined a cult?

Really, I was uncomfortable. Why did I always feels the need to downplay my own needs? Where had I learned that it was bad to reach out?

But even more than the fun revelations about my own capacity to self-isolate, what I remember most vividly from that night was that Sammie cooked us a chicken. “None of you said you were vegetarians on the google form,” they said, directing us towards the food, “but there’s a vegetarian dish just in case.” Filling my plate with hot rice and a chicken thigh, I was touched at the care that had been put into the meal, the effort that had been put into making us all feel at home.

As an organizer, Sammie believes in the importance of honest, truthful, and challenging relationships, the kind that allow for growth. “I’m not interested in creating comfortable spaces,” they said during our interview. “I’m interested in safer spaces where people can be challenged.” When I asked about the experiences that helped shape them and the way they do their work, Sammie began by telling me about their early years in LA’s San Fernando Valley. Then, when they were in elementary school, their father passed away. After that, it was hard for their mom to sustain a life for them in LA, so the two of them moved to Las Vegas.

In the Valley, they had lived near their mom’s family and a vibrant Pilipino community, but in Las Vegas, they were isolated. This was when Sammie began witnessing their mom struggle to find another job and deal with what they now recognize as depression, alcoholism, and gambling. By 15, their mom had moved out. Sammie did not have stable housing and often didn’t know where they were going to get their next meal. “I didn’t think I would survive long enough to make it through high school,” they said. “Moments of joy and community were my only reprise.”

“I’m not interested in creating comfortable spaces,” they said during our interview. “I’m interested in safer spaces where people can be challenged.”

One of their first experiences with community and collective people power was in high school when the state of Nevada announced budget cuts that decimated arts and elective courses. Sammie became part of a group of high school and community college students that formed the Nevada Students for Public Education. The group painted signs, attended rallies, and knocked on the governor’s door. It was the first time they’d seen people coming together to fight for a single issue. The next year, there were still budget cuts, but because of the student activism, they couldn’t make all of the cuts they had originally intended to.

During this time, Sammie was also navigating different aspects of their own identity. They’d begun learning more about Pilipino history and the way it had shaped their mother’s and their own life. They were also starting to realize they were queer. Growing up, they didn’t think that it was possible to be queer or trans and Pilipino. They would hear their mother saying things like, “All the bakla are acting gay, acting American, to get attention.” This was alarming to Sammie who felt like they were Pilipino and had no desire to fit into a larger American context. They wouldn’t learn that they didn’t have to choose between their identities until later.

Through all of this, Sammie went to Stanford, where they found a world that was often difficult and enraging to navigate. They experienced intense culture shock. “Just the fact of stable housing and being able to go to a dining hall and eat at almost any time of day and eat unlimited food was ridiculous,” they said. Once, Sammie was in the dining hall when two of their classmates started complaining about the food. They were so angry that these people were ungrateful to have the basic necessities that they got up and ate by themself.

What got Sammie through college was finding other students who were like them, many of whom were activists and organizers. It was one of these friends who introduced Sammie to APIENC. Freshman year, after getting back from winter break, they found that other students already had summer plans because most of them had grown up in families that could advise them about classes and internships. Not sure what they wanted to do, Sammie sat down with a friend to ask for his advice. They knew they wanted to do organizing but couldn’t decide between Asian American or LGBTQ issues. He looked at them and said they didn’t have to choose between the two. They could do both. “I was shook,” said Sammie. “I was just mind-boggled. I had never even considered that I would not need to choose between being Asian American and being an LGBTQ person.”

The summer of 2013, Sammie interned at APIENC, an experience that transformed them. They were given responsibilities far beyond what they expected as an intern, even getting to co-lead their own campaign with ASPIRE, a pan-Asian organization of undocumented people. They also gained a community that challenged them to consider hard questions like “Why is it hard for you to trust people?”, “What are the barriers to asking for help?”, and “What is your relationship with money?” At APIENC, they had found a place where they could be all of their identities at once, allowing them to grow into their leadership.

At the time, APIENC was also going through a period of transition. Prior to 2013, the organization had received most of its funding from grants specified for marriage equality work. They took that money to work on local marriage equality campaigns, but also tried to divert as much as possible to other issues. After 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, that funding disappeared, leaving the organization at a crossroads. In a precarious financial situation, APIENC decided to shift its work to center young trans and gender nonconforming people. They also changed their fundraising model to rely more heavily individual donations. That way, they could do the work that community members wanted to do instead of being beholden to wealthy donors or institutions. Throughout all of this, Sammie remained at the organization, aiding in the process of experimentation and restructuring.

When I asked Sammie how they became APIENC’s Director, they laughed. “How did I become the director? I don’t know!” Then they got more serious, talking about the fear that they did not know enough and anxieties about not being taken seriously as young person. Many of the experiences they had related to being trans, nonbinary, queer, Pilipino, and a person from a poor background had affected their sense of what was possible. “But at the end of the day, I had been at the organization for three years and the organization was saying it wanted to center young trans people. I’m a young trans person! I thought, ‘Let me just try and use all the skills that I’ve learned about asking for help and being vulnerable and knowing history and hope that’s enough.”

“I’m a young trans person! I thought, ‘Let me just try and use all the skills that I’ve learned about asking for help and being vulnerable and knowing history and hope that’s enough.”

Sammie makes sure to talk about all the people who made their leadership possible. Throughout the interview, they reference elders and peers across social movements who continue to support them. They also talk about how leadership can often be difficult in progressive spaces, where we put our leaders on pedestals and then make them targets for our rage. Sammie constantly receives messages telling them what they should do next, something they find exhausting. They have to remember that they’re human, that they make mistakes, and that often when people come to them, their feedback is just as much about themselves as it is about Sammie.

Something they find particularly frustrating are people who feel that they can give unsolicited advice without knowing the context of the situation or what Sammie has already done to address the problem. These people often feel entitled to do this because of Sammie’s age. Especially because APIENC’s membership is trans people who are 26 or younger, some are quick to assume that members don’t know or care about history or elders. “There’s so much brilliance around us constantly,” said Sammie, ”and there’s a desire to learn from history…[but] it’s hard to be told what to do all the time, especially when so many of us come from blood family or assigned guardians that are toxic. It reinforces a culture that prevents relationship building and trust from happening.”

Still, Sammie considers it an advantage to be part of an organization made up of young people and folks who are not tied tightly to ideas about how things should be. Because people haven’t become jaded by other movement spaces and instead trust the community at APIENC, the ability to imagine is so much wider and there’s more of an ability to experiment with things others might not see as possible.

I was about to wrap up the interview when Sammie said, “I guess I didn’t talk much about being trans. That’s a big part of my life.”

“Oh right,” I said, realizing that I’d asked them to expand on many other aspects of their identity but not this one. “Do you want to talk about that?”

For a long time, Sammie saw gender nonconformity as a performance used to draw attention. It was not until other Pilipino people shared stories about how people who existed outside of the gender binary have always existed in Pilipino culture. This knowledge allowed them to see rejecting the gender binary as a way to fight colonization and imperialism. Previously, they’d felt like they shouldn’t take up space as someone who was neither a binary trans person nor who had immediate plans to medically transition, and though they still think it’s important to to see the different levels of privilege in trans communities, Sammie believes looking at their transness through the lens of its cultural power made it easier to see the ways being trans had always shaped them.

Later, I realized why I hadn’t thought to ask Sammie to talk more about their trans identity, even though I’m also a trans nonbinary person. It was because I had internalized many of the things Sammie had been talking about — the hesitancy to take up space, the fear that my gender identity is just a call for attention. For all the years I’ve been out and seemingly empowered, when I wrote the interview questions, nonbinary identity was something I’d considered too frivolous to ask Sammie about. But listening to them, I remembered how untrue these assumptions were and that by denying the validity of my own identity, I was also denying the people around me. For all the ways we make each other possible and for the relationships that push me to confront myself and maybe try to be a better person, I’m grateful to APIENC and to Sammie.

It was because I had internalized many of the things Sammie had been talking about — the hesitancy to take up space, the fear that my gender identity is just a call for attention.

These moments of connection, forged by emotional labor, are important. They are what allows us to be vulnerable, to ask for help, and to form the relationships that support us, especially in times of crisis. It is the commitment to this kind of work that Sammie believes helped prepare APIENC for this current crisis. Almost immediately after the shelter-in-place order went into effect in the Bay Area, the organization created a phone tree to see what needs members had and moved their programming online to make sure people still had access to community as well as to continue its organizing work.

Now, in a time when we’re seeing things that we previously thought were impossible — like the government giving money out on a large scale and city’s canceling rent — Sammie is focused on using this time to as best as they can. Still, they want to make sure that relationships and care are centered in their work. When I asked them what they’re hopeful for, they said, “I myself am going to be doing work my whole life to understand my feelings and emotions, to ask for help, and to support folks with the different things that they need. I hope that we can use this time to assess what is essential in our lives and to really make sure these changes stick.”

Protective Spells For Mentally Ill Witches In A COVID-19 World

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

Stepping Out Of Silence

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

I know three different ways to say the word “love” in Hindi, but I’ve never once heard them spoken by anyone in my family. Nobody did anything for love but rather for honor. It seems like every South Asian story boils down to a story about shame and honor: the family’s honor must be protected at all cost – even, if necessary, that ultimate one — but if everyone would just hold onto their sense of shame, we wouldn’t have to go down that road.

So much went unsaid, and yet somehow the stories made the rounds. No one ever told me, but I always knew that my cousin, two decades my senior or more, put a lit cigarette out on his soon-to-be-ex wife’s hand. My mother reminisced about my cousin, her nephew, from time to time as I was growing up. How smart he was. How much potential he had. If he had become a black sheep, it’s because he had been sent to a boarding school for rich kids as a child and spent too much time around “bad” people. Lost in her memories, I was always afraid to interrupt and ask whether the shame of that incident was his fault for battering his wife or hers for deciding that she deserved better than a life of abuse.

Being in India often answered my questions without my asking them. I don’t remember living there, but I remember visiting it over the course of my childhood. One of my earliest memories is watching my father’s youngest brother spend an entire evening berating his wife because she talked to a man on the street that she — and more importantly he — didn’t know. My parents stood out of the way, saying nothing. That solitary, enraged voice, emboldened by the complicit silence around him, carried a clear message. Some people were in possession of honor, and others could only bring shame. Some people could say anything in defense of that honor, and others had to acquiesce into silence.

Some people were in possession of honor, and others could only bring shame. Some people could say anything in defense of that honor, and others had to acquiesce into silence.

No matter where we were, religion always elucidated the unspoken: the positions of honor and shame within a family are relative, usually assigned based on birth, marriage and — most of all — gender. By any account, Holi and Diwali are the two biggest Hindu holidays, but those aren’t the ones impressed into my memories. I remember Rakhi, where my sisters and I would be woken up early in the morning before school to tie beaded and decorated thread bracelets on my father’s wrist (in the absence of having a brother) to thank him for another year of protecting our honors. And then there was Karva Chauth, where our mother would join hundreds of thousands of women across the subcontinent and the diaspora in fasting food and water an entire day for their husbands. Some people were in possession of honor, and others’ lives only had value in relation to them. There was no escaping that.

But nobody uses the words “honor” and “shame” except in the movies, because if anything is said, it’s said indirectly. So shame becomes a matter of propriety and honor, respect. And in that translation, the burden shifts from how we are viewed to the lengths we must go to secure our place.

My mother always framed herself as more forward-thinking when it came to gender equity, although it was never clear to me who exactly she was comparing herself to. She seethed quietly about my uncle’s treatment of his wife on that trip. Such disrespect for women. My father’s eternal criticism of her is that she says too much. I’ve watched as she, often, silences herself in reply. Because the only way to compensate for behaving improperly is to recede into the silence.

Silenced feelings find their way out, in one way or another, and it doesn’t always end well. I grew up surrounded by a fuming anger that could ignite anywhere at a moment’s notice – including inside myself. But sometimes the silences were more terrifying because you never knew what was smoldering, just waiting to combust. And as the flames eventually burned themselves out, as they always do, we returned once again to our unstated familial obligations. Silence to silence.

At this point, the other first generation immigrants and the other Asians say to me, “Oh, but you know your parents cared about you. That’s why they immigrated. They just showed it in a different way. They did their best.”

Silence is about absence, so how can I possibly describe it to you?

What if we tried this: Think about every time in your childhood a parental figure told you that they loved you, in whatever language they spoke. Every moment of being cared for and knowing, truly knowing, that this person was putting your needs, interests and desires first and foremost. Every embrace, every caress, every pat on the back. Take all of those memories – can you hold them all? – take every single one of them and remove them from the narrative of your youth. Now look at the emptiness you’re left with.

That barren landscape is my childhood.

B. and N. and I broke the silences, in secret. We found solace in each other’s company because no one who didn’t live it could truly understand. And besides, barred from having friends, all we had was each other. We spent all our time together: after school, on the weekends, in the summer. Year after year after year. There was nothing else to do. We lost ourselves on the pages of fantasy lands. There was nowhere else to go. We had the closeness of people who shared everything.

But even among the three of us, the most important things were left unsaid. Growing up, anything that smelled of sentimentality was roundly mocked. When I was very young, I liked singing along with Barney, and my entire family teased me because, apparently, love was a ridiculous thing to profess. So I followed the example of all my elders, and buried that word deep inside myself, laughed at it — disbelieved it — if anyone dared to even imply it.

Oh, that we loved each other is undeniable. Love was always there: in the gifts we made by hand for one other, the letters we sent long after the world stopped using postage, the secret nicknames that no one else is allowed to use. Even through all the bitter fights that children and teens and young adults have, we found our way back to each other. We were never shown how to navigate those disagreements, how to put aside differences, how to apologize, but we taught ourselves bit by bit, for each other, because we were all we had.

“We’ll never be like them,” we used to say — still say — talking about our father and his brothers. “They fight about the favors they did for each other years ago and who still owes what.” In my family, the only understanding of love was as a price, once paid, you collected your dues ever after. But B. and N. and I wanted so much more than that.

You probably think I’m exaggerating. I’m given to talking in metaphors, after all. So, I’ll draw the curtain back just a little.

What if I told you about the time they threw N. out of the house because she couldn’t stomach the taste of cooked onions? Which time should I tell you about? It happened so often, I can’t even count how many times. Or how about the time N. and I got into an argument, and the only way they knew how to end it was by making her stand on the other side of the apartment door?

I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

Twenty-five years later, and I still can’t think of this without —

“Why are you crying? What’s wrong with you?”

“You don’t cry out there,” B. told me gently after she dragged me by the hand into the bathroom. I got upset that he yelled at me for crossing in front of the TV too many times.

But as we got older, B. couldn’t handle my tears either, probably because she has worked so hard her whole life to swallow her own.

Isolation is too small a word. To be left to navigate a storm of feelings in silence on your own – sometimes I think people use the word “alone” without ever really knowing what it means.

Everything I learned about love – including the words – came from Bollywood. So often, in those movies, love was about destiny, as in Devdas, a predetermined bond between a man and a woman that transcended the trappings of family, marriage or even life itself. At times, love for a woman was about being gazed at by the proper man, as in Pakeezah, although it was never clear to me what separated the hero’s leering eyes from the villain’s that caused the heroine to fall in love with one and live in fear of the other. And if that love was unsanctioned by family, it almost always ended in either exile, as in Mughal-e-Azam, or even death, which is the story Devdas was really telling.

In the nineties that unsanctioned love started earning the family’s blessing, as in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. But that rested on the strength of a familial love that felt like a fairytale to me. A mother who loves her daughter so much she defies her husband on her daughter’s behalf? A father who loves his daughter so much he acknowledges her feelings and allows her to follow them? This seemed more fantastical than all those books I read set in made-up worlds.

My parents vastly preferred Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, which begins with a similar premise but ends with our heroine realizing that the man she should have loved all along was the man her father had chosen for her. That told me everything I needed to know.

Desire was so obscene that anything even remotely connected to it was silenced out of existence. I grew up with three other women, and yet the only time we talked about our bodies was when my mother told us we couldn’t enter the temple in her hometown because, They’re a little old-fashioned. I did my best to hide it — practicing how to open pads while barely making a sound and burying them deep in the trash. But I couldn’t be sure when I was internalizing her shame and when I was acting in defiance of it.

My parents shamed us about our bodies endlessly. Those shorts are too short. Only skirts below the knee are acceptable. That top is cut too low. Bare shoulders are indecent. But South Asian women are placed in a paradoxical position. Hide yourself endlessly for shame. Protect yourself from being marred so you could secure a good marriage. And then, one day, emerge from the chrysalis in perfect, untouched beauty.

The only time I’ve been to a salon with my mother was just before B.’s wedding in India. After two decades of being told that a dressed up body was improper, suddenly now I was supposed to care about looking good. Suddenly now, drawing attention to myself in that way was acceptable, but just for that one day. I was uncomfortable and a little unnerved by all the watching eyes because I was so deeply conditioned to believe it was shameful. But this is the love that was sanctioned.

You can say that I never had any bruises or scars, that there really isn’t much to this story at all, so what’s the problem? But what can I say? How can I explain that the world terrifies me in its vastness? That the deepest truth I hold is that people are fundamentally scary, unpredictable and untrustworthy? That dreams are a luxury when the mere existence of feelings could compromise the only place I had in this world?

My family moved around a lot, especially when I was younger, as my father chased one dream job after another, but the one constant was that I was always drowning in a sea of whiteness. My classmates taught me, at a fairly young age, that all the things that made me different were sources of shame.

“Why are your jeans purple?” (Why are you wearing those hand-me-down clothes, those dated, out of fashion pants?)

“Your mother has a red dot sewn into her forehead, right?”

I wanted so badly to fit in. I dreamed of having different parents, parents who I could go to with the simplest of my wants: a wardrobe that at least wouldn’t make me stand out. “No,” definitively, and more silence. If I asked too often, “What’s wrong with you that you would think of something so stupid as to want this? It’s such a waste of money.”

I turned, instead, to things seemingly more in my control. I remember looking at my hands and wishing with all my heart they were white, thinking that if I hid from the sun I could will my brown skin away. It didn’t work, of course it didn’t work, but as I grew older, I learned how to hide better. I spoke less and less about my family and anything that even hinted at culture, to the point that I still don’t use my sisters’ names when referring to them; sharing my own foreign name is more than enough to navigate.

But, as I grew older, the terms kept changing, and I couldn’t keep up.

“You’re a girl, why do you have a mustache?”

I couldn’t tell the other kids about the time they had yelled endlessly at B. because she dared to do something about her pubescent hair like the other girls in her class. How improper that is for an adolescent girl. Had she ruined herself on purpose, because every South Asian knows the hair will grow back thicker? That was a memory buried deep in myself, like so many others, surrounded by silence — all shameful topics, never to be discussed inside the family and especially not outside it.

And besides, by that point I knew that anything I said would only be fodder for further attacks. I tried throwing my own jabs, once — I called a boy “so gay” and felt terrible about it ever after. I learned, after hurting someone else, that the kindest thing I could do for myself and for others was to hold my feelings even closer.

Every high school rom-com I’ve watched shows teenagers fumbling through adolescence together. But I had bigger concerns, and love wasn’t real anyways.

Eventually, first B., then N. went to college, and so I was left to navigate the unpredictability of school and home life ever more alone. Oh we talked on the phone every single day, but it wasn’t the same. And then there were all those things — the most important things — that we had never spoken about at all. How could we start now, over a landline? How could we start now, when we never knew if they were listening? How could we start? Now?

That’s when the feelings began to just spill out. The harder I tried to hold them in, the more intense they became. Feelings I could never find words for, so I drowned myself in music to express the things I didn’t know how to say. Still don’t. I can make you a playlist of all the most desolate musical moments written by composers of the Western classical cannon. Would that make it any clearer?

I receded further into other people’s stories. Young adult fantasy novels became my guide, and I particularly loved books with women at the center of the action. I relished the works of Patricia A. McKillip, Robin McKinley and Diana Wynne Jones, who showed me that a woman could be seen for everything she was capable of, that a woman could be herself and still belong. But, they also, unwittingly, showed me that love was a foregone conclusion if there was a boy and a girl, roughly the same age, who spent an adventure’s worth of time together. That’s all it took.

So I romanticized those rare moments when a boy talked to me and didn’t make fun of how I looked or what I said. That’s all it took, right?

One day, I stumbled on an excerpt from Stone Butch Blues in an anthology N. had recommended to me. I remember the wonder, the utter beauty that reverberated through me as I read an intimate scene between Jesse and Theresa, and I needed more.

One day, I stumbled on an excerpt from Stone Butch Blues in an anthology N. had recommended to me. I remember the wonder, the utter beauty that reverberated through me as I read an intimate scene between Jesse and Theresa, and I needed more. But what left a much, much stronger impression were all of the graphic descriptions of assault, of being unaccepted, of being abandoned again and again and again. I didn’t remember that Jesse found a place at the very end.

I closed that book, and, with it, locked shut a door so, so deep inside me I didn’t even know it was there. By that point, I was so removed from myself I had no way of realizing what had happened. Those feelings had long since hardened into imperceptible silence, hidden behind a mask so close-fitting I couldn’t feel it on my skin and countless others I adorned meticulously because that is what I thought acceptance meant. Perhaps, if I made myself small enough, I could make it out of this life unscathed.

And yet, in spite of all that, I continued to despair at the lack of attention I got from boys and, eventually men, as one after another my sisters and then my closest friends entered into relationships and got married. When would my moment arrive to be seen, to belong? To be loved?

But, on the rare occasions I was noticed by a man, my feelings ranged from indifference to fear. Most of the time, I felt nothing.

When love is a matter of desperation, how do you even begin to know what it is you desire? It doesn’t matter what shape love takes. Or does it?

People talk about being closeted. “What do you mean you assumed you were straight until you were almost 29? Didn’t you have any inclination earlier?”

I refuse to fill the silence with a voice that was never there. There was a word that just didn’t exist in my world. Couldn’t. I was already burdened by too many other labels that prescribed who I was and asserted that I would always be worth less in this world. I simply could not add one more to the list.

Sometimes — I would argue most of the time — there isn’t a single, solitary closet. It is a door within a door within a door within a door, each chamber going deeper and deeper and deeper, and if you make it to the innermost one you just might catch a glimmer of your heart as your eyes adjust to the darkness around you. If you’ve been told your whole life that opening even the first door is an act of shame, that opening the second door results in derision, that the third door ends in violence and beyond that who even knows — would you open any of them?

It took years of unlearning and learning the many shapes of love to crack open one door and then the next, close it, reopen and try again. And I have always, always been afraid of darkness, of things that I can’t see, of paths that I don’t know where they lead. But no one makes such journeys alone. With B., with N., with people who have come in and out and into my life throughout adulthood, I’ve begun to build a place where I can be and always belong — a place that is much richer than the flimsy love any of those movies or books could possibly imagine.

People marvel that in just a couple of years I went from assuming I was straight to being so comfortable in my queerness, from how I dress to the fact that I write here publicly. But I finally have the words for what I’ve been trying to say for so long.

It has taken me three decades to find this voice. I will not silence it.

Honor Trans Elders: Cecilia Chung Is the Mother We All Wanted

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

If you polled Cecilia Chung’s friends and acquaintances about her best qualities, you’d find that “hilarious” is in the top two. When I think of her now, as I sit 3,000 miles away in Brooklyn, I hear her signature chuckle—her body leaning backwards, her glasses falling just slightly down her face. 

Behind that laugh lies many years of struggle. While she was figuring out how to survive, she was also laying the foundation of movements for justice today. 

Prior to arriving in San Francisco, the city she has called home for over three decades, Cecilia grew up in Hong Kong. Her early memories of childhood already demonstrated her divine feminine energy. She grew up obsessed with the stories of goddesses, especially Quan Yin, a Buddhist deity that reincarnated many times in multiple genders. Since her parents were rarely home during the day, she had the space to play with gender in skits with her sister. “I always played a goddess. And in primary school, I played a belly dancer when I was in the sixth grade.” 

But the older she got, the more she felt the need to hide her femininity. She was already dealing with racist harassment at her boarding school. “They called me ‘slant eyes’ and ‘socket face.’ I didn’t want to give them more ammunition.” 

She didn’t allow the goddess side of her to return until she started going to clubs in Hong Kong. During this period in the 80s, artists like Prince and David Bowie wielded androgyny against the strict rules of gender. But they were certainly not the only ones. Gender variance is well-documented among Indigenous societies globally, but that history is often buried by colonizing governments. In fact, many people who are called “trans” today were sacred people — shamans, priests, mediums. 

As if she were channeling Quan Yin, Cecilia dolled herself up for club nights. These instances helped ease her way into a gender transition, which began on the other side of the world. Her family moved to the United States in 1984. And her life continued to vacillate: role play then boarding school, club nights then college. When Cecilia began her undergraduate studies in San Francisco in 1985, she knew she was through with hiding. 

Transitioning can mean entering a new sense of self. It can also be the result of finally letting our inner child have the freedom we’ve always craved. While trans people get closer to who we are, our loved ones often position themselves further away from us. Cecilia became estranged from her family when she told them of her transition.

At the time, she had two jobs: at a finance company with a six-figure salary and as a language interpreter within the court system. She resigned from her finance job because she could no longer withstand the 16-hour workdays. She thought she always had security with her second source of income. But court judges took note of her physical changes due to hormone therapy and her contract was subsequently terminated. Without the support of her family and no way of supporting herself, Cecilia turned to the streets. She was a sex worker at a time when there were no digital mechanisms for screening clients to evade dangerous men, including the police. While she was homeless, she also self-medicated. That same year, she discovered she was HIV-positive. 

Cecilia in 1993, the year she became homeless.

Her life was filled with loss: starting with the loss of her family and her career. And now, she was witnessing her community being taken by a mysterious virus. “I remember some of the girls. You’d see them one week. And the next week, they passed away.” 

She experienced sexual violence during her time as a sex worker. Almost three years into her homelessness, two men tried to sexually assault her. She screamed for help and ran around their red four-seater, even jumping onto the roof of the car to be out of their reach. One of the assailants pulled out a knife and lunged at her. She tried to block the knife with her right arm and sustained a stab wound. When she eventually passed out from rapid blood loss, the two men kicked her until they heard sirens in the distance.

She was rushed to the emergency room with a punctured artery, a severed tendon, and nerve damage. When the nurse asked her for an emergency contact, she gave her mother’s phone number. Her mother arrived at the emergency room, finally realizing that her daughter’s transition wasn’t a temporary matter or a lifestyle. By then, Cecilia had already undergone years of trauma. 

“How does it feel to retell that story today?” I ask her.

“It gets a little easier each time. But it’s taken a long time to come to terms with it. I felt like I was the criminal. They don’t see sex workers as human beings.” She was a target for rape and murder simply for being a trans sex worker. And she couldn’t turn to the police for any help. In fact, police officers regularly profiled and arrested trans women as sex workers and as “female impersonators.” These arrests would lead to the Compton Cafeteria riots and the Stonewall riots that launched a national LGBTQ movement. To this day, the police continue to attack and imprison trans women of color under the guise of enforcing the law.

After that assault, Cecilia channeled her trauma in the service of her communities — trans communities, people living with HIV, and sex workers. In fact, even while she was homeless she served on the San Francisco Transgender Discrimination Taskforce. She documented cases of discrimination against trans individuals, while experiencing them herself. She became a counselor for people who use drugs at Baker Places Rehabilitation Center and a counselor for people navigating HIV at UCSF Alliance Health Project. She dedicated herself to community work at a time when there were hardly any services being given to transgender communities, especially those who were migrants, sex workers, disabled, or living with HIV. There weren’t yet national organizations like Transgender Law Center, where she and I are colleagues, fighting legislation and shifting cultural perceptions of trans people. There weren’t progressive policymakers who fought alongside community organizers to decriminalize sex work. She playfully recounts, “We’ve been advocating for sex work decriminalization since the Jurassic period.”

Cecilia organized and spoke at the 40th anniversary event for the Compton Cafeteria riots, which helped launch a national LGBTQ movement.

Over the next two decades, Cecilia Chung would move through too many roles at too many organizations and governmental bodies to name. In 2004, she produced the first Trans March ever, which is still an annual event during Pride Month in June. She was appointed to Obama’s Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS in 2013. In 2017, her life’s story was created into a series by ABC called “When We Rise”; she was portrayed by the brilliant trans Filipina actress Ivory Aquino.

Her will to survive and help her community thrive has been recognized by the Levis Strauss & Co. Pioneer Award, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation Cleve Jones Award, the Human Rights Campaign Community Service Award, California Women of The Year, and the Out and Equal Champion of the Year Award, among others.

But perhaps the greatest praise she receives is from the people she calls family. She became a mother to so many. She became the mother who so many of us were denied. She became the mother who wouldn’t abandon us. She became the mother who saw our transness as something that made us even more deserving of her love. Her impact is felt in the hearts of every person who has shared stories and laughs with her. 

As a daughter of Ms. Cecilia Chung myself, I indulge myself and ask, “What’s it like being a mother now? How does it feel to care for so many now?” 

She spends a moment reflecting. “I never knew I would live this long. I thought I would die when I turned thirty. Ironically, that’s when I got stabbed in 1995. I would not wish what happened to me to happen to anybody else… My role is to be there and show them it’s possible to have unconditional love. And it’s kind of my own healing space. Because that’s what I wanted at the time.” 

Like all mothers, Cecilia Chung was once only a daughter. She sought the same kind of love that her daughters find in her. 

For a moment, I imagine the world she thought would be her reality, a world where she dies at thirty. I imagine myself as a motherless daughter, alongside her other children. I explain to her why I’m struggling to speak through tears, as she observes me on her screen. This very moment, a mother-daughter conversation, was something she was never able to experience as a young person. At least for a while, she, too, just wanted the unconditional love of a mother who understands. Now, she’s helping end the cycle of daughters who are broken by a world always at war with them. The same world that came close to killing her years ago. 

Cecilia stands in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 2012. By this time, she had lived seventeen years past the age at which she expected to die.

This month, I implore you to celebrate the fact that you live in a world that’s been transformed by Cecilia Chung, alongside so many movement mothers. Mama CC helped set the stage for trans people to receive the proper resources in health, housing, and HIV care. She helped mold the landscape of individuals, organizations, and institutions that are making sure no trans person will go through what she went through. Her story has inspired the media and art that’s moved forward cultural ideas of who trans people can be. 

The state of trans lives is nowhere near what it should be. But without Cecilia Chung and the ecosystem of leaders who each played their part in changing the world, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Today, as I sit safely in my apartment, with enough to eat and a network of people and resources to support me, I thank Mama CC and so many other trans elders. I have many trans siblings who don’t even have that much, who are without the basic means to survive. And that is why the work of trans liberation continues. 

“There are others before me, too, who’ve been advocating hard, to make all this possible.” How fitting that in her closing words to me, Mama CC chooses to honor her own ancestors. 

Four Transracial Asian Adoptees on Body, Place, Family, and Race

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

I knew all the words to the original cast recording of Miss Saigon when I was in sixth grade. I’d sit cross-legged on my twin bed listening to the double-CD, memorizing the liner notes and singing along in what I imagined was a spot-on Lea Salonga impression. Miss Saigon is the worst type of white-savior-complex, virgin-whore dichotomous, colonizer-loving Asian representation. I also loved it. It was among the scarce Asian pop culture representation I’d found in 1994 in rural Western New York.

There was this one song, titled “Bui-Doi,” a Westernized version of the Vietnamese trẻ bụi đời, in this case referring to children born during U.S. occupation during the Vietnam War. (The term bụi đời in Vietnam refers to any person who lives on the streets, not just children or mixed-race children of American occupiers, but anyway.) The Vietnamese protagonist, Kim, has a child with a white American soldier and the climactic end of the musical comes when she, heartbroken that he has moved on and married a white woman back in the U.S., kills herself in front of her former lover to ensure her child can be “an American boy.”

This was my first exposure to an Asian adoption story, other than my sister’s and my own. Miss Saigon is just the traumatic tip of the iceberg when it comes to the United States’ racialized history with the transracial adoption diaspora.

Prior to the late 1940’s, white families rarely adopted children of color. “Race matching” was the typical practice, with agencies placing Black and mixed race children in Black homes and white children in white homes. That changed in the 1950’s, as interracial placements began happening purposefully, often into evangelical Christian homes with a literal savior complex. In addition to interracial adoption of Black children, international adoption and adoption of indigenous children by white American parents also began to rise.

Following World War II, international adoption became increasingly common as wars, famines, forced migrations, and other issues made children living in poverty more sympathetic and visible to Americans. Soldiers sent to war and occupations in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in the years that followed both raped women and had romantic relationships during their deployment, resulting in children and mothers who were poor and stigmatized in their own countries.

In 1954, the evangelical Holt family adopted eight Korean children who were “war orphans” in what became a public spectacle. They went on to launch the faith-based Holt International, the first international adoption agency and one of the largest still operating today. For decades, Korea was one of the largest “senders” of children to the United States. Korea underwent an industrial growth period in the 1960s and 1970’s that created economic division, resulting in huge numbers of children being available from “unwed” parents, teenage mothers, poor families, and due to divorce and death.

At the same time, the growing civil rights movement increased the overall openness towards interracial families. Victories in reproductive healthcare like the birth control pill and legal abortion meant fewer white infants available for domestic adoption in the U.S.. White parents were drawn to the idea of “saving” orphaned children and were also more open to adopting light-skinned East Asian and Russian infants rather than Black infants available for domestic adoption. South Korean and U.S. adoption agencies worked together to funnel Korean children into the U.S. in the thousands annually.

The adoptee diaspora is lived by many people from many countries, including not just East Asian adoptees, but Pacific Islander, South Asian, African, South American, and Caribbean adoptees. Many of us are LGBTQ and the adoptee diaspora has unique ramifications on our health, our families, our bodies, and our future.

Lisa Kim is a bisexual Korean adoptee from San Diego, CA who came through Holt International to the U.S. in 1965. She was two years old when she arrived, with no information about her birth or early years of life. Growing up with four siblings who were biological children to her adoptive mother, her childhood was “wrought with physical and emotional abuse.” She never fit the model minority stereotype because her family was poor and she didn’t fit in with other Asian children or with white children. She remembers her first racial slur from a classmate at the age of seven. “Basically, as a Korean adoptee, your identity is always in question. You straddle two worlds—not white, not Korean.”

Feeling caught between two worlds or without a place to belong is a common experience for Korean adoptees. I also remember my first racial slur around kindergarten, when kids would whisper, “Chink,” to me in the hallway. As an adult, I think about where those kids learned that word and that’s more upsetting to me than my five-year-old peers’ first ventures into hate speech.

Like both Kim and me, Jake Abbott grew up in a white home, with white family members, deeply wishing he could be white. “Growing up, I thought I was going to be white,” said Abbott, a transgender 29-year-old Korean adoptee living in Rochester, New York, “Not literally, obviously I knew it wasn’t possible, but there was always this sense that I wasn’t the way I wanted to be… I think I focused a lot of my unhappiness with myself onto that unattainable goal, when the reality was that I had a different but similar unattainable, at the time, goal to become a man.”

Abbott feels that being adopted contributed to the length of time it took him to recognize his gender dysphoria. “Sometimes I wonder whether I would have recognized my gender dysphoria sooner if I had Asian male role models in my life. Even at the beginning of my physical transition, I felt that I could never look the way other trans men/trans masculine people looked. It was only when I made a conscious effort to consume content from Asian men/trans masculine individuals that I felt like I could see a future for myself where I didn’t hate my body.”

“I longed to be tall and blond, with blue eyes like my siblings,” shared Kim, “I saw being Asian as ugly and less than… The very idea that I saw being white as superior is such a sad statement. Today you couldn’t pay me to be white.” Living in this placeless racially complex space is common for transracial adoptees. We’ve been severed from our language, food, culture and our history and there’s no way to fully retrieve it, no matter how much healing we do. The politics behind so-called interracial adoption and intercountry adoption have always been bound up in Western imperialism, whether it was the “integration” of Black and mixed-race children into white households, forced removal of indigenous children to “boarding schools” across North America, or the “saving” of children from war-torn countries. Not all adoption experiences are bad, but all come with deep loss.

As Korea added new U.S. adoption restrictions in the aftermath of their public embarrassment during the 1988 Seoul Olympics, China became the global leader in international adoption in the mid-1990’s through today, followed closely by Russia. Overall, international adoption has been dropping since 2005 as more countries including Ethiopia, China, Russia, Korea, Guatamala, and Khazakstan have eliminated or reduced the number of adoptions to the U.S. and standards for international adoption have become more rigorous.

Kate is a 23-year-old queer and nonbinary Chinese adoptee who lives in St. Paul, MN. Per identified with per Chinese culture and also feels “there isn’t much room for [Chinese] queer and trans identities as the general population struggles to survive harsh conditions and, traditionally, trans and queer people aren’t acknowledged.” Per was able to embrace per identity by meeting other queer adoptees and other queer people of color who navigate multiply marginalized identities.

Queer and trans adoptees, who already grew up with a notion of being “chosen” by their families and straddle complex identities deeply understand the concept of “chosen family.” When asked what brought him joy about being a Korean person and an adoptee, Abbott replied that, “…’chosen family’ in LGBTQ+ communities is something that is not as easily embraced in other spaces. I find that other members of the community are more understanding of the different layers and nuances that can exist within a family dynamic and that it doesn’t matter who gave birth to you but rather who played a formative role in raising and supporting you.”

Kim recounted her “first trip home,” a home trip to Korea she embarked on as an adult after beginning to connect with other adult adoptees through a local meet-up group. The group “was the first time that I was able to connect with others who shared the challenges of being adopted into a white culture.” At 45, she took her first trip back to Korea, followed by a second trip the next year. “It was very powerful. I say that on a molecular level, my body knew that I was, ‘home’,” she shared. On her second trip, she was with a group that included Korean adoptees from Europe and she remembers, “sitting in an outdoor eating establishment in Seoul one night speaking French with KA women from France & Switzerland. It was absolutely surreal. I felt that I had died and gone to heaven! A truly magical experience.”

At 45, she took her first trip back to Korea, followed by a second trip the next year. “It was very powerful. I say that on a molecular level, my body knew that I was, ‘home’,” she shared.

Chosen family revolutionized my way of being in the world, too, but it’s mainly been my queer and trans family and aligning my solidarity with Black folks and people of color. I’m just beginning to forge real-life connections with other adoptees, dissect my adoption trauma and joy in new ways through parenthood, and grow my chosen family to include specifically queer and trans adoptees. This piece you’re reading is a real-time exploration of that journey.

For all of us in both queer and trans spaces and adoptee spaces, the concept of “family” is perpetually changing and changed. This comes to bear for many of us as we approach how we want to create our own families. For Abbott, not having any biological relatives or health history was a factor both in entering his transition without any idea of what male relatives looked like and his plans for having children one day. He shared, “While I was struggling to decide whether HRT was right for me, I would have appreciated the comfort of any information that could help me feel like I knew what was waiting for me on the other side.” He also has had to pass on having a DNA-related child, knowing that he would need a gestational carrier to carry his eggs, a costly procedure that would have been “too expensive and physically undesirable (for me personally) that I decided not to pursue it so that I could save money for top surgery and be able to start HRT sooner.” Abbott has made peace with his decision that will likely result in him never meeting a biological relative.

While writing Countdown to Baby T. Rex, I connected with several other adoptees who also chose to carry their own biological children. It’s something I never planned to do and it unearthed new levels of pain when I realized that I had never even considered the possibility of a biological child. It’s very much the reason why I’m thinking about and reading so much about and trying to connect with Korean adoption narratives now.

Having her own child was also a “turning point” for Kim. She shared that, “It was the first time that my being adopted bubbled to the surface. Up to that point, I managed to bury my feelings. While pregnant, I distinctly remember it hitting me that the child I was carrying would be the first person that I would be genetically related to. It was also the first time that I was struck with the thought that some woman carried me in her body.”

Adoptees are always grieving loss. That’s something that translates into queer and trans experiences, as well, and certainly the experiences of people of color. The losses are big and small, can be forced on us or uncovered through our own lived experiences, and they stay with us. Adoptees are up to four times as likely to commit suicide than non-adoptees. On top of that, more than one in five LGBT youth have attempted suicide and that number is higher for Native American, Pacific Islander, and Latinx youth. Transracial adoption narratives in popular media often focus on the adoptive parents, the “saving” or “civil rights” framing of adoption, leaving transracial adoptees feeling they have to show gratitude and that they’re alone in their feelings of loss.

There is certainly joy in adoption, too, not for all but for many. Kate shared an annual tradition per family has during which they have a celebratory dinner and look through photos from per adoption together. Per also attends Chinese New Year events with per friends from Chinese school. My sister and I had similar commemorations every year, which was kind of like a second birthday with presents and cake and attention from our parents. In fact, it’s my sister’s “anniversary” as I’m writing and I just sent her a note of celebration. OK, it was a gif. Because we’re all stuck at home during the pandemic, my mom now video chats with my toddler every day and we both get so much amusement out of the ways Remi reminds my mom of me at Remi’s age. I feel so close to both my mom and my child in those moments.

Because we’re all stuck at home during the pandemic, my mom now video chats with my toddler every day and we both get so much amusement out of the ways Remi reminds my mom of me at Remi’s age. I feel so close to both my mom and my child in those moments.

I believe my queerness makes my Asian-ness and my adoptee-ness stronger. I am more myself when I hold all these truths together than when I try to compartmentalize them. Kate also spoke to the joy and strength that comes from per multiply marginalized identities: “Since I identify in many ways, it can be disheartening to find out so many ways I might be marginalized. I also find that these different identities can have protective factors. I may be a minority, but I can speak up for myself and others on issues and ask for help. I might be queer, but I can pave the way for younger people who are also struggling and show them that it gets better. I may be adopted, but I can relate to other adoptees and form strong bonds and encourage their stories to be heard. There are many ways to see both sides of issues and I strive to find the strength in myself when confronted.”

Abbott added, “There is no right or wrong way to feel about your past or your culture. You don’t have to embrace where you came from, but you absolutely can. Be thankful for the ways that being adopted makes you uniquely capable of viewing class and race, and acknowledge when it makes life harder.”

I asked Kim what advice she would give to younger transracial adoptees today and this is what she shared: “Never ever apologize for who you are. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel less than because society has deemed you as different. Embrace yourself—your full self. Speak your truth. Surround yourself with others who will love and support you. Never give up, and never forget where you came from. We are so resilient!”

The Illusion Of Safety

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

Just about two months ago, I was driving up the 101 to record a conversation with Nicole Kelly for her podcast, The Heart, and Asha Grant, of the Free Black Women’s Library LA (a branch of Olaronke Akinmowo’s Free Black Women’s Library project). That afternoon we had a conversation on the topic of people pleasing, and how it has informed our youths, and the kinds of queer women we have become now.

I highly recommend listening to NK’s series, Divesting From People Pleasing, for a deeper dive, but “pleasing” as we’re considering it, is not about being nice. It’s about all of the ways that we, as queer women of color, deny, curate, bury, criticize and otherwise create a public presentation of ourselves in order to move through the world. It planted a seed in my mind about what it means to be Asian American: about the values that are most important in my family, about the ways I was taught to protect myself and succeed, about how those strategies are perceived by larger American culture.

After the the podcast episode aired, I got a text from an artist friend, Chloë Bass, that said, “My response thought (IN CASE YOU WERE ASKING, which you weren’t) to something you said is that actually we are being protected using strategies that people in the past wished they had known before the bad thing happened to them. If they had known to protect themselves from that thing, they feel like they would have been ok. So they imagine the thing they wish they had (long hair, correct clothes, whatever) and use that as the protection into the future. But in the future, we face different problems that need different protections that we don’t know yet. And it’s always going to be like that.”

“Does it have to always be like that?” I asked Chloë. I couldn’t help but wonder: Is safety ever more than an illusion? What is true safety?

This was at the end of March and COVID-19 was buzzing like a low ominous bass line beneath everything, shaking out a hysteria that was erupting in all sorts of ways, from hoarding obscene amounts of toilet paper and water to a rise in brutal violence and open hatred of Asian Americans in public. Plus, there were just a lot of people dying from illness. I kept thinking about what Chloe had said. I kept thinking about this present/future that I lived in. I was well aware that it was different from the past that produced my grandparents and my parents, that I wouldn’t otherwise exist.

But it was also true that the same discriminatory sentiments against Asian people, from the past, had been carried on, as a kind of cultural protection among The Rest, which is how I consider everyone else who isn’t “Asian”.

But it was also true that the same discriminatory sentiments against Asian people, from the past, had been carried on, as a kind of cultural protection among The Rest, which is how I consider everyone else who isn’t “Asian” — a designation that of course Westerners would make to attempt to homogenize the majority of the world’s population. So am I ignorant or optimistic for thinking that I am less vulnerable than my Japanese American grandma Sumi — Betty, as she called herself to please in white company (a name I used at the milkshake shack at my summer camp because Kamala was too pretty to let them butcher)?

I wanted to track down the past-future protections that had gotten me to where I’m at now in my identities. I also wanted to know how to better face the unknown of my own future — I don’t want to be caught parading around in last generation’s false sense of security. So last weekend, I got my parents and my sister on a Zoom call to discuss the values that had been instilled in us by my grandparents, and what the culture of our family was about.

I had an idea of the general values in my family culture — I did grow up in it — but it was illuminating to have my parents put these things into context for me. It boiled down to four main values: education, family, pride in your identity, equity & justice. There is a way that all of these ideas meld together to create the general container of the world I know. If I think about them as one protective strategy, the goal is to gather as much knowledge and legitimized qualification as possible, use it to enlighten your family in a cultural and social way, gain access to money and opportunity, and then feel confident enough to extend this same protection to as many other people as possible.

When I see it laid out like this, I understand how easy it would be to create the narrative that Asian Americans are complicit in upholding white supremacy culture. I know a lot of Asian Americans who do. I also see how easy it would be to cast this strategy as simply protective, conservative, self-interested, rather than forward-thinking or inclusive.

When I was in high school I found my family strategy constraining in its singular focus on academic achievement, with some room for sports, as the most important value in a person’s whole entire life — “what about the way I feel?” I was always writing in my journals and my creative writing classes, “what if succeeding means sacrificing who I want to be?” Then, in college, having been radicalized by a winning combination of campus orgs and post-colonial theory, and also starting to come out, I found this strategy short-sighted and arrogant. “How dare we find a comfortable life within the systems that oppress us while people continue to die?!” was my totally cliched, self-righteous college vibe. Without understanding that comfort is necessary to survival, without looking at how lucky I was to have been gifted an extremely expensive experience of learning to articulate who I was, how I thought, and what I stood for.

My parents met in my dad’s dorm room at Oberlin College in the 70s because he was a popular calculus tutor, and my mom and her roommate needed help with their problem sets. When it was my turn to go to Oberlin College (and my sister would join me three years later), I didn’t quite understand what a huge accomplishment it was for both of my parents to have been there, but also how well it fit their own parents’ plans.

My mom is sansei and grew up in California. When I ask her about what expectations there were of her growing up, she says it was very clear. “Just like you, we were born with college funds, and the expectation was that we would go to college. Sometimes, as a treat, we got to work to add money to our college fund.” My mom’s mom had grown up on a strawberry farm in Oregon and she’d told me about how much manual labor filled her life. “It was extra for the women and girls because we also had to do housework and take care of the men — don’t get married to a man, unless you want to waste your time,” my grandma had told me. I’ve taken her advice to heart.

I know my grandma saw education as her way out, as a means to develop her own independence and to fortify herself against inevitable racism and discrimination. Sumi went to college, and then in the midst of internment, was one of the few Japanese American women to earn a master’s degree, and went on to earn a teaching credential, so that she could influence as many young minds as possible. I read an essay she published in the 80s in a UC Berkeley review about how, when she was applying for secretarial work, for which she was overqualified, she was told that they didn’t hire Japanese people and she should “go be a waitress.” But she would just not accept that. It occurs to me that my grandma was accruing an official record to back her up when she went to break the rules. I come from people who never intended, I see now, to accept safety as enough.

It occurs to me that my grandma was accruing an official record to back her up when she went to break the rules. I come from people who never intended, I see now, to accept safety as enough.

My dad’s family did not have the discipline, steady-paying jobs nor the financial-planning that my mom’s did. But my dad says his own dad clearly had designs on him getting an education, and leading an intellectual life. We’ll be generous and say first that my grandfather is a charming, intellectual powerhouse with mastery of both the sciences and the humanities, and was a professor of Eastern philosophy for many years. But what is hard for me to forget is that he’s also a narcissist, philanderer, misogynist, party monster and just generally irresponsible. When I ask my dad about his dad’s expectations of him, he tells me this story: “My dad, first of all, did not come to the graduation ceremony when I got my M.D. Instead he asked me when I was going to get a Ph.D. and I had to tell him I probably won’t! I think he saw medicine, and all professional degrees, as technical work, as not requiring a great mind.”

At the age of 7, my dad came to the U.S. with my grandma and his two younger sisters to join my grandfather, who was teaching math and physics at Yankton College, in that well-known American city, Yankton, SD. My dad says Yankton’s small town Americana made it a really smooth transition, people were welcoming and helpful. When my dad’s family moved to Houston, TX in 1964, it was the first time they had experienced segregation in the U.S. and it shocked them. My dad says, “We saw the U.S. from an academic perspective, as this place of innovation and new ideas, and especially my mom, was horrified to see African American people treated so poorly.”

As a dark-skinned Indian person, my dad lived in this liminal space, where he was technically allowed into places that denied Black people entry, but everyone was angry about it, convinced he was lying, that he had snuck in and wasn’t supposed to be there. Both of my grandparents, my dad reported to me, held gatherings with Black leaders from Texas Southern University, where my grandfather taught in the summers, to organize around passing the Civil Rights Act. My dad says of my grandfather, “He was always asking, ‘Why do people stand for this, why do you let them treat you this way?’ and they’d say ‘Well, if we resist they kill us.’ So that was sort of our introduction to the U.S.” That my family has long seen their own proximity to Blackness as a relationship to consciously cultivate and build power with was news to me, but also a message I grew up with, that was always implicitly there.

All of this reframes the narrative I had of what my grandparents and parents were doing with their lives, and with me, their latest iteration. Before I began this mini-journey, I thought I came from a family that hung on pretty tightly to protective measures. It seemed like the risks I was willing to take in my own life were bigger than the ones that people had taken before me: I’m very gay with a mohawk, I’m a writer who doesn’t write for white people, I’m not invested in marriage or the couple form. I am actively looking to discard a kind of superficial safety for another that was built around being exactly who I am, to living the change I seek. That is what true safety looks like to me now: being secure in my ability to adapt, to create my own path where there is none, to set goals that nobody else can see, to pick the people who give me strength and bring them along with me. I’m starting to understand now that so many people in my family before me were taking these same risks, building this same kind of security, it just looked different then than it does now.

I can’t claim that this is how all Asian American families work.That would be as absurd as believing myself to be performing the role of model minority when I achieve success — and I maintain that I would be just as smart, as funny, as hot, if white supremacy never existed. I recognize the ways that my personal Asian American culture is strange, in my family we’re all weird, but we are also a part of Asian America and I know we aren’t the only ones.

I’m very gay with a mohawk, I’m a writer who doesn’t write for white people, I’m not invested in marriage or the couple form. I am actively looking to discard a kind of superficial safety for another that was built around being exactly who I am, to living the change I seek.

What I think I am saying is that so much of American culture is a performance. I was working with a hypothesis that a good portion of what we call Asian American culture, is a fearful protective response to living in the U.S. That living under capitalism, that contending with the prevailing notion that we were all the same and all expendable, had produced a monolithic Asian American culture meant to prove our financial value and therefore human value, to commodify ourselves in order to buy our safety in white America. In essence, to pretend that we’re committed to their rigged game. I don’t know, now, that it was always based in fear. I think so many of the best parts of our cultures, the most safe and the most dangerous, are still protected, just for us. But the performance worked, they believe it.

Some among us apparently believe it too. There are an unseemly number of Asian American people who are fully committed to the violent, tragic cause of the original America. When I see Asian Americans suing Harvard to get rid of Affirmative Action, because they see it as the highest level of protection I think to myself, “Oh shit, these assholes forgot that complete assimilation is a performance.” And when I see Andrew Yang wearing an American flag around and telling us to “prove our Americanness” I think to myself, “To whom does he belong?” I think somebody needs to remind them. I think they forgot. That you will never be protected, you will never be safe here, not by accepting values that don’t value you.

I used to think it was my own security and safety, my privilege, that allowed me to decide that I didn’t want to participate in anyone’s monolithic culture — queer, Japanese, South Asian, literary, womanhood, romance. In many ways, it’s true. My parents and grandparents have a built all kinds of safety nets to catch me, should I fall, and as long as we’re alive, we will have each other. But it’s also clear that they also passed down to me the permission to live beyond the things we know, to take the risks that I see fit, and to invent my own version of security and comfort in the world, because that’s what they did. That’s my family legacy.

I still agree that we can’t know what protections our future selves will need, but maybe we just don’t expect to hold on to safety, especially not to find it in the status quo. The version of safety that’s an illusion is the one that pretends to protect you no matter what. Instead, maybe we just accept that none of us are safe unless all of us are safe, that to keep living our cultures and identities comfortably, we’ll always have to take risks and keep looking out for the costs of our sense of security.