Dear 妈妈,
I will always remember the sour air, the first time, the only time your alien mouth birthed the word “sex.” It lowered slowly and dully.
Until I was encased in a soft film of guilt. This year, or four years ago, I was 15 and still glowing from amniotic fluid.
The powdered soil, orange sky, cooling spit on my upper lip was a mother.
And unexpectedly ejected from a computer screen. I saw myself, a queen.
When my freshman year partner broke up with me for a more progressive, White girl, my yellow girlhood only became more patiently, stubbornly American.
In the West, men left streams of satin and lines of shit for women to pick into clothes. And in the West, the big titted Chinese mascot I drew in after school art class with Hong老师 was my partner’s idea of an intersectional revolution.
Must everything foreign be revolution?
Hong老师takes my hand in hers and I shiver at the contact. How much was given for these calluses? Tsk. Tsk. Not like this.
To contain such history in a tiny body and to rub, with the intent to remove, replace, retribution, until the thinness of skin, the back of my hand, breaks in confusion. She will release me.
Hong老师 continued her cricket sounds, brushed away the beads of black rubber, and, with the concentration of an American immigrant, enforced the curve of Blue Girl’s side boob.
The Gay Girl’s Riding Club led by Ray Harrison created pre-Stonewall queer adaptations of popular Hollywood films.
Harrison filled the screen with comedic drag figures usually comprised of his circle of friends.
In one scene in The Spy on the Fly, recreating the classic plotlines of a James Bond film, the protagonist stumbles into the lair of a conniving group of Chinese opioid addicts. Under the white light, conniving might be a bit of a stretch.
For seemingly no reason, the policemen, chasing Bond, slaughter. One Chinaman down. Two Chinamen down. Three Chinamen. Four China. Five. The gunfire paused.
Why do these cameras always zoom in on our emptied limbs?
Our hair, the long braided type, plastic against the concrete, like, mom, my hollow participation trophy proudly displayed in the living room and last week, you called me to discard.
I should have said something. I should have said something instead of laughing helplessly in the theatre. Your bruised hand, now beautifying, beginning to crystallize over mine, as we practiced, once again, erasing.
Forgive me. For bringing the White Utopia into our home. When I reached my aged chopsticks over your body for a serving of steamed egg and corrected my name as if I ever knew it. Alex.
And you cried because your creation story is the airport. Transitory. Transgender, and you didn’t know it either. And you saw dad for the first time in an airport.
And you found the name hung, alive in front of one of those sterile airport bookstores.
A week before, Iris Chang who wrote The Rape of Nanking, killed herself. Later, we hike past her gravestone.
Do all Asian families throw secrets like swallowing medicine? It’s good for you. It’s good for you. Let’s just get it over with.
After everything, we were in deadlock and silence truly doesn’t suit this family.
But you taught me to ignore your dark circles not because you were afraid of your reflection, although you are afraid of your reflection, but because you were afraid of melting—this was not love.
I looked away out of kindness.
One afternoon with the moist air stuffed full of summer break anticipation, you picked me up from school. The road caught your words. I sat in the passenger seat.
Completed “In Honolulu, you were concieved. Our wedding in Las Vegas, did not spend too much money. We wanted to splurge for honeymoon.
You know, Iris, your dad looked much more attractive back then. Less fat. He even helped me plan the vacation, which he do not do anymore.
We had a balcony and you can see the sea and sunset everyday. Very beautiful, very expensive.
At the end, 他给我 Swarovski bracelet. I will give you on your wedding day if you get a nice Chinese husband.
但是，it was not our first time having sex. Our first time, I did not know it was so easy to be pregnant without the protection.
They never taught us in China. So, I was pregnant. Before. I think it would have been a girl, 你的姐姐.
I was very excited, but your father told me to get an abortion. I will not forgive you.”
“Mom”
Mom, 我没给你说 I am learning you. I am learning you. Because, mom. Because.
You claim so confidently, this country.
So little rage and I rage because I know for the White woman you smile at in your morning hike in Rancho San Antonio (rehearsed, with meaning “Hello, good morning”) we are simply another Asian migrant with our tongues twisted into this violent language.
And the both of us looking silly in neon polyester, our liberal pilgrim costume.
You were 21 when you immigrated to America for university.
And maybe, because you could buy alcohol, your roommates didn’t rip into your smaller, smarter eyes, “chink” like planting that synthetic red, white, and blue in between the floorboards of the living room. Instead, they sequestered you into the attic
Cinderella, did you desire my desires? To be desired and undesired? Over the summer, when in an effort to culture my brother, you drove the family to the Cantor Art Center in Stanford
He just wanted to do his math homework. And, of course, you nodded with surrender because that’s what you came here to do.
Black spines of hair peaking out of algebra equations. So while Derek slanted over the steps of the museums over the Rodin sculpture garden, we drifted through a, likely, stolen collection on Chinese Art.
Taking turns guessing the dates of the pots, you always won because I lost interest in History class when we got to Chinese dynasties.
Mom, there’s so many and they all look the same. Mom, I forgot to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Then, you were observing a sarcophagus from Indonesia.
Two White women, maybe PhD students, maybe just colleagues reunited were taking a selfie behind you. And I tried to drag you out the frame.You slapped me for the first time in 3 years in front of the TT Takemoto video.
I’m not much of a straight A student. This story has been told a million times and I will continue.
Progress is the devil. The only time I received a perfect record was in second grade. You and dad beamed as my school handed me a certificate with an embossed ugly metal pattern.
After the award ceremony, Dad called me into his office. “Iris-ah, since you are smart now.
I need you to look at this.” Correct the grammar of his emails. Wielding my elementary subject-verb diagrams, I regurgitated Ms. Bowden’s instructions like beaten-in scripture.
We graduated elementary school together as my instruction became professionalism, instead of, punctuation. I’ve always loved performing.
“Dad, white guys like to talk about fishing, yachts, and hunting.” They act like this.
And I’ll mimic a Ford commercial. Before, I knew it dad was buying his first gun.
One lazy weekend morning, you were in the bedroom gossiping about Derek’s poor grades, and we were in the kitchen pretending not to hear.
Our uncle’s gifted Star Wars Lego naked on the floor, distributed by shade.
From behind the table, dad slid out with his newly bought 9mm handgun. “WATCH OUT DEREK” he shouted.
And he aimed at my head and shot. Dad who you described as burning, backlit by the Oregon sunset when you first met him in the Portland Airport.
Dad, despite our victory against time and against space, only tangible through pictures. A day on the San Diego coast when sitting on his shoulders, I dripped mint chocolate chip ice cream into the oily crevice of his scalp.
A digusting laugh twisted in his gut before ripping open the silence, and Derek laughed too. Mom, when I couldn’t cry.
“Did you know that 90% of gun-related deaths come from within the household?” A statistic I read in speech class, not even sure if it’s true.
That immigrant fear that one mistake could end it all. Mom, why does Dad have gun if he cannot kill. He would not be able to kill.
Robert Aaron Long was 21 years old when he murdered 8, 6 of whom were Asian, in three Atlanta spas with a semiautomatic 9mm handgun.
March 16, 2021. Robert was watching pornography. Ashamed, he decided to buy a gun to kill himself.
After purchasing the gun and 50 bullets from a firearm store in Holly Springs, he decided, instead, to target his sexual temptation.
Robert drove to the Young’s Asian Massage Spa paid for a service, and went into the bathroom to prepare his handgun after it ended. He killed for an hour and twelve minutes.
“When Long finished using the bathroom, he walked out, pulled out his 9mm handgun, and aimed it at Paul Andre Michels.
Michels was in the back of the building using his cellphone while leaning over a counter.
Long fatally shot him once in the head. Long began walking towards the front of the business in the main hallway.
His next victim, Daoyou Feng, was in room 3. Feng poked her head out of the room and Long shot her once in the head.
Long entered room 4 and shot Xiaojie Tan once in the head. Long then walked into room 2 and injured a man.
Long entered room 6 and fatally shot customer Delaina Ashley Yaun González once in the torso while she was hiding in the corner of the room. Her husband was receiving a service in another room. Only six people in the building were left uninjured.”
By the time the police arrived at Young’s, Robert had already left for the Gold Massage Spa and Aromatherapy Spa, where he killed 4 other women.
“I’m going to kill all Asians.” Robert pleaded guilty and was charged with eight counts of murder.
This country was written in fetish. When they ask me about this weapon, this fucking gun, this evil machine, Asian fetish, I can answer in a million words, in all jargon you cannot pronounce.
Mom, I want to say I told you. This country’s pattern of sexual abuse and violence against Asian women, Asian sex workers is ritual. This colonial, imperial fantasy.
The Vietnam War developed an industry of 300,000 to 500,000 prostitutes for the satisfaction of American GIs.
In the Korean War, Ralph Millard, an American doctor, created the double eyelid surgery to make Korean sex workers more desirable to American soldiers.
The Asian massage parlor, synonymous with sexual services. These are our ancestors, mom, there is no blood, but only the curve of our eyelids, an open and waiting mouth, the red lipstick you bought in a bundle from Aliexpress, and our memory.
In this country, it doesn’t matter if our family line almost ended at Japanese invasion. My ex-partner and their dumb anime comparisons.
How can I express how porn makes me feel? To need, so painfully, to one day transform into silicone.
A unburdened sex toy. If the American Dream is to leave behind traces of existence 妈妈，你真忘记了吗?
Your first flight, from Shanghai, you told me how the roofs receded in time, they receded into their primitive form—clay.
After living in Wuxi, Hangzhou, and Chongqing, it was unexpected. From up here, now American, the specificity shatters. You must cling onto a hyphen.
For this is your last reminder that at one point, when your father brought back a black-and-white TV in a sales trip, the light richocheted off the tiered clay ceiling and it wasn’t about conquest.
3 jobs and 4 classes a week. After abandoning graphic design, you switched to information studies and became a computer engineer.
You met Dad through your parents, who found him on a TV dating advertisement.
Two computer engineers and then Silicon Valley. 妈妈, I am so grateful.
This is my eighteenth year of teaching you and Dad, English. When you turned to me over an email to Derek’s Spanish teacher, and left behind, “I always wanted to be an artist.
And I don’t understand your art. And I think it’s stupid. But I am proud.”