“For my friend Fong,” he says, and begins singing John Denver. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.” There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. “It’s a blur-dense, raucous, exhausting-feelings and thoughts all jumbled together into days and semesters, routines and first times, rolling along, rambling along, summer nights with all the windows open, lying on top of the covers, and darkening autumn mornings when no one wants to get out of bed, getting ready, getting better at things, wins and losses and days when it doesn’t go anyone’s way at all, and then, just as chaos begins to take some kind of shape, present itself not as a random series of emergencies and things you could have done better, the calendar, the months and years and year after year, stacked up in a messy pile starts to make sense, the sweetness of it all, right at that moment, the first times start turning into last times, as in, last first day of school, last time he crawls into bed with us, last time you’ll all sleep together like this, the three of you. And whether or not that quantification, whether accurate or not, because of all of this you feel on some level that you maybe can’t even quite verbalize, out of shame or embarrassment, that the validity and volume of your complaints must be calibrated appropriately, must be in proportion to the aggregate suffering of your people. That the wrongs committed against your ancestors are incommensurate in magnitude with those committed against Black people in America. That despite all of that, you somehow feel that your oppression, because it does not include the original American sin-of slavery-that it will never add up to something equivalent. Violation of civil liberties including internment. Alien land laws and restrictive covenants. Legislation that was in effect for almost a century. That while your community’s experience in the United States has included racism on the personal and the institutional levels, including but not limited to: immigration quotas, actual federal legislation expressly excluding people who look like you from entering the country. That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream, i.e., White America-Īnd on the other hand neither do you feel fully justified in claiming solidarity with other historically and currently oppressed groups. Wu, is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority?
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