Gilded Gates

I started the writing process for this piece by crawling through dozens of “50 Prompts for Personal Writing” articles on a bright March day masquerading as a cool spring afternoon. Maybe it’s the weather that brings up my spirits so much to take up writing again, even if only for a day. Maybe it’s the boost of getting a platter of anxieties sorted and out of the way, or the joyful anticipation of seeing many friendly faces I have long missed this coming weekend. Most likely a mix of all three, but whatever caused it, here I am – finally starting the lovely process of staring down a blank Google Doc again. Ah, nostalgia.

I’m slogging through open prompt after open prompt, but none of them inspire me. When was the last time you overcame adversity? Do you like horror movies? What role do you have in your family? None of them particularly call to me. Some pique my interest but require a sink into somber reflection, and I’m not quite ready to leave my good mood at the door just yet, however valuable those prompts may be. But it’s been so long since I’ve last written, and if not now, when? I possess the full and empiric knowledge that if I get up from this chair, tell myself I’ll think of something else, and wait for an appetizing prompt to fall into my lap, I will not be writing until the second coming of Christ (as my ex-nun-raised mother likes to say).

But I need a prompt, I need an assignment, I need a deadline – how else will I bring myself to putting out actual words on paper? Writing for myself, entirely for myself, is different and unfamiliar. I miss writing dearly, but dear god, where do people get the drive? What do people write about with no assignment to fill? Whatever they’re thinking about lately, I suppose.

Under this intense dilemma of what on Earth to write about, the logical outcome finally strikes: write about my writing. What else have I been thinking about on the daily, without fail? I don’t go a day without writing crossing my mind somehow: how much I miss it, old prompts I enjoyed writing, pieces I’m proud of, want to improve, or follow up on someday (but not today – never today, it seems), worry over deterioration, worry over a future without it, the loss of a space where I might be heard, doubt that what I have to say deserves to be heard in the first place.

But the swirling pool of fresh doubt and dusty pride churns to one single point: I miss writing. I miss using my voice.

Of course I talk with friends, and I speak my mind in small bursts, the give in a give-and-take conversation. But the empty Google Doc, however daunting it may be, is a comfort all on its own. It’s my personal amphitheatre, clear and devoid of all other life but I am here, speaking the thoughts and emotions and conflicts I have so dearly, desperately wanted to craft into words for two long years. It is bare, no seats are filled, and it is far from empty. I am here.

I miss my voice, so I will speak, and find company in it once again. If my voice is rusty and ugly, if it cracks and stutters and stalls, I will speak to improve. If nobody hears me, I will speak to hear myself, to reflect, to change. I speak for myself; it is far from empty.

I am here. And I’m so glad to be back.

“He was class president, not class thug.”

I keep thinking back to these words from House of Suh – a classmate describing Andrew Suh’s days in high school. I can’t help but think back to Better Luck Tomorrow as well as how Catherine Suh has been portrayed by different people in HoS. In terms of what constitutes a “good Asian” and a “bad Asian,” it seems that sometimes it falls to a strict binary of either star student or criminal. In BLT, the main characters eventually get into criminal practices. However, some of these characters, like Daric and Ben, are both model students and young criminals, creating a mixed and fluid image of who they are. In House of Suh,  from the beginning Robert’s brother and lawyer both paint his murder as Catherine Suh being out for money and thus sending her brother to kill Andrew – it got me wondering about how this “good Asian – bad Asian” dichotomy can be gendered, as well. Rather than being portrayed as violently criminal, accounts paint her as cunning for life insurance money or as flirtatious with men. However, HoS as a whole also works to build fluid, nuanced, and human images of Catherine Suh and her brother to blend and contrast with their criminality – rather than just be portrayed as “class president” or “troubled kid” growing up, or criminals, they are people.

Out of all the characters in Better Luck Tomorrow, Daric Liu stood out to me the most. At first, I thought he was going to stay in the stereotype lane portraying him at the very beginning of the film – studious, popular for his good standing in grades and extracurriculars – the “nice guy” popular kid, the school’s good-guy superstar. As the movie progressed and his flaws and deeper character unveiled, I saw that archetype mold into something entirely original, someone more human. Daric is first shown deviating from the purely “nice guy” impression given at the start when he makes a lewdly comments to Ben and then accuses him of being the token Asian on the team through his intensive questioning for the school newspaper. Daric quickly reveals himself as cunning, willing to show a doctored, biased story for more intense student reception. But as the movie progresses, Daric becomes more than just cunning – he becomes physically and criminally intimidating, all while maintaining human connections with the other main characters. When Daric and his friends, despite having power over much of the student body through both illicit and legitimate standing, are still treated as if they are powerless and do not belong at the school jocks’ party, Daric turns violent, even pulling out a gun. Daric is completely different from the one-sided picture we got at the very beginning, and that is because BLT has taken the time to develop and evolve his character from the very beginning. Rather than remain the one-sided “nice guy superstar” character, Daric actually develops because he is a main character. Better Luck Tomorrow leaves me thinking on why more Asian American representation in major media roles can lead to more opportunities like Daric Liu, where characters go beyond a set of archetypes and evolve as people to the audience.

Vincent Who? has got to be the most emotional film in this class for me thus far. Watching it, I was hit with fury, hopelessness, resignation, sorrow, and more fury. I couldn’t believe I had never heard of Vincent Chin. I couldn’t believe I had never even caught a hint of the history of Asian American lynching in any history class, any discussion with teachers, friends, or family, any activist social media. I remember a memory – more of an argument – with my father suddenly hitting me as I watched the film. All Lives Matter and that’s why Black Lives Matter is offensive to me! I remember him grinding out after a long argument. I did think it over, and realized that in its current scope, ALM isn’t frequently used as an communal anthem for how institutions like the police or judicial system have had shortcomings for all citizens of color, so much as it is used as just a counter to BLM. I still felt a little bad right then about arguing so vehemently with my father over it. I wondered if he had heard of Vincent Chin and all of these other heinous, tragic lynchings, and that’s what spurred him on to be so adamant in his position. (Later I asked him, and he had actually not heard of any of them – his parents didn’t get the same amount of Chinese newspapers that they get today – so I told him.) The lack of justice and the threat of Asian Americans being lynched even in recent history boiled my blood, and got me wishing there was some banner people could get behind to protest the injustice and violence against other Americans of color. Resignation hit me – there’s not right now, at least not with the same mainstream power that BLM has (and deserves), and I don’t know if there will be. But I’m hit with a daunting realization: maybe that’s up to us.

What struck me the most about History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige was its strong focus on  remembrance. While a central base in the film is the narrator’s striking visual memories of a Japanese concentration camp, History and Memory also presents how American government has tried to shape how many of the American people remember Japanese internment. The oddity of how memories that aren’t from the narrator’s own life naturally occur in her mind contrasts with the intention that the government had in molding remembrance. History and Memory discusses multiple facets of this intention – how the government did not allow any sort of recording or communication device, like cameras or radios, into the camps, or how one of the only sanctioned recordings of Japanese internment, war films, portrayed the Japanese as willingly leaving their homes. Even beyond World War II, a Republican official is shown advocating for teaching Japanese internment not as “Japanese concentration camps,” but to rather tell the next generations of Americans that they were moved to “relocation centers” justified by military necessity. There is so much intention in how the American government tries to shape how the country remembers – and forgets – Japanese internment, yet the narrator still comes to naturally remember and become part of the legacy of Japanese internment.

One of the first things to whip into my mind watching “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” was “Somebody actually made this?” And when I think this, I don’t solely mean the racist appraisals of Japanese that the creators seem to hold, as anti-Japanese sentiment during WW2 shouldn’t come as a surprise after learning so much about it. But it baffled me that people at Warner Brothers actually put in all the work of the animation process – storyboarding, hand-drawing cels to make a moving picture, and voice acting – into this piece of ignorant, dehumanizing propaganda? The fact that there were people who actually thought of the Japanese as less than human is deeply disappointing, and that children’s cartoons like these could infect the next generation of Americans with these ideas at formative ages is even more so. However, despite being utterly awful, these facts aren’t that surprising after learning about anti-Japanese propaganda and internment. The real slap in the face was realizing that for this particular type of propaganda to exist, there had to be dedicated creators. Animators, grown adult citizens, actually sat down and hand-drew, picture by picture, ugly caricatures of Japanese men digging in the sand like animals, showing off buck teeth, or kowtowing to a rabbit in a military uniform. These animators must have had to constantly look at the depictions they were creating and the ideas they were spreading to children as they drew out each frame of the cartoon. How can people look at a project so dehumanizing in the face again and again, and yet go through with it anyways?

Right at the start, Sanjay is portrayed as a wide-eyed child idolizing the role models he sees on television. However, the Super Team he sees on TV falls in line with American ideas of heroes – capes, tights, etc. On the far side of the room is his father, respecting their cultural traditions. But as Sanjay is brought over, huffing and grumpy from being disconnected with his show, he begins to imagine the figurines and instruments his father is using to connect to their culture as a dramatic fight scene not unlike that of his Super Team show. However, this time the role models Sanjay is looking up to resemble not just the Western Super Team, but figures from his family’s heritage as well. Near the end, we see that Sanjay’s father is heartbroken that Sanjay hasn’t connected to his culture – or at least, not in the same way his father has. Rather, Sanjay has connected in his own way, mixing the media idols he’s growing up around with the idols of his father’s culture. In this way, Sanjay has connected and personalized his cultural identity, making it a mix of his own. By this point, Sanjay has moved from his TV corner, to his father’s corner, and now, he is sharing this new Super Team – Sanjay’s Super Team – with his father as they meet in the middle of the room. In a heartwarming moment, his father gets to see Sanjay’s unique connection to his  heritage and appreciate that while it may be different from his own, it is still valuable and real to Sanjay.

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the two shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth.”

-Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West

Kipling’s poem, The Ballad of East and West, has a moment of recognition in The Cheat when an excerpt from this final stanza is shown in its very own frame around the time of the husband’s trial. By this time, Arakau has gone from sexual interest to dangerous, possessive aggressor. While Arakau has revealed himself as an unsavory character, Arakau’s physical appearance has also altered in tandem with this shift in moral perspective. Before, Arakau was presented in crisp, Western clothes when around Edith and other white characters. At the same time, his character is presented to be amicable, flirty, and courteous. However, we see flickers of what is to come behind this disguise when Arakau kisses Edith while she is unconscious, right around the time Arakau has shown Edith the Eastern section of his home. During the critical shift, when we see Arakau attempt to violently rape Edith before branding her as his property, they are deep within the Eastern section of his home, and he is fully dressed in ethnic garb. By exoticizing Arakau only at the moments where his character is presented as dangerous, the filmmakers link his Eastern heritage to his threat to others. His moral identity is linked to his cultural identity.

While it seems like there is a clean cut between Arakau’s “Eastern” and “Western” appearances and behaviors, the subtle breaks in his character around the times of his subtle shifts in appearances – such as when he kisses Edith without consent in the Eastern section of his home – seem to indicate that his gentlemanly, Western appearance is merely a disguise for who he truly is: a selfish, violent threat to Edith and her white husband. And in the context of the film’s link between his cultural appearances and his moral fronts, an Eastern man disguised as a Westerner.

Strolling through an earthy path graced with shade, she complains to me about not wanting to complain. She is in a strange place, lamenting and yet scared still about the very act. She laments what she dubs a sheltered life, and feels illegitimate in her strife. There is absolutely no way she can get in front of her class tomorrow, after hard confessions of childhoods spent huddled in fear and of nights without bread on the table, and make a speech about the struggles of being an introvert at a private middle school, and later a prestigious prep school.

But we walk, and she falls into that very explanation – of somehow inexplicably being unable to speak or have any feeling of social contribution. I lick an icy Powerpuff Girls popsicle as it drips down my wrists under the warm summery rays, and we bubble into harsh, natural laughter as my hands are stained blue (even after a wash in a GW sink). Somewhere along the way words about personal legitimacy and self assurance come into play, albeit among strange metaphors comparing introverts to potatoes simply in need of the correct circumstances to turn into zesty curly fries.

We are somehow in the Addison now, lounging on cushy chairs by floor-to-ceiling windows. The summer rays that had stolen my overpriced cold treat bathe me in a gentler embrace through the glass. My feet are bare, socks shoved into my backpack, and my legs are sprawled out on the deliciously cool stone of the coffee table between us. We laugh quietly. Exchange wild, irreverent jokes found on the internet with each other. Snort quietly, if that’s even possible. (We hope it was.) Eventually, I sink into the chair, my neck bending up on the back and my gaze resting into the scene beyond the glass. Bluish-grey sky tinted by the window shades, the sun, vibrant but never harsh, and the top of Cochran Chapel reaching into the blue-grey cloud sea. I’m not tired, not sleepy, yet feel the same lethargic lull. Submerging my gaze into this scene, my joints and bones and muscles melt into each other and become one fluid being, swirling in existence with the sky, the sun, the girl beside me, the building that houses both me and pieces of history in its empty halls.

I will have to leave very soon; I have work that will drag itself down my chest and an isolated disposition that will no doubt come to sit by me once again, but right now is precisely that. I exist in this moment, together with everything around me, and I am one existence full of many.

“For they are actions that a man might play:

But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

When first reading Hamlet’s accusations that the royal court was just acting in mourning, the first image to snap to mind was some thirteen year old chilling in an outfit 95% from Hot Topic and unhappily complaining on Reddit that their generation is so “fake.”

Although that was the first image, my mind also drifted to how many times I had seen similar behavior in my own peers (and sadly also middle school me). To be completely honest, it always pisses me off a bit to hear people talk as if they’re one of the only individuals left in the world and somehow that makes them such a special snowflake. I’ve seen friends turn their noses up at the peers they’ve labeled into tropes like “the fake popular kids,” refusing to believe that their peers have lives and identities just as nuanced as their’s. It’s not a new trend to label the world as “fake,”either – Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye was quick to label people as being “phony,” despite the judgement being shallow in itself.

I can see why Hamlet might do something similar. He’s in a hard place with his father’s death on top of his mother’s quick remarry to his uncle – yikes – and the pain that’s in your very being can feel like the most legitimate in the room. But I couldn’t help but feel irked by his coincidentally accurate whining about shallow mourning in comparison to his own genuine grief. My mind jumped to the same question that’s popped up in my head to friends and a myriad of malcontents on tumblr: what gives Hamlet the right to denounce and devalue the experiences of others? Accusing that people are fake is rejecting their identity, as if who they are is just a show.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t times in our lives that we mask certain parts of who we are, and put others on display. With the rise of easily-curated social media, one can just log in and find millions of carefully presented identities. But to fall into a habit of denouncing an entire generation as “fake” is shakily arrogant and narrow-minded. Again, I ask: why can’t all people have their own valuable genuine identities, like the kind you’ve given yourself? If you can’t find the unique value in your identity without first invalidating other’s, is your own self-image truly stable?