War operates like a disease. Only those who have personally experienced it know its toll. For them, they will suffer from the pain of it, and stay up all night praying to God to be healed from it.
Warmongers never talk about the costs of war, and so it falls to brave writers to reveal the emotional, economic, and physical tolls. I wrote my memoir, War and Me, to inform readers about ordinary Iraqi citizens and the horrors they faced during many years of war—the Iraqi-Iranian War which lasted for eight years; and then the Iraqi-Kuwait War (Gulf War), which ended with the imposition of an economic blockade in Iraq that lasted for thirteen.
On my first day of middle school in Najaf, the government announced they would close schools for ten days, until “certain victory” in the war with Iran was announced. But the war did not end in ten days. It lasted eight years, and all my friends were killed in the war or went missing in it. As a young woman, I hated seeing my father and brother go off to fight, and when I needed to reach them, I broke all the rules by traveling alone to the war’s front lines. That was my reality.
In my book, and in the list of superb books below, readers learn the truth about war for innocent citizens: crushing poverty and starvation, constant danger and fear, job loss, severe lack of medical care, and the absence of security and freedom. In a world on fire, these writers find courage, compassion, and a voice.
In her memoir, Yeonmi Park delves into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, a country whose inhabitants live in abject poverty, starvation, deception, and misery. Park describes the constant indoctrination that prevents the population from rising up against the “Great Leader.” With dignity and bravery, she also divulges that she and her mother were sold into sexual slavery in China and endured horrific hardships before they found their way to freedom in South Korea. Now a human rights activist, Park works tirelessly to bring attention to the oppression of North Korea’s citizens.
Vera Brittain’s memoir is an insightful and exquisitely written record of World War I told through the lens of a young, fiercely independent spirit. Brittain details falling in love with a soldier and becoming active in the war effort as a nurse for the wounded. The war cruelly robs Brittain of her lover, her brother, her dearest friends, and her academic work. But it also opens up new worlds, allowing her to travel alone to foreign fronts, first in Malta, and then in France to work in hospitals near the front. Brittain is a shrewd and intelligent observer of all aspects of war, and her story has lost none of its power to shock and enthrall readers since it was first published in 1933.
Bao Ninh’s harrowing tale depicts the lasting impact of war on an individual’s conscience through the journey of Kien, a veteran of the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade of the Vietcong. Kien struggles with PTSD, substance abuse, and an indescribable longing, a hope for a better future that he knows will never come. Ninh beautifully illustrates the emotional aftermath of war, a subject that often goes underrepresented in war stories. Though it was written in 1990, the novel is still fresh, presenting a unique, but surprisingly relatable, story of one soldier and how war changed both the world around him and the world within him. The Sorrow of War was banned in Vietnam upon its release for its negative representation of war and the government. It is that exact rawness, however, that makes it such a standout read.
The Broken Circle is a heart-stopping memoir that details the brutalities of war on Afghanistan’s citizenry. As a child, Enjeela has great pride and affection for Kabul, a prosperous and peaceful city. Everything changes after the Soviet invasion of 1980, when her family is thrust into chaos and fear. Enjeela, her siblings, and their father spend the next five years attempting a dangerous escape out of the country, where they hope to mount a desperate search for their mother, who left Afghanistan to seek medical attention prior to the civil war. Enjeela’s is a story that conveys war’s horrific effects on children.
This powerful novel presents a refreshingly original portrait of a Palestinian woman who fights for a better life for her family as she travels throughout the Middle East as a refugee. Born in Kuwait in the 1970s to Palestinian refugees, Nahr, the protagonist, dreams of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and opening her own beauty salon. But the US invasion of Iraq changes everything. Instead, she becomes a refugee, like her parents before her. After trekking through her temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, and falls in love. As her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation, Nahr’s subversive humor and moral ambiguity make this book a special treasure.
One of the most prolific investigative journalists – and a former wife of Ernest Hemingway – Martha Gellhorn writes in a way that makes readers feel as though they are in the throes of war alongside her. In The Face of War, Gellhorn takes readers from the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the wars in Central America during the mid-1980s. Some of her reporting and interviews are so damning and explosive, they were never published by the contemporary news media. Gellhorn’s brisk, candid reporting reflects her deep empathy for people no matter their political ideology; it is a truly transformative anti-war book.
Madeleine Thien has crafted a novel that is at once deeply personal and broadly political, rooted in the details of life during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Thien vividly describes two successive generations of a musically gifted Chinese family – those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. As readers become emotionally invested in Thien’s multidimensional characters, they learn how Chinese citizens were forced to reimagine their artistic selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates were irrevocably changed by the Cultural Revolution.
Before my first Asian American Studies class, my last semester of college, I thought my brown ass was white. Nowadays, I credit ethnic studies—from CRT to Beyoncé—for making me a person of color.
When I tell people this, they seem neither shocked by my delusion nor appalled by my POC betrayal. They seem, TBH, kind of bored, like my obsession with racial-identity development is old hat. And so I’ve come to think it’s a given: of course East Asians want to be white. The sky is blue, oppression is intersectional—what else is new?
But what if it’s not indifference? Let me slow it down this time like honey. I’ll run it back pure and unpack these very loaded American phrases: “wanting to be white” and “becoming a person of color.”
Before the US, my whole childhood set in Taiwan, I dreamt one night about an American-Born-Chinese pop star. Dressed in all white like a church girl, he was flying through the sky. I was him in the dream, though I saw him from afar. When I woke up and realized I was still myself—nose, still piggy, tummy, still flabby—I crash-landed, sinking into disappointment.
I was learning it at a young age: becoming cozy with whiteness meant destroying anyone who wasn’t.
Then I moved to the suburbs of Chicago. I became the Asian boy who always finished the sheet of multiplication problems first. The school placed me in gifted math right away. In fifth grade, the two people I bullied were Angel Davila and Shonda Okazaki. I made fun of Angel for having a “girl’s name.” I terrorized Shonda. While she didn’t “look Asian” to my ten-year-old self, her last name sounded Japanese. I don’t remember what I did, only that her mom, a Susan-Sarandon type in white-working-class drag, asked the teacher for a parent meeting. I was learning it at a young age: becoming cozy with whiteness meant destroying anyone who wasn’t.
In middle school, my English standardized-test scores caught up with my math. I got my dad—I guess he was around?—to advocate for my transfer to gifted English. It worked. We wrote our own books of poetry. Returning my first piece of writing, the teacher, a white woman squarely within J. Crew’s target demographic, told me not to get ahead of myself. It was my first time hearing this idiom. I couldn’t wrap my head around what it meant. Next year, at the high school, in “honors-gifted” English (🤷🏽♂️), I turned in an essay filled with long words from the thesaurus. The teacher, my Dumbledore, questioned all this diction, told me to stick to what I knew. Since then, I’ve written every sentence to prove my competence in the English language.
The summer before college was my first time feeling literary fiction in my soul. I was reading Infinite Jest—a notoriously long novel about loneliness, familial estrangement, and the futility of finding worth in one’s achievements—written by the dangerously white-male David Foster Wallace. On the big, floral couch at home, the skirt all stained by dog piss, I set the book face down at the sight of myself on the page. What I didn’t see in that moment was how Wallace would never see me. What I wouldn’t see for the longest was the particularities of my queer Asian American life.
When Jobu Tupaki, alien superstar, saw every variation on the course of her life, everything everywhere all at once, she took it to mean nothing mattered. Nihilism is why she made the everything bagel—a weapon of mass destruction, if we take the Alphas’ word for it. And why wouldn’t we? They are the heroes, after all.
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Let’s take a minute to revisit Jobu’s origin story for the bewildering everything bagel.
I started by putting all my hopes and dreams on it. Then I put all my report cards. Next came every breed of dog and wanted ads on Craigslist. Finally, the actual seasonings. With so much on it, the bagel collapsed, creating a black hole.
People who don’t do well in school are unfit for American life, undeserving of any more lifelines.
The juxtaposition of aspirations and grades brings up well-worn American myths. In the neat plot of model minorities, 4.0s open doors to hitherto unavailable opportunities. SATs measure intelligence, if not inherent worth. People who don’t do well in school are unfit for American life, undeserving of any more lifelines. This illogic defies harder, more honest narratives about all of the country’s isms.
My first semester of college, a month or so in at Brown, Wallace killed himself on my birthday. I took it as a sign I would be the next American genius. My second semester, I took Japanese History. I wanted to learn about myself but figured Chinese History had nothing to do with me. I didn’t think twice about a white man teaching an East Asian Studies class. I also took Intro to Ethnic Studies. I read Kimberlé Crenshaw as though intersectionality were an intellectual puzzle to solve, a concept irrelevant to my life.
I took Advanced Fiction. Another Asian American was in the class. I neither identified as such at the time nor assumed kinship with any Asian, but I remember this woman just like I remember the majority of the workshop. It was a remarkably attractive bunch, hip in precisely the ways I associate with Brown: thrift-store cardigans and cute, Icelandic backpacks; New Yorker subscriptions and Criterion editions of Fellini flicks; the faces of Student Labor Alliance and the College Hill Independent, cool extracurriculars that made a difference. I felt in all moments like a guest. I wouldn’t take another creative-writing class for eight long years.
A baseline of self-loathing. An open wound in the shape of myself, which I filled with longing for white men. A field of landmines for anyone who was other. This is what I mean when I say I thought I was white.
White supremacy sets up Asian Americans endlessly to act as beige pawns. In the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, which is bound for the Supreme Court, Edward Blum and the Asian Americans he’s organized accuse the Ivy League icon of institutional racism. The predictable ruling would “likely reduce the number of Black and Latino students . . . with more Asian American and white students gaining admission instead.” It’s wedgy shit like this that makes it hard to believe in “BIPOC solidarity”—hard to keep calling myself a “person of color.”
So, when Jobu says that everything’s a matter of chance, here’s the film’s implication. Making it in America has little to do with talent or hard work. Success is about the largely random factors of one’s positionality: race, ethnicity, sex, class.
Jobuvision is chaos to the Alphaverse, epicenter of becoming anyone you put your mind to, that madness of meritocracy. Far from evil, Jobu’s a hero—an iconoclast against Asian American mythologies, ones that rest on anti-Blackness.
Before my first Asian American Studies class, my last semester of college, Asian meant out of place to me.
Before my first Asian American Studies class, my last semester of college, Asian meant out of place to me. It meant obedient and robotic, the opposite of artistic. It meant conformist and indistinguishable, the opposite of American. It meant boring and awkward, the opposite of personable. It meant the opposite of Black.
Never mind that back in high school, in jazz band, the students who set the bar for improv were Filipino and South Asian. That my group of friends senior year, all of us misfits, who wore thrift-store tracksuits on the last day of school, was majority Asian and Middle Eastern. That the friend who got me through college—who I’d known since elementary school and turned into my lifeline once we were a commuter rail apart in New England—was Indian.
Never mind these facts. Believing in whitenessmeant denying what was in my line of sight, most of all myself. It took seven semesters of thawing my frozen sense of self to find Asian Americans worth studying.
My last semester of college was my first time in an American classroom where everyone was Asian. It was my first time making friends at Brown who accepted me exactly as I was. (It was my first time cuffing it with somebody who looked like me.) It was my first time learning that Asians have been on this land longer than the United States; that contrary to my anomalous presence in the Midwest, Asians live all over Latin America; that contrary to my family’s wealth and our post-’65 migration, Asians in the U.S. are also refugees and undocumented immigrants.
It was my first time finding power and pride in the term “Asian American,” which originated in the radical movements of the ’60s. For the first time, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinx students were crossing paths at San Francisco State College. Across the Bay, in Oakland, the Black Panther Party organized around self-determination. This model of Black liberation gave rise to the first “Asian Americans,” who demanded SFSC offer relevant curriculum and representative faculty.
My last semester of college was my first time identifying as Asian American. I am thirty-one now. I was in the class a decade ago when I learned about Vincent Chin. Chin lived to be twenty-seven. I was months short of twenty-one. That’s when I learned about Trayvon Martin. Martin lived to be seventeen.
I learned in the class that two white men killed an Asian American because the man was Asian.
I became Asian American in the shadow of a grim coincidence. I learned in the class that two white men killed an Asian American because the man was Asian. At the same time, the nation was grappling with the fact that a white man killed a Black boy because the child was Black. I recall no talk during class about Vincent Chin and Trayvon, no addressing the parallels of the two incommensurate acts.
In the film’s most overtly political scene, Jobu steps out of an elevator in Elvis drag. Evelyn is handcuffed. Waymond is unconscious. Police are on the premises.
A cop tells Jobu that she can’t be there. Heated, King Tupaki taunts him. You keep saying “can’t,” but I don’t think you know what that word means. Serving Yvie Oddly, she reveals a second face on the back of her head. She snaps the neck of one cop and positions another to get shot. Then a cop shoots Jobu in the back. Evelyn watches her daughter bleed until Jobu pulls out a ketchup bottle, revealing the deadliest gag.
It’s hard to make sense of an Asian American woman killing cops and staging her own homicide. Scrubbed clean of the historical record, popular imagination does not associate Asian Americans with racial violence. In the minds of many, attacks on Asians in America started with “kung flu” and Trump and peaked with the shootings in Atlanta.
Why might a text that’s Asian American in form choose content so tethered to Black American experiences?
The case of Vincent Chin made it plain that I wasn’t—would never be—white. What would I become instead? Whom? Would I claim a role of racial target, which in 2012 was taking shape in the image of Trayvon Martin? If I did, I’d be putting down my limited access to whiteness just to pick up a misguided claim to anti-Blackness. What kept me from swapping out one over-identification for another?
I had never talked about this before—the nebulous place of Asian Americans in the U.S. racial hierarchy.
One day, in the Asian American Studies class, discussing the concept of honorary whiteness, I said I often felt other POC assuming I was basically white. I had never talked about this before—the nebulous place of Asian Americans in the U.S. racial hierarchy. The professor—a father figure, of course—asked a question, simple and difficult. How do you know that people perceive you that way? I heard doubt in his asking, but I had no answer, so I dropped into overthinking, a Virgo’s groove. How did I know? Was I making all of it up? Was I the only one judging me—the only one even thinking of me?
At the ceremony for the English department, I noticed that English majors were either Asian or white. At the college-wide graduation, donning a red and yellow stole made for everyone in our class, I was part of a community—finally—at the end of four otherwise alienating years.
I was moving to Los Angeles that summer for grad school in social-justice education. I would start a career in “urban” public schools—that is, to work with youth of color—which is really to say, to teach low-income Black and Latinx kids. I was immeasurably, inter-dimensionally self-conscious about pursuing this role as a rich, East Asian man. While I surged with social-justice values, I was at a loss about what would make my care credible to the people I sought to serve.
So, en route to LA, in the middle of a summer renaissance, I attended the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance conference. At an “intergenerational plenary” that filled a hotel ballroom, a queer, South Asian woman said something that would stick with me for years. Though I’m technically Asian American and proudly so, too, I identify as a person of color much more—politically, spiritually.
At the time, this self-articulation felt as intimate as a password—magical like a riddle solved. In the ballroom, jotting down every word as if divinely revealed, I thought, It’s cute to be Asian American, but the real work is in solidarity to those more oppressed than I, and the only appropriate role for this duty is as a queer person of color.
Jobu’s everything bagel is literally a black hole. Given the film’s wobbly preoccupation with phalluses and anal penetration, I’m inclined to read the bagel as—well—as a Black hole.
I acknowledge that this gloss might seem glib, literal and a little embarrassing, but, no shade, so is the film. I would also assert that a crucible of American culture is an obsession with Black bodies—controlling them, inhabiting them. So, if I may:
Entering the everything bagel—Black hole—symbolizes fucking a Black person.
Entering the everything bagel—Black hole—symbolizes fucking a Black person. Loving Black people is the last thing you’re supposed to do if vertical assimilation is one’s MO in this country. The opposite is how you make it: hide privilege, champion hard work, ignore injustice, marry white, make hapa babies, lock the Tesla driving through Black neighborhoods.
People strive for other endgames. When non-Black people come into racial consciousness, whether white or of color, we often immerse ourselves in the breadth of anti-Blackness. We act like Black death is the whole of Black life.
Jobu allegorizes first-gen kids like me who go to liberal-arts colleges, go in on ethnic-studies classes, go home all gung-ho about communism and queerness, and go off on relatives about their racist, sexist views. Jobu’s black hole of a bagel symbolizes an all-consuming understanding: the fictions of American life hinge on the premature death of Black Americans.
From the start of my teaching career to the summer of 2020, a passage of my life bookended by two chapters in the Movement for Black Lives, I believed in the predictive power of positionality. The premise was this: socialized as a cis man, East Asian and rich, I was doomed to hurt people, to reproduce patterns of harm.
I wore this fate like a corset. Behaviors I tried to anticipate and hide: talking too much in my teacher-education classes, where the majority of my peers were women and only one or two were Black; mispronouncing the names of my Latinx students; mixing up the names of students with similar positionalities; locking my car doors “just in case” after passing a Black pedestrian; choosing bougie restaurants for dates without considering access and cost.
I made it a job to monitor all my thoughts and choices. Everything I did, I distrusted on account of my suburban origins, all that white supremacy I internalized growing up the only one. Everything I said, I said to myself first—a line from Tegan and Sara, a queer, white band that gave words to my anxiety in high school and whose music, along with that of so many white indie acts, I put aside to excise myself of whiteness.
I listened exclusively to rap, believing that conscious Black music would correct my basically white consciousness.
I student-taught at Compton High School. I commuted there from Koreatown. Every day, I listened exclusively to rap, believing that conscious Black music would correct my basically white consciousness. One morning, at a railroad crossing, cutting it close to the start of first period, I broke into tears listening to The College Dropout. “I’ll Fly Away” and “Spaceship,” gospel teeing up slice-of-life rap with Afrofuturist motifs, were teaching me about the lives of my Black and brown students—their dignity and their despair, I was sure. I felt good about myself for crying. It meant that I really cared.
The one class I taught was small. The students were majority Latinx, minority Black. The guiding teacher, a Black woman who ran the kind of classroom in which students rarely spoke, chose for me to teach poetry. I designed my first-ever unit around good kid, m.A.A.d. city, the Kendrick Lamar album set in Compton. For the final essay, which the students wrote in class, I assigned a prompt about how accurately the text represented “life in the hood.”
That weekend, the guiding teacher emailed me and my teacher-ed professor. On the day of the in-class essay, after I left, some students came to her during lunch and told her how uncomfortable they were with my prompt, how hurtful it was that I’d called their home “the hood.”
The teacher ended my student-teaching assignment early. She afforded me the opportunity to apologize to the students in person. I would like to think I took it—that I went back in and acknowledged to the students that I had disrespected them and their communities—but honestly, I’m not sure. I remember the students’ faces, their names and even their voices, but all I remember about the end is my massive shame over my preventable, almost textbook mistake.
In her official evaluation, which would factor into my credentialing by the state, the guiding teacher wrote that some people are not meant to be teachers. I took “some people” to confirm my worst fears about myself. I took it to mean Asian American men. My positionality would always be a liability. No matter my hypervigilance, my conscious cultural consumption, I would always end up hurting the people I was building a life to love.
If the cops had stopped me for breaking the law, anti-Blackness might have implicated my partner.
Five years later—after I failed enough at teaching to get better at it, after I entered the first romantic relationship of my life, after I left my job as a high-school teacher and moved in with my partner, after we took the plastic off the sofa—we had reservations one night at a restaurant down the street. Before heading out, I opened a can of hard cider. I drank it on our walk there. My partner’s Black. He brought up this evening months later, pointing out my carelessness in drinking outdoors. If the cops had stopped me for breaking the law, anti-Blackness might have implicated my partner. Had police escalated—
My partner didn’t go into all this. He knew I knew, I think. In fact, early in our courtship—before he presented me a key to his apartment while humming “Darth Vader’s Theme”—we talked about the benefits of dating people of color, all the energy we were saving instead of coddling and convincing white partners. We took for granted that our experiences and worldviews overlapped as Asian and Black men—that “people of color” functioned intimately as well as politically. That hope was why it hurt when he told me what I’d done the night we walked to dinner.
I learned in my twenties to condemn myself for thinking like a white person. This script assumes that the crucial division in white supremacy is between whites and people of color. But as Frank B. Wilderson III argues in Afropessimism, anti-Blackness and Black cultures are what structure the world that we all share. White or not, anybody non-Black needs a reminder of the world we’re accountable for.
As news spread in 2020 of attacks on Asians in America, I was ever aware of my privileges. Moving through the world in a body more masc than not; living in LA—in Little Tokyo—almost never the only Asian; young and able-bodied and dressed in the fashion of Angelenos; I figured myself, if not safe, then at least less vulnerable than most.
Then a white man killed eight people, six of them Asian women. Since then, government at every level has invested and intervened to #StopAsianHate. In contrast, since the 2020 elections and uprisings, the buzz around police abolition has dissipated. While enough Asian Americans have refrained from “#AsianLivesMatter,” the state’s limited acknowledgement of anti-Blackness—inconsistent, largely symbolic—implies over and over that Black lives don’t matter in the United States of America.
What I can’t get over about this inequity is that Asian Americans gained state resources through the use of Black American discourse. After the Atlanta spa killings, admonishing traditional media for erasing before anglicizing the Asian women’s names, Asian Americans enjoined social media to “say their names” in the original languages. Indignant about public indifference and incredulity, Asian Americans urged people to “check on their Asian friends.” To balance out the grief, Asian Americans were even showcasing “Asian excellence” on social media.
Asian Americans use Black cultures to make sense, to be seen. We do so without crediting Black people. Our gains have been disproportionate to what’s afforded Black Americans. We’re not the only ones to do this. America has a problem.
To use what doesn’t belong to me and get more out of it than the creators—this is a specific mode of theft.
To use what doesn’t belong to me and get more out of it than the creators—this is a specific mode of theft. The behavior is settler colonial; it’s model minority and anti-Black.
This is the defining challenge of my Asian American selfhood: crafting a way of being that’s as genuine as it is just.
The Alphas represent the burgeoning movement of Asian American conservatives, anti-affirmative action, pro-criminalization. The Alphas try to radicalize Evelyn by stoking her class-based resentments (laundry, taxes, laundry, taxes) and endowing her with a purpose: save the whole-ass multiverse by making things how they used to be.
As the MAGA agenda makes clear, you make your own civilization supreme by conjuring outsized enemies. Enter Jobu Tupaki. Sexual deviant. Remorseless murderer. Cop killer! No goals or moral code. An agent of chaos.
If the Alphas stand in for Asian American conservatives, Jobu represents their cultural opposite: the Social Justice Warrior. A genderfucking queer. An iconoclast. A police abolitionist. No ties to the status quo. A revolutionary.
Reading the almighty Tupaki as a paradigmatic SJW—a BLM, FTP, QTPOC leftist—we can interpret Jobuvision as an awareness of systemic oppression, of the life-or-death stakes of people’s social location. When one becomes aware that race, class, and gender all condition the life you get to live, the world begins to unfold as a multiverse.
The multiverse represents more than all the paths one’s life can take. The multiverse is metaphor for hierarchy, for how unfairness is the grounds for everyday living.
Trained to name and shame my privileges, I can qualify and even loathe every nice thing about my life.
Aware I’m positioned to thrive while others struggle to survive, I’ve learned to minimize my struggles and discredit my successes. Yes, I got into a competitive Ph.D. program for creative writing without publications or an MFA, but I did undergrad at an Ivy, and the year I took to apply to writing programs, I did so unemployed as my parents paid all my bills. Yes, this is my third essay at Electric Literature, the biggest platform of my career so far, but I met my editor at a conference, which I paid full price to attend. Trained to name and shame my privileges, I can qualify and even loathe every nice thing about my life. When I follow this logic, it’s like I’m not a person at all. I’m a cheat code, a string of privileges and pure luck.
Now get all up in your mind the iconic scene of Everything. Mother and daughter, rocks, overlook an expanse of nothing. The two are in a universe where conditions aren’t right for life. The only thing to do is watch. Jobu acts like it’s peaceful at first, an existence limited to observation. Then she tells the truth. The nothingness has felt like a trap. She’s been pursuing Evelyn not to kill her but to find another way, a subjecthood that would allow her more life.
Plato who? Cave what? 2022 is the dawn of talking rocks. Good morning to this allegory and this allegory alone of my East Asian American life.
Proximity to white-male privilege is my lot. Since the start in 2020 of the white-liberal frenzy to “expose” white supremacy, I’ve felt mighty uneasy. The culture and the market were aligned for the nation to go on a journey, something racial-justice-y. I’d started mine the decade before, feeling guilty and very much alone. I reached a bitter standstill. To live an ethical life, I had to accept I didn’t matter. The stories that called for championing would center me but rarely. The harms that warranted spotlighting would never be my own.
In a culture that feeds on spectacles of suffering, I’ve got a whole lot of nothing. I refuse to lay claim to any oppression other than what governs us all. I’ve resigned myself in adulthood to a status of American insignificance.
Everything is committed to redeeming Asian American men as indispensable political actors. It does so by staging our near-constant humiliation.
The movie’s running bit is belittling Waymond without his knowing. Alpha Waymond derides the weakness of Waymond’s body. He mimics Waymond’s voice to blend into a hysterical crowd. Waymond Wang even ridicules himself. In one scene, confronting Gong Gong, Evelyn takes on Waymond’s voice, literally speaking as him. Waymond’s right there, but he doesn’t seem to recognize his voice, calling it weird. Evelyn changes voices again, chirping this time. The film subtitles the noises as actual dialogue. By the end of the scene, the joke is less the birdsong than the affect of an Asian immigrant man.
The film’s atmospheric abuse of Asian men simulates our American condition.
It breaks my soul to enumerate Waymond’s many humiliations. This is precisely the point. The film’s atmospheric abuse of Asian men simulates our American condition. The movie implicates all audiences in our quotidian indignities. You might find yourself laughing at all the gags untilWaymond turns out to be the linchpin of the family.
His importance comes to light in the epic kindness speech. The conservative Alphas are bent on eliminating the leftist Jobu. An Alpha recruit at first, Evelyn has become a SJW sympathizer. After Evelyn stabs Waymond for all the Alphas to see, he puts himself in the middle of their fight. He begs Evelyn, Please. Be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on.
Everything Everywhere turns on this very plea. Because of Waymond, Evelyn chooses empathy over nihilism. Fighting with kindness, she defeats the goons. She wins over Gong Gong and reconciles with Joy. If the movie has an overt thesis, this is it. In a polarized, disintegrating world—an age of extremes and radicalization—reach across the aisle. Relate to the pain of the other.
For a movie about the multiverse, this is noticeably facile, perfunctory. The not-uncommon position turns a blind eye to power and politics. The naivete passes muster only because it’s delivered by a cishet, Chinese American man, a social location presumed to lack ideological allegiances.
The movie tries to make Asian American men relevant by presenting us as pitiable and, on top of that, apolitical, a rare class of angels that soars above the times. For this rhetoric to work, the film tears out the people most likely to grasp identity politics at its roots: Asian queers like me.
Not long after “My Family’s Failures” published, in the thique of revising “My Drag Masculinity,” I watched the movie a fifth time. Back in the dark of the theater, no longer crying about family and abandonment, I had the bandwidth now to start processing the gay stuff emotionally as well as intellectually.
I’d thought through the implications of framing ass play as irrational. Queerness is a joke, a total humiliation.
From viewings one through four, I’d thought through the implications of framing ass play as irrational. Queerness is a joke, a total humiliation. While this wasn’t lost on me—the cruelty—I judged the audience, not the text, whenever people laughed at Asian American bottoms, at Hot-Dog Evelyn and Deirdre.
The fifth time, though, I felt it: stepped on and struck out by butt plugs and dildos as gags; betrayed by the phallic undercutting of the women’s queer intimacy. Everything is so insistent on the absurdity of Asian American queerness that by the end of my fifth viewing, I stared down an obliterating question. Are queer Asian Americans real in Evelyn Wang’s universe?
This movie that’s helped me heal—that’s helped me feel what had gone numb in thirty-one years—does it accept that I’m that girl? Does it know the particularities of my queer Asian American life?
I remember what it feels like to doubt that I am real. I’ve worked so long—with such tenderness—to recover from systematic self-denial.
Tension is not a problem to solve. Tension—far from purity—is what it feels like to be alive. Tension—multiplicity—is a fulcrum to ride to freedom.
Now that I’ve felt what it’s like to be whole—loveable, desirable, and uncontainable by the inhuman Black-white binary—I refuse to be divided again. Masc, femme; Black, white; Asian, American—all of the above, always—I am everything. With my loves, we are everywhere, free to be all the contradictory things at once.
Sneha, the 22-year-old protagonist of Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut novel All This Could Be Different, is the dutiful immigrant daughter. Despite the long recession, she bagged a corporate job right after college, and a free apartment in Brewers Hill, Milwaukee. She regularly sends money home to India and is also working toward a visa sponsorship. Her life, on the outside, is set—except for the supine after-work hours, the loneliness unquenched by desperate swipes on dating apps, the bed temporarily warmed by one woman after another. When a chance encounter with Marina, a professional dancer, incites a crush that burgeons into a burning desire, Sneha realizes life may have more to offer. As her feelings deepen, she is compelled to contend with her identity, her (in)ability to share parts of herself, and the familial past she has buried.
A beautiful, authentic rendition of the brown queer experience and immigrant dynamics, All This Could Be Different is a love letter to these communities. It is a novel of possibilities, and a novel bound to steal your heart.
Sarah Thankam Mathews and I spoke over Zoom about finding community, the immigrant hustle and the American Dream, coming of age and emotional intimacy, and much more.
Bareerah Ghani:One of the most profound threads in the novel is the exploration of adulthood from the eyes of someone in their early twenties. Sneha talks about her present life as a period of freedom and looks to “adulthood” as an inevitable circling back to a path that’s already been carved out: find a stable job, get a partner, buy a house. At her age, I also felt like being an adult meant eventually giving in to what others asked of me. I would love to hear your thoughts on this warped sense of adulthood.
Sarah Thankam Mathews: Writing a coming-of age-novel, I felt aware of the ways in which the form can be conservative, although a lot of queer and postcolonial writers have done a lot to innovate within the conservative shape. Ultimately, I found it useful to almost put an explicit reference to the concept of “coming of age.” There are references to Goethe, who wrote what’s considered in the western frame one of the first Bildungsromans. And there’s this definite explicit acknowledgement of the western concept of coming of age, which is this liminal stage between childhood and adulthood, where you have some degree of satellite freedom, but not the full assumption of responsibility. I want to be careful with how I talk about this because Sneha is responsible for many things—for example, she’s responsible, like many immigrant kids, for sending money home. But what I’m talking about is specifically the responsibility to reproduce society as it exists. That’s what I mean when I say conservative. Ultimately, as I wrote my way deeper and deeper into the novel, I found the characters within it sort of shaking a fist at the world as it is, feeling really no investment in reproducing it, and in fact desirous to imagine different ways of being, of relating to each other, things that look like something other than bourgeois pro-capitalist.
BG:It’s especially heartbreaking how Sneha often feels like she isn’t seen by her family. How do you grapple with the idea that sometimes we have to conceal parts of ourselves from the people who raised us and shaped us?
I think it’s really up to us young South Asians to break intergenerational patterns of relational harm or trauma—and break them ideally in both directions.
STM: One of the shaping mechanisms of this novel is silence. Its first-person narrator is aloof and silent, and often deals in lies and cordoning off the different facets of herself. The thing about that is, on one hand, it’s deeply understandable given her background—from the ruptures of immigration to the criminalization in her family’s history. I feel a deep well of compassion for Sneha, and I hope some readers do, as well. This is someone who’s defiant about being seen as any kind of victim and is mocking the concept of trauma but definitely carries a heavy burden nonetheless. On the other hand, Sneha’s approach makes her unknowable. That’s what lying and silence does—it makes us unknowable, and sometimes to the people we love the most.
Part of the overarching project of this book is to examine what it means to be in community with people, to know and let yourself be known, to give and take in mutuality. The novel is advocating for a certain kind of large-hearted, generous, and honest relational style between people that allows them to build relationships and community with each other.
BG:I found it interesting that even when Sneha has real, steady friends and a partner, she struggles to be vulnerable. At one point, she tells Thom that in her culture there isn’t “always a big focus on, like, attention, affection, saying feelings out loud.” This resonated with me and I’m wondering what you make of this truth about South Asian culture. To what extent do you think it serves to work against our ability to maintain intimacy and be emotionally available in relationships?
STM: I really don’t see certain things as exclusive to South Asian culture. I have met plenty repressed WASP parents in my life who’re out there harming their kids’ psyches. But I do think there are specific challenges for young people to navigate if they’re diasporic; if they, like so many South Asian people, come from families who’ve experienced meaningful trauma, whether that’s partition or the longer wounds of colonization, or just, like, the trauma that is immigration. I’m an immigrant, I came here in my late teens. There was a lot about that process that was incredibly difficult and wounding for every single member of my family and it’s the sort of great, shaping force of my life. So I think it’s really up to us young South Asians to break intergenerational patterns of relational harm or trauma—and break them ideally in both directions, not just for the next generation, but also work to have engaging conversations with our elders, our parents, when that’s possible. And the reality is that it’s not always.
BG:Sneha and Thom’s dynamic is particularly interesting. He treats Sneha like one of his boys. We know he cares for her, loves her genuinely, but then on several occasions, when Sneha is pouring her heart out to him, he shows a lack of empathy. I’d love to know your thoughts on what I perceive as a typical hetero male friendship dynamic, where there’s a macho facade and a seeming lack of overt emotional support. How do you see all of this in connection to emotional intimacy in friendships and in the community we build around us, outside of family?
STM: The relationship between Sneha and Thom means a lot to me. One, you have a dynamic between two people who have their own relationship to masculinity. Sneha, in a lot of ways, idolizes masculinity, thinks of it as a superior way of being. That’s evident in some of her choices, some of her relational approaches, and even things like, she would much rather be sort of the strong, silent cowboy type than let her feelings spill all over the place. Early in the novel, when she says that she recognizes something of herself in Thom, that’s a lot of what she’s referring to—this spark of recognition that here is someone who’s also sensitive, who also thinks about the world and art and politics, but ultimately is kind of a bro, like they’re both kind of bros together. You see the challenges of real intimacy when two or even one person in a friendship is really committed to being apathetic and chill, and not letting their soft underbelly be exposed. And you see that in real contrast to the feedback cycle of general openness and generosity that, with some exceptions, you witness between Sneha and Tig. The other thing that is very interesting to me about Sneha and Thom is that they’re coworkers. They work in the same company, the same system, and one of the things that comes between them is conflict about who’s getting paid more. There’s something about their relationship that allows us as readers to think about what it means to have friendship and solidarity at work, and also what it means to compete with your close friends in capitalistic systems. Professional jealousy comes up in a lot of friendships, but it isn’t necessarily talked about.
BG: Sneha’s corporate life routine—the consistent back-and-forth between just home and work—makes her seem like a cog in the capitalist machine. I think it also speaks to the idea that the American Dream sold to the immigrant child from an early age seems to leave no room for personal ambition and drive. How do you contend with this as it connects to the immigrant hustle, the desire for a better life, and capitalist greed?
STM: In the novel, when Thom, whose radical politics Sneha does not at that time share, accuses her of being an aspiring member of the bourgeoisie, Sneha’s response is a little bit like: “fuck you, yes I want to have this life that I’ve never had”—and implicit in what she says is that Thom got to have it, his parents are doctors, etc., and so it’s really easy for him to play Mao. I think the beauty of the novel is that it can allow deep characterization, individual consciousness, and individual history to inhabit these questions. Sneha is not a super ambitious girl-boss type. I think what she’s really motivated by – because of her personal history – is safety. And a different character—frankly, like a younger version of me—would’ve been more motivated by the explicit question of ambition and climbing the ladder and making oneself a story. Sneha’s very much like: Maslow’s needs, I want safety, stability. There’s something very heartrending to me about that. And I think that that is actually the most common American dream.
The more complicated narrative that the American dream doesn’t ever examine is that there’s a reparative quality to what immigration can be.
A lot of Time Magazine cover stories of the American dream focus on a certain kind of pioneer wunderkind narrative when in fact, the actual American dream has to do with the fact that the world is extremely unequal—in part because of imperialism, war, climate change, and post-colonialism—and the quality of life and the safety and stability one can have is very different, based on what country you are born into. And the quality of life and the safety and stability one can have is very different, based on what country you are born into. So, it makes a lot of sense to me personally that people – who come from parts of the world which have been affected if not ravaged by colonialism and war, and the poverty and resource theft that ensues from those things – want to immigrate to richer countries that, in some cases, were responsible. Suketu Mehta talks about this explicitly in his book, This Land Is Our Land. One of its opening stories is of this Indian elder who, when confronted by a racist British man who was like, “why are you here, go back,” says: “I’m here, because you were there,” meaning, you were there in my home country. I think that’s the more complicated narrative that the American dream doesn’t ever examine, which is that there’s a reparative quality to what immigration can be.
BG: I find it interesting that Sneha often feels like she is her parents’ investment. At one point, she says, “All my choices are mortgaged to the people who have made my life possible.” I think this could ring true for many immigrant children, who are seen and treated as avenues for family success. How justified is this approach in your opinion, keeping in mind the fact that immigrant parents undertake the difficult task of starting anew in a foreign country, with language and cultural barriers, looking for safety for themselves, their children, and the generations to come?
STM: The reality is that families are wildly different. Most of the families I know who’ve experienced immigration—and specifically, where people have engaged in this script of “we’re investing in our children, we’re giving everything to our children”—the primary impulse isn’t anything other than dogged, sacrificial love. I want to honor that. It’s the sort of collision of this love against an unequal and extractive world that creates the hardship in my eyes. It’s the hardship of familial separation. It’s of using guilt as a weapon because you don’t see your child, who you love so much, as separate from you, and so you’re trying to control what they end up doing. I see it all as a flawed but deeply human expression of something beautiful and transcendent—which is love. And some things that are hard and fraught, like racial and wealth inequality, meets, frankly, an unwillingness to accept that your child has their own life and agency, which is a challenge for parents to accept across all cultures.
There’s a passage of the novel where Amit asks Sneha this sort of pitying question about arranged marriage and she’s struck mute because she doesn’t know how to say what she wants to say. And one of the things she says is, “I did not know how to explain this stubborn love for my parents that I staggered under, iridescent and gigantic and veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.” I think that’s like the novel’s attempt to engage with what it’s like to at least be on the child’s side of that dynamic.
BG:What advice would you give to a young queer brown person like Sneha, experiencing their early twenties?
STM: Find your people. Remember that you matter, very deeply. Try to situate yourself in the world. One of the things about being very young is that the world is large and incomprehensible to many, and trying to learn about the world and being in love with the world is one of the great gifts you can have as a young person. Particularly if you’re queer, situate yourself in queer history and lineage. The great comfort I always held onto was that there were other people like me—in long time, in present time. It’s ultimately about finding people like you, people you can build bridges of commonality with and see yourself reflected back in—and knowing that it’s often going to be hard, depending on who you are, but it’s also going to be very beautiful, joyful, and glorious.
The news comes in the form of an email. YOU’RE BEING REPLACED, the message says, and I glance around the office. The typists are typing, the copy machine is copying, and the shredder is shredding. The room looks like the type of workplace you’d see in a movie set in an office, not a Post-It note out of place: cubicles, computers; shades of grey and blue; the soft sounds of machinery filling the background. Everyone is acting the way they always act.
I walk into my boss’s office. She appears to be in the middle of doing something very important on her computer while riding a stationary bike. In the corner of her office, there is a trash can overflowing with hundreds of half-eaten chopped salads, and her desk is littered with lipstick-stained cups and bottles of every beverage imaginable. When she doesn’t notice me, I knock on the doorframe, and she stops pedaling and looks up.
Am I being replaced? I ask.
Oh good, she says. They told you. Things have been so busy around here I was worried I’d have to do it myself.
She steps off of the bike, rifles through a desk drawer, and pulls out an ornately decorated cupcake. She hands me the treat with a smile.
ACCEPT IRRELEVANCE is written in pale pink frosting across the top of the cupcake. I take a bite, and the cupcake tastes like a mixture of refined sugar and unrefined pity.
Why? I ask, my mouth full of dry cake crumbs.
We just feel you’re not the right fit, my boss says. It’s nothing personal, but we’ve found someone who’s a better match for the position. She hands me an empty cardboard box. Here, you can use this to pack up your belongings.
Back at home there is a problem with my key. It no longer fits inside the keyhole on the front door. No matter how many times I try, I can’t get the front door of my apartment to unlock. The key is suddenly a mismatch. I put my box of personal items from the office down on the ground and look around for the spare my boyfriend and I hid when we first moved in. It isn’t in its usual place under the doormat, so I bang on the door with a fist.
Boyfriend! I yell, and inside I can hear the sound of footsteps. A few seconds pass, and the front door finally creaks open to reveal my boyfriend standing in the doorway with an apron tied around his waist.
I hold up my key and begin to explain that it no longer fits in the keyhole, but my boyfriend interrupts me before I can finish.
I have to stir the sauce! he says. I don’t know what sauce he is referring to. He doesn’t usually refer to sauces at all. He rushes down the hallway toward the kitchen.
I pick up the box and follow him inside where I find him at the stove stirring an enormous pot of marinara sauce. I’ve never seen my boyfriend cook before, but tonight the kitchen table is piled high with crystal platters overflowing with food: piles of shellfish, a rack of lamb, freshly baked bread still steaming from the oven. I pick up a caviar-dusted deviled egg and watch my boyfriend strain spaghetti at the kitchen sink.
What’s all of this for? I ask.
To celebrate! he says.
Celebrate what? I ask. The fact I got fired today?
My boyfriend makes a face like he’s forgotten to take a soufflé out of the oven, which it turns out he has. He turns away to rescue dessert, and we both hold our breath as he pulls the chocolate soufflé out of the oven. He closes the oven door and wipes his hands on his apron before turning back to look at me.
About that, he says, and his eyes dart around the room. I follow his gaze and find three overstuffed suitcases waiting in the corner by the trash can.
What are the suitcases for? I ask.
Your stuff, he says. Your replacement will be over shortly. She’s finishing up some things at the office. That’s actually why we’re celebrating. She got promoted already!
She’s replacing me here too? I ask. I thought that was just a work thing.
What’s the difference between life and work these days? he says. He returns to the stove to stir the giant vat of sauce. A second later, he raises a single finger in the air as though trying to determine the direction of the wind. Hold that thought, he says. I have to send some work emails. He puts the wooden spoon down and bends over a laptop perched nearby on the kitchen counter. When he is finished typing, he closes the laptop and looks back up at me. Sorry, where were we?
Where am I supposed to go? I ask.
Have you checked your email? he says.
I wait for the train to arrive and read through my inbox. Apparently, the email had gone to my spam folder by mistake. The subject line says, NEXT INSTRUCTIONS, but when I click on the email the body of the text only reads: TBD. I don’t know who to contact about the oversight. I put the phone back into my pocket and watch the train pull into the station.
Almost all of the seats on the train are already full. As I walk down the aisle in search of an empty seat, I can’t help but notice all the passengers have something in common. They all look a lot like me. Some more wrinkled, some more taut; some with beauty marks, others with boils. I walk through train car after train car trying to locate an empty seat.
When I finally find one, I sit down and pay a conductor in a blue hat for a one-way ticket. Sitting to my left is an elderly woman. She too looks a lot like me—only about one hundred years my senior. She has a newspaper spread open on her lap.
Where are you headed? she asks.
To my parents, I say.
Oh that’s nice, she says, and the train makes noises to announce it is departing the station. Outside the window the landscape starts to blur.
Where are you going? I ask.
To my parents, she says and laughs hysterically. I join her in laughing, but I don’t know if we are laughing because her parents are likely very old or if we are laughing because her parents are likely very dead. I make a pillow out of my hands against the window and try to fall asleep.
I wake up to a finger poking me in the ribs. I open my eyes. It is the elderly woman trying to get my attention.
Do you want any sections of the newspaper? she asks. She holds the paper a few inches from my face. I’m still half-asleep but I nod groggily. She hands me the style section, and I browse the wedding and engagement announcements until I see a familiar face.
It’s my boyfriend printed in black and white, smiling up at me. I’ve never seen the beautiful woman standing next to him before, but I know who she is immediately. She has thin upper arms and a smile that doesn’t show her gums. She has a knack for arts and crafts and a head for business. She can dish it out and she can take it. She is my replacement, and I stare at the diamond ring glittering on her finger. The picture is small, but the stone still looks impressive.
The article says my boyfriend proposed by hiring a skywriter to write WILL YOU MARRY ME in the clouds. It occurs to me that my boyfriend and I were together for a total of six years and never discussed future plans, let alone marriage or proposals written by airplanes. I scold myself for always forgetting to look up at the sky and crumple the newspaper into a ball.
Hey! the woman says, snatching the paper back from me. I haven’t read that section yet.
The conductor returns to our row.
Excuse me, ladies, he says. It appears we have a problem.
No problem here, I say. Just a misunderstanding about a newspaper.
Next to me, the woman grunts in disagreement.
I wasn’t referring to a newspaper, the conductor says. He leans in close to my seat and lowers his voice to a stage whisper. I’m sorry, but it seems your seat has been double booked.
Behind me I hear the sound of a woman clearing her throat and turn around to see my replacement standing a few feet away, a single dainty suitcase in her hand. She smiles in my direction.
You can have the seat, she says warmly. I can stand, it’s no trouble at all.
The train conductor beams at my replacement. She looks even more beautiful in person than she did in the newspaper photo. Her skin is pore-less, her posture is ballet-straight, and her breath smells like a dentist’s idea of heaven.
Now, that’s very generous of you, the train conductor says, but with a selfless attitude like that, we couldn’t possibly allow you to give up your seat.
Really, I don’t mind!
No, no, no. He shakes his head. Follow me, I think we all know a person like you belongs in first class.
He takes her by the arm and leads her towards the front of the train. Before they disappear into the next car, the conductor turns back to shoot me one last simmering stare. He wags a finger in my direction and looks as though he has something more to say to me, his face resembling a cat about to hiss, but he turns and continues toward first class with my replacement.
When they’re out of sight, the elderly woman turns to me excitedly.
That’s the lady from the newspaper! she says.
I know, I know, I say. Who announces their engagement in the newspaper anyways?
No, the woman says. Not that. Look, she’s on the front page. She puts on a pair of enormous reading glasses and hands me another section of the newspaper. Sure enough, on the front page is another photograph of my replacement. In this photo, she stands with a pair of comically oversized scissors in her hands and appears to be in the middle of a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
It says here she uses all of her vacation days to visit towns that have been destroyed by earthquakes and tornadoes and floods, and rebuilds the schools and hospitals and playgrounds all by herself, the woman says. Isn’t that something? And on top of that, she works a full-time job.
Wow, I deadpan. How selfless.
Oh, look here, the woman says, pointing to the final paragraph of the page-long article. This says she just got promoted at work—again!
I stare out the train window and watch the landscape become more familiar and stranger at the same time. Outside, the neighborhood where I grew up is coming into clear view, but all of the businesses I once knew have been replaced. I barely recognize the train station when the conductor comes over the loudspeaker to announce we have reached our destination.
When I finally arrive at my parents’ front door I don’t bother trying my old key. I don’t want to take any chances. Instead I knock on the door, which has recently been repainted a new color, and yell, Mother! Father! It’s me!
When the door opens, it isn’t my mother or father who opens it, but my replacement.
Oh, come on! I say, when I see her standing in the doorway.
She is wearing a different outfit than she was on the train and is freshly showered and blow dried. It’s possible she’s gotten a new haircut in the short time since we parted, a difficult to pull off style that she does in fact pull off. She doesn’t look like someone who spent several hours on a train and then another hour walking uphill, but then again, she was carrying considerably less luggage than I currently am.
What are you doing here? I ask.
What do you mean? she says. This is my family.
I can hear my mother’s voice shouting in the background. Honey! Who is it at the door?
I elbow my way around the replacement and find my mother on the living room sofa flipping through albums of old family photos.
Mother! I say. She looks at me as though I am an item on a menu that doesn’t meet any of her dietary restrictions, like something wrong, something to be sent back, or something to be avoided entirely in the first place.
Who are you? she says.
Don’t you recognize me? I ask. I’m your daughter.
No, she says, getting up and standing next to my replacement. This is my daughter.
I try to think of a way to prove I am who I say I am. I walk over to the photo album she is holding and point to a family portrait. I am twelve years old in the photo. See? I say.
See what? she says. That isn’t a picture of you.
I look closer at the photo and see she has a point. The child in the photo doesn’t wear the unflattering bowl cut or the orthodontia-neglected smile of my childhood; doesn’t share my adolescent habit of standing as though my hunched shoulders are an apology for the mere act of existing. Instead, the child in the photo looks like the replacement standing in front of me, only younger, and her very presence in the photo makes the rest of the family in the portrait appear a little lovelier too, both the same and not at all in my absence.
I pace around the room, trying to think of an alternative method to prove to my mother that I am her daughter.
Well, I say, if I wasn’t your daughter how would I know about the time you bought me gerbils for my tenth birthday? And how I accidentally let them escape and they got into the walls of the house and ended up having hundreds of babies? And how it took us months to find all the babies and how years later we’d sometimes hear scratching in the wall and realize we hadn’t found them all?
My mother makes a face like she is doing algebra in her head.
That sounds pretty irresponsible, she says. And unappreciative of such a thoughtful gift. I don’t think mydaughter would do that. She puts an arm around my replacement.
How about the time I wrecked dad’s car a week after I got my driver’s license? I say. Or when I got so depressed in college I had to come home, and the doctor said the reason I was sad all the time was because I ate only pancakes for the whole semester? Or what about the time we all went to Bermuda on a family vacation and I locked myself in the hotel room for the entire trip because I had my period and was afraid of being eaten by sharks?
My mother shakes her head. My daughter would never do those things. She shows up to my house with flowers and gifts and bouquets of chocolate-dipped fruit. If you’re supposed to be my daughter, where are your flowers, your gifts, your bouquets of chocolate-dipped fruit?
I look at my overstuffed suitcases and the box from the office.
I didn’t bring any flowers or gifts or bouquets of chocolate-dipped fruit, I say.
Tsk, tsk, my mother says. Definitely doesn’t sound like my daughter. Plus, you have a certain brittleness about you. My daughter wouldn’t have that. She goes with the flow. She’s always trying to help others. She never asks for anything. She doesn’t have all this . . . baggage . . . that you seem to.
She picks up the box from the office and hands it to me.
I think you should take your things and go, she says.
My replacement gives me a pitying look. Here, let me help you with your suitcases, she says, but I don’t accept her assistance. These are my things and I don’t need anyone else to help me carry them.
As I walk away from the front door, I can hear my family cheering inside the house. Another promotion? my father’s voice yells. Let’s celebrate! Someone is blowing into one of those noisemakers they sell at party stores. I turn around to try to catch a glimpse of my family through a window but find that my mother has already pulled the curtains shut.
I walk for what must be several days. All the trains that pass by are fully booked, not a single empty seat available for me to purchase, and every day my luggage seems to grow heavier and heavier. Eventually, when I can barely lift the suitcases, I stop by a weigh station and the scale confirms my suspicions.
I begin to take things out of the suitcases to make them less heavy: out-of-style clothing, unread books, supplements I’ve consistently forgotten to take, dirty socks, the guitar I never learned how to play, overpriced facial serums, half-finished and long-ago abandoned knitting projects, expired tubes of mascara, a dust-covered yoga mat, pants that no longer fit, a broken umbrella I’d been meaning to replace. As I walk I scatter my belongings behind me one by one like a trail of breadcrumbs that leads to my parents’ house, to my former self—to my replacement? I’m not sure anymore. Things are getting fuzzy. As each suitcase empties, I leave the luggage behind too.
Another day passes and I’m down to only the cardboard box. All I have left now is what I took from the office. I can barely remember packing them: a dying houseplant, a bottle of hand lotion, a photo of my boyfriend and I summiting a mountain, a punch card for a coffee shop near the office that is just one punch away from a free small drip coffee, a birthday card signed by everyone in the office in which half of my colleagues misspelled my first name. The things I once put on my desk to mark it as mine, but now have no use for.
I turn a corner and realize the streets resemble something I remember from a dream. I look around and realize it’s not a dream at all—I’m almost exactly back where I first started, just a few blocks away from my office.
I hoist the box onto my hip and continue walking in the direction of the building. I don’t know what I’ll do when I get there but it feels good to have a destination.
As I get closer, I notice there is something different about the block than the last time I was here. It is lined with movie trailers. I pass by a table laid out with craft services and walk up to one of the trailers. There is a sign on the door that says CASTING. I knock on the door.
A man with a baseball cap and a headset around his neck opens it.
Can I help you? he asks.
Can you tell me what is going on? I ask, pointing to the rest of the trailers lining the street.
We’re filming a movie, he says, and looks me up and down. Actually, we’re in need of some extras. Do you have any time to kill?
I look down at my box of belongings. I won’t be needing my things anymore, so I put the box down on the ground and follow the director into the office building.
As we walk he explains the movie is set in an office, an office that happens to be my old office. When I had worked there I hadn’t realized it was a movie set.
The director tells me where to stand and I follow his directions. He hands me a stack of papers that are entries from my childhood diaries, outlining all the various ways I have disappointed myself and others throughout the years.
Here, he says. You can shred these in the background of the next scene.
Won’t the shredder be too loud? I ask the director.
Good catch! he says. You’re a natural at being an extra. He hands me another stack of papers. You can work on filing these instead.
This new stack of papers is a collection of news clippings celebrating my replacement’s myriad accomplishments. The stack is as thick as the stack of my diary entries—maybe thicker.
Should I file them alphabetically? I ask.
Doesn’t matter, the director says. You’ll barely be on-screen. He turns his hands into a frame, closes one eye, and pans his fingers around the room like a camera.
It’s funny, I begin to explain. I actually used to work in this office—
Quiet on set! the director yells, and a hush falls over the crew.
I watch as the movie’s two leads are guided by a PA to a pair of Xs taped onto the carpet.
The scene is a love scene, and I watch the main characters rehearse their flirtation by the water cooler. They make working in an office look so much more romantic than when I was doing it myself. I think of the days when I was the new girl in the office, but it feels like a story that happened to someone else. It’s possible I’m mistaking something I saw late at night on TV for a memory.
Action, the director yells, and I watch the camera make slow circles around the couple. I’m far enough away that I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can see their faces, and I recognize the woman. She’s my replacement, and I have to hand it to her, she’s doing a better job with the role than I ever did.
If you’re queer and have watched And Just Like That you probably remember the picnic scene. In “Diwali,” episode 6 of the Sex and the City reboot, Miranda Hobbes, Charlotte York, and Carrie Bradshaw meet for lunch in a park along the East River. All is well until Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) reveals that she had sex outside of her heterosexual marriage and, that she did so with a non-binary person, the Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez). Glassy-eyed, Miranda asks Charlotte (Kristin Davis) not to have a big reaction. (Carrie already knows). She then very calmly says, “I had sex with Che at Carrie’s apartment after the surgery when we thought she was asleep.” Without missing a beat, Charlotte shrieks a bunch of rhetorical questions: head shaking, eyebrows raised, eyes bulging in a way that is reminiscent of her ex-mother-in-law Bunny, whom she once despised. She asks, “Are you GAY now?” Miranda immediately responds, “No,” but then shrugs: “I don’t know.” Charlotte continues: “You spent your whole life with men. You’re MARRIED to a MAN and now you’re suddenly having non-binary sex!… You are not progressive enough for this!”
In what feels more like hurt than anger, Miranda storms away from the table as Charlotte calls out, “You’re having a midlife crisis! You should have just dyed your hair!” Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) coaxes Miranda to return to resolve the disagreement. After watching this scene, I railed against Charlotte and the show to anyone who would listen—including my therapist. I began to recognize my queer identity about five years ago, in my late 20s, which until recently is not something I’ve often seen in life or media. Miranda’s vulnerability, confusion, overwhelm, and shame feel so true to the early days of me stepping into my queerness. And Just Like That took on a pivotal moment for older queer viewers and had Charlotte trample all over it. Her reaction ignited what, deep down, I still fear when coming out to anyone.
Her reaction to Miranda’s queerness in And Just Like That felt like a betrayal not only to Miranda, but to me.
I was always a Charlotte. At 12, I snuck TBS reruns of Sex and the City in my basement, thumb on the remote’s channel change button in case my parents walked in. I identified with how judgmental she could be, how much pressure she put on herself, and how conventional she was. She was possibly the only character who made sense to me when she admitted to thinking blowjobs are gross (lesbian clue #1). Binge watching the library box set DVDs during sleepovers with my ballet friends in high school, I looked around the room as Charlotte told her friends, “Maybe we can be each other’s soulmates. And then we can let men be these great, nice guys to have fun with” (lesbian clue #2). It was Charlotte who understood me (we even both attended Smith College—lesbian clue #3), which is why her reaction to Miranda’s queerness in And Just Like That felt like a betrayal not only to Miranda, but to me.
The coming out narratives we’re accustomed to seeing on TV often center on teenage characters, so I was especially tuned into this moment that felt closer to my own experience. It was painful to see Miranda vulnerable in a way I was intimately familiar with and to witness what felt like rejection from Charlotte. (Carrie’s lack of eye contact throughout the conversation wasn’t so hot either.) But after months of rumination, I’ve come to realize that sometimes the truest depictions of coming out moments on TV are also the most uncomfortable. And perhaps just because they feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad representation—or bad TV.
With a few months of distance, I’m able to think about Charlotte’s reaction less emotionally and more critically. By the end of the picnic conversation, she tells Miranda she wants to understand and asks, “What is wrong with people just staying who they were?”—also a reference to Charlotte’s child Rock (Alexa Swinton), who is exploring their gender expression. Carrie, in a rare moment of wisdom (the only writer character I will ever respect is Jo March and that’s final), chimes in with “Some of us just don’t have that luxury.” Charlotte doesn’t yet understand that there’s an inevitability to being queer. It’s a whole different way of looking at the world and it’s really not possible to stay who you were once you open that door.
Charlotte doesn’t yet understand, but she will. If anything is true about both the Charlotte of the original series and the reboot, it’s that she is committed to and capable of growth (another reason I identified with her). We’re talking about the woman who abandoned deeply ingrained dreams of a WASPy future to convert to Judaism for Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler). By the end of the first season of And Just Like That, she is more open to understanding Miranda and Rock, even throwing Rock an obscenely expensive “they-mitzvah.”
I’ve had people of her generation push back, question my identity, and ask me to defend or prove my choices.
While it was painful for me to watch Charlotte react to Miranda the way she did, I recognize that it’s not possible for any televised coming out moment to appease every viewer. Coming out is different for everyone, and it’s not one thing, done one time, in one way. It’s an ongoing, lifelong process. There’s also a generational element to Charlotte’s response. Maybe the picnic scene bothered me so much not just because it felt homophobic, but because it did feel realistic to how women of Charlotte’s generation sometimes react. I’ve had people of her generation push back, question my identity, and ask me to defend or prove my choices, albeit less aggressively. It’s the fluidity that seems difficult to understand. How could someone who has, until this moment, seemed straight come to a different conclusion about themselves? If this is truly their identity, why didn’t they figure it out sooner? Without exposure to stories like mine and Miranda’s, some people don’t trust the legitimacy of a later in life identity shift. In this way, Charlotte’s response is both true to her character and true to life. Can we, as viewers, fault a TV show for putting a version of truth on screen when it’s a truth we don’t want to see?
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen more positive reactions to characters coming out on TV, non-reactions, and queer stories that don’t address coming out. There’s Dr. Kai Bartley (E.R. Fightmaster) on Grey’s Anatomy, whose storyline focuses not on the fact that they’re non-binary, but on their Alzheimer’s research and budding relationship with Dr. Amelia Shepherd (Caterina Scorsone).Taissa Turner (Tawny Cypress) on Yellowjackets deals with the aftermath of surviving a plane crash while running for political office with little mention of her sexuality.And Just Like That is not one of those shows. When Miranda’s storyline and Charlotte’s response didn’t fall into a familiar category, it was a bit of a shock to my system.
The purpose of And Just Like That seems to be to rectify the lack of inclusivity in Sex and the City, and that’s certainly true of Miranda’s queer storyline and coming out. The original show’s characters were mostly straight, cis, and white. The few LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color were stereotypes. Carrie’s gay best friend Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson) and Charlotte’s gay best friend Anthony Marentino (Mario Cantone) were caricatures, interested mainly in fashion, sex, and making fun of people. The reboot brings more diverse characters, but not in a way that’s progressive. The characters of color function largely as bolsters for the main characters without much depth of their own. Do we know anything about Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker), other than she’s a documentarian, the “Black Charlotte” who Charlotte wants to impress, plays tennis, collects art, and sometimes has marital discord but not in a way that moves the plot forward? Does representation mean anything if it’s done superficially? Writer Melanie Curry explains, “When viewers of color ask for inclusivity, we want genuine and honest representation—not side characters who are the punchline of every joke.”
The characters of color function largely as bolsters for the main characters without much depth of their own.
Curry’s insight is true for the LGBTQ+ characters in the reboot, too. As with the new characters of color, And Just Like That’s newest queer character, Che, is a caricature of someone who is non-binary, bisexual, and a comedian. They wield a “woke moment” button during their podcast, are self-obsessed and sex-obsessed, and have a very soapbox-y standup routine. After having sex with Miranda, Che suggests Miranda DM them on Instagram if she wants to hang out again, which, in my experience, is not how real people make plans. Then there’s trans character Rabbi Jen (Hari Nef), who pops up in the season finale to help Rock study for their they-mitzvah and affirm the strength of Carrie and Miranda’s friendship from a public restroom stall. We don’t know anything about Rabbi Jen (though there is a they-mitzvah program prop with her bio!) but Twitter users immediately called for a spin-off.
While perhaps there are elements of Stanford, Anthony, Che, and Rabbi Jen that viewers connect with, it’s Miranda who has all the depth. And Just Like That allows her to explore how unsettling, overwhelming, and confusing it can be to embrace your own queerness, which is invaluable for both queer and straight viewers. When Che tells Miranda it’s a turn-on to ask for what she wants, Miranda replies, “I didn’t know that!” In this moment, adults stumbling within their queerness everywhere felt seen. When Miranda surprises Che at their apartment with cookies and Che isn’t instantly responsive, Miranda flies down the stairs, calls herself “so fucking stupid,” and questions why she came over. Writer Heather Hogan has identified what we are seeing Miranda work through as “late-blooming queer mania,” and that feels accurate.
Having your sexual or gender identity shift at any age, but especially as a fully-formed adult, can be daunting and disorienting.
Within the queer community, we discuss how the most genuine queer narratives in film and television don’t revolve around coming out at all. Instead, they examine queer people living their everyday lives while navigating their evolving identities. Generally I agree with this. But coming out in adulthood is a different animal. Having your sexual or gender identity shift at any age, but especially as a fully-formed adult, can be daunting and disorienting. Seeing how Gen Z so fearlessly embraces their identities both on TV and in real life, it’s easy for Gen X and Millennials who didn’t or couldn’t come out earlier to feel left behind. All of this is why Miranda’s story matters. That representation needs to be on TV precisely because it rarely has been. Watching Miranda navigate her identity—and messily—is validating and valuable for those of us coming out later in life.Even if it’s painful or uncomfortable, we need to see her vulnerability as she stumbles through the process of getting to know herself. What we don’t need to see is queer and minority characters without nuance, or worse stereotypes and caricatures.
And Just Like That isHBO Max’s most-streamed series of all time, and it spurred wide internetdiscourse on race, gender, disability, age, and sexuality. It wasn’t always productive, but published essays and social media posts did move the conversation forward. I didn’t think critically about the way Miranda’s husband Steve Brady’s (David Eigenberg) hearing disability was being portrayed until a hearing impaired friend posted about it on Facebook. I was beginning to side with the Che haters when a writer tweeted that not allowing Che the same grace we gave our Sex and the City main characters as they made questionable romantic choices for two decades is not okay. And I’ve seen more conversations about coming out later as a result of Miranda’s storyline. I’m begrudgingly grateful for the discourse that And Just Like That has brought to the surface. It feels a little like therapy for 12-year-old me—the me who might have realized her identity earlier, if she had the kind of TV shows and media discourse we have now—including, I suppose, the picnic scene.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by mother-daughter narratives in literature. At times, it bordered on obsession. I consumed anything and everything that promised to explore the distinctive and singular ways that mothers and daughters can hurt each other. It is the tug-and-pull nature that intrigues me most—the mother’s ability to simultaneously repulse and inspire, the daughter’s craving for both closeness and freedom.
In my debut novel Mother in the Dark,Anna is estranged from her family and living in New York when she receives a phone call from her sister. Knowing it is about their mother, guilt-ridden and consumed by grief, Anna doesn’t return the call. As she reflects on her childhood, she must confront the reality that despite the distance she’s put between them, she is more like her mother than she has allowed herself to believe—and she never left her past behind. In order to move on, Anna must break down the walls she built as a child to survive.
While writing my novel, I devoured stories about unraveling mothers and resentful daughters, negligent fathers, and siblings fending for themselves. Below are eight books that explore the ways mothers and daughters can love, wound, and haunt.
In kaleidoscopic, fragmented prose, Clemmons tells the story of a young woman, Thandi, who must halt her life and a semester at college to care for her mother as she dies of cancer. It is a heartrending reflection on the dizzying process of grief—the slow pain of losing a mother before one’s eyes, and the ache of things left unsaid in a mother’s absence. “The pain was exponential,” Thandi writes, “because as much as I cried, she could not comfort me, and this fact only multiplied my pain.” What We Lose is a moving and thought-provoking account of suffering and the road to healing.
Set in Depression-era Glendale, California, Mildred Pierce follows a mother-daughter pairing fueled by competition and jealousy. Cain centers a single mother, Mildred, who loves in a well-intentioned but smothering way, “acting less like a mother than like a lover who had unexpectedly discovered an act of faithlessness, and avenged it,” and a reptilian daughter, Veda, who seems determined to break her mother’s spirits. The novel reveals the emotional manipulation that can exist amongst mothers and daughters, and the dangers of a parent stifling their own needs for their child’s. I’ve read many novels about mother-monsters; the monster-daughter is rarer. You will be haunted by Veda’s horrific acts long after you’ve finished.
Lost and reeling after their mother’s suicide attempt, Edith and Mae leave their Louisiana home to live with their estranged father in New York City. The Deeper the Water is ahorrifyingly visceral portrayal of mental illness and inherited grief, and Apekina beautifully captures the complexity of siblinghood as Edith and Mae emerge from their shared childhood with entirely unique scars and perspectives.
Hotel Irisby Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
Slim and thrilling, this novel is narrated by Mari, a 17-year-old girl who’s been forced to drop out of high school to work at her family’s rundown seaside hotel. Mari is lonely and starved of affection, overworked and tormented by a callous and demanding mother. One night, she witnesses a middle-aged hotel guest chastising a prostitute who’s been staying in his room. Marie is immediately drawn to the man’s commanding voice, and soon falls into a dangerous affair. Hotel Iris masterfully explores the violence and pleasure of intimacy, and how our relationship to our parents might affect the romantic relationships we seek.
This heartrending play begins when the patriarch of an Oklahoman family vanishes in the night. His three adult daughters return home to care for their volatile mother as the details of his disappearance come to light. With hilarity and heart, Letts explores the complex dynamics of a family as they unite and unravel beneath one roof. August is a stunning portrait of shifting loyalties, and what it means to break free of one’s family.
A Girl Returnedby Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein
Without warning, a 13-year-old girl is torn from the family she’s known all her life and sent to live with her “real” family. Abandoned first by her birth mother, and then by her adoptive mother, the unnamed protagonist fights through fear and alienation as she strives to find a place in her new world. Di Pietrantonio imbues this story with sadness but also resilience, all while skillfully capturing the weight of a mother’s absence.
In cold, precise prose, Doshi explores a poisoned relationship between an aging mother, Antara, who is losing her memory and the adult daughter, Tara, who has been called to care for her. But Tara cannot forget her mother’s willful harm and neglect. “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” the novel begins, “. . . And any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption.” This is an evocative tale of betrayal and resentment, and one woman’s search for peace.
Lucy is feverish and isolated in a hospital room as she recovers from a mysterious illness after surgery. Her husband is unable to visit due to his fear of hospitals, and she’s not seen her young girls in weeks. One afternoon, Lucy wakes to find her estranged mother at her bedside, who begins to comfort her with stories of her youth and hometown gossip. Much of the novel carries on this way, becoming a tender portrait of the inextricable bonds between mother and daughter as sharing stories allows them to heal.
Belinda Huijuan Tang grew up listening to her father’s stories of his ancestral village in Anhui, but as she writes in the author’s note of her debut novel, it wasn’t until she moved to China in 2016 that she began to think seriously about the one story he never told: “how the man who’d raised him went missing when [her] father was seventeen.”
Tang turned to fiction to try and fill in the gap in her family history. Though A Map for the Missingisn’t autofiction, it does contain autobiographical elements. The story follows a Palo Alto-based mathematics professor, Tang Yitian, as he returns to China to search for his missing father. Yitian arrives in a village he doesn’t recognize and struggles not only with a home that has become unfamiliar, but with a family and personal history—especially with his first love Tian Hanwen—whose facts change the more he examines them.
I chatted with Tang over Zoom about what home means to diasporic communities that are constantly urged to go back to the countries they have left, the impermanence and unreliability of memory, the subjectivity of history, the uses of topology, and more.
Elyse Martin: Your book focuses a lot on the idea of home. “Home” is such a fraught concept for people in the Chinese diaspora right now, with the uptick in racist violence and assaults, and the all-too-common insult of: “You should just go home.”
Belinda Huijan Tang: I had no idea when I was writing this book that America would look like this right now. I couldn’t have expected that. And that phrase, “you should go back to China,” is so interesting, because I think for many people who are part of the diaspora, that’s not what they want. They don’t necessarily view China as a place of home or belonging when they’ve been in America for this long. My parents have been here for three decades, and I think that time has created such a distance for them, from their “home” place. It’s really, I think, shocking to them, or shocking to other people like them, who have decided to make their home here to hear phrases like that—to hear, “you should go back home”—because that home is a place that they willingly chose to leave, and they’ve willingly tried to make their new home in America.
At the same time, I think for people like them, there has always been this kind of acknowledgment that they didn’t feel a sense of total belonging here. I don’t think they ever felt that their lives were completely free from small violences in the US. This moment is really bringing out a lot of the contradictions of diaspora and immigration that have always been there.
EM: That idea of “the home that they knew” reminds me of how my grandfather and his brother immigrated from China—so the China I know is the China from their stories, which is pre-Cultural Revolution China, not contemporary China. It also reminds me of the jumps between timelines in your book; it undergirds this idea that the home or the homeland becomes fixed in your mind as the home you had at the point when you left it. So it’s not just a location, but a time as well.
BHT: Yeah, as I was writing this book, I began to think of the idea of home as a place in your memory, more than a physical location. And this home was referring to the specific set of ways that you remember living life at a certain point in time, and a place where you felt belonging, rather than something that stays fixed.
A huge part of the sadness of being an immigrant is accepting the fact that you are leaving this place, and you will forever have to hold it in your memory.
Yitian has this idea of home as the place that he had come from; this place that was set back in the past and hadn’t developed. And then when he returns, he finds the place has moved on, in many ways that he would not have anticipated. People are going to the city, there are signs of development in the village that he would never have expected. A huge part of the sadness of being an immigrant is accepting the fact that you are leaving this place, and you will forever have to hold it in your memory, as a home, rather than as a place that exists that you can still be a part of.
EM: Exactly! You brought that out in the very beginning of your book, when Yitian’s trying to recognize his childhood home by the broken tiles around the roof. But in the time that’s passed, and due in large part to his own success in America, those tiles have been fixed for years.
BHT: He has, as you said, been instrumental in creating the changes that have taken his home away from the place that he once recognized. That’s interesting—that the image of home that existed for you is the one that your grandparents told you about, and it’s one that’s decades in the past. That was also very much the case for me, too. I had always imagined this ancestral village as the place that my father told me about from the 1970s and ‘80s. I had this very rustic image in mind. And when I visited as a student researcher, I did encounter some of those things. It certainly wasn’t developed like a big city. But it also was very evident that the place that my father was recalling to me no longer existed. And I had to confront that distance between what I expected and what was when I visited.
EM: You mentioned in your author’s note that that trip reshaped your understanding of home. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
BHT: My father was the first to leave China and come to America, so I grew up without any knowledge of what it was like to have family around. Going to China as an adult, and being so warmly received by so many members of my extended family, people who are very far off in the branches of the tree for me, was the first time that I had experienced that sense of belonging outside of my immediate nuclear family. I understood what it felt like to have a community that you can rely on in times of need, and what it felt like to always have support around you and that someone always has your back.
It felt like an immense load off my shoulders, not to have to do everything alone. It was just such a relief in a way that I didn’t really understand or anticipate: to live in a place where everyone just looked like me. My face was taken as a given for what people from this place look like. I’ve never been someone who’s really felt like an outsider in the US. I didn’t think I struggled with questions of identity in that way. But it became apparent to me that there was something in my body that just felt more at ease and comfortable when I was living in China.
EM: Using topology and mathematics, versus geography, was an interesting and unusual choice. What led you down that particular path?
BHT: I studied a lot of math in college and when I made Yitian a math professor, it was an opportunity for me to explore subjects that I really hadn’t looked at since college. The origin of the phrase “map for the missing” was this idea of trying to define an object in terms of the parts of it that are missing, rather than the parts of it that are there. When I read about it as a mathematical concept, it felt like such a perfect fit for some of the things that I was thinking about, like how Yitian is conceiving of the losses in his life. I felt like I had to put it in the book.
EM: Your book really explores absences and gaps, sort of like lacunae in texts. Did that make it at all difficult for you to write the novel? Because you’re writing around things so much?
The origin of the phrase ‘map for the missing’ was this idea of trying to define an object in terms of the parts of it that are missing, rather than the parts of it that are there.
BHT: That’s an interesting craft question that originates out of an interesting life question, which is: “How do we fill spaces when there are deaths in our lives, or when we have people in our lives who don’t give us the answers, or who don’t give us the clarity that we’re looking for?” That’s something that most people have to reckon with at some point in their lifetimes: creating meaning for themselves out of a lot of missing spaces. I tried to give space for the two major characters, Hanwen and Yitian, to do a lot of thinking around making meaning of their lives when there’s so much they don’t know. In fact, we, as the reader, know more about Yitian’s life and his family than Yitian ever finds out himself. We see that he has to make closure and meaning for himself through imagining, “What must my father have felt like, going through these sets of situations? What must my brother have felt like? And in what ways can I extend empathy to try to understand them?” It began as a difficult craft question but I think it ended as an opportunity for me to engage deeply with how we make meaning in the world when we don’t have that sense of closure.
EM: I thought this was particularly interesting given the Alzheimer’s subplot that appears later in the book.
BHT: Right? Alzheimer’s is something that I’d wanted to write about because it’s something that runs on both sides of my family, and it’s something that I’ve seen up close quite a lot. What was most striking in seeing people in my family go through it, was how Alzheimer’s is the loss of memory—but with that loss of memory came the loss of relationships, because all of these relationships were based in memory. And once that was gone, there was really nothing to keep those relationships or families together, because there was no history on which to base it upon. I was really curious about what happens when memory is lost. It can be tragic because obviously all that history is lost, but in the case of Yitian, who’s had such a difficult relationship with his father, it also presents a kind of freedom because all of that tragic history is lost. That sense of being wronged is also lost. That’s what happens between Yitian and his father at some point, the loss of memory almost provides the opportunity for the other parts of the relationship to rise anew.
EM: I’m struck by your saying that relationships start changing with the loss of memories, because when Yitian leaves, obviously, he stops making memories with his neighbors and the people in his village. When he comes back, he’s always telling people that he’s from the Tang village and trying to establish connections based on that, but people keep assuming that he’s American and trying to interact with him based on their own assumptions of who he is now.
BHT: When Yitian returns to the village, it’s shocking for him that people aren’t seeing him as the person that he once was. His identity, as he conceives of it, has been lost, and it’s been crafted anew by the people he once thought knew him intimately. They don’t see him any longer as one of them. They see him as an outsider. I wanted to play with that, in showing how these people who were once a part of him; how, when their conception of Yitian changes, it also really changes Yitian’s own conception of home.
EM: I think that ties into the way history is examined and played with in the book, because Yitian’s understanding of history is shaped and changed by the people who are presenting it to him, and also by the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. What was it like writing with a sense of history that was not fixed, but rather is constantly changing and constantly being edited?
BHT: That really informs my writing, both in terms of the actual history in this book, and this idea of family history. As I was doing research, I had to really question a lot the sources that I was reading, because reading a Chinese government account of what life was like for the “sent down youth” was very different from reading a memoir published in the US, and that was different from reading a memoir published by a Chinese blogger. There are all these ways that people who are speaking are constrained by their understanding of history, and by how they should speak about history. The research process became quite fraught because I had to find the truth between what was allowed to be said and what wasn’t allowed to be said, and I had to try to come to an understanding of what reality I wanted to present in the book.
The idea of a fluid national sense of history was helpful for me in thinking of what it means to have a fluid sense of a personal or familial history. Yitian starts the book with one idea of what the history of his family is and why he’s estranged from his father. What he finds out throughout the course of the book is that a lot of the things he took for granted in his family were actually not true, and were assumptions that he had developed as a child. He then has to undergo this process of understanding the flaws in his conception of his family history.
EM: Let’s talk a little bit about Hanwen, then, because her understanding of her past relationship with Yitian is very different from his own.
BHT: I think that becomes really obvious when they come together again in the 1993 timeline after not seeing each other for fifteen years. Yitian views Hanwen as his first love. But because of the opportunities he’s been granted, he’s been able to put that story with her aside and say, “This was formative, and it’s also a time that has passed.” Whereas Hanwen has come to associate that time in her life with Yitian as representative and symbolic of something more meaningful, which was this great missed opportunity: “This was the moment where I could have gone to college and begun to determine a life for myself.” Even when we come to her fifteen years later, she’s in many ways still engaging with that memory as a point when her life really changed. Watching those two conceptions of how they’re holding the relationship clash was a point of conflict that I really wanted to explore.
EM: Anything else you’d like to add?
BHT: I’ve read a lot of a kind of book that has been really meaningful to me, which is the immigrant novel that’s set in the US about how life in the US is fraught because of feeling like an “other.” I really learned a lot from and love those kinds of books—but I wanted to write a book that was the opposite of that. I wanted to geographically center a different part of the world, because that’s a relationship that’s just not talked about as much in literature. I think part of it is because when we see immigrants come to the US, we make the assumption that where they’re from is a place they want to leave behind. But as we discussed, it’s still something they hold onto. What does it mean to have an idea of home that just is not there anymore because of the decision to emigrate?
they wouldn’t’ve been able to hoist him up on that cross / all the paintings got his ribs showing, the contours of his stomach undulating from emptiness / a growl heard through centuries of canvas / enough to make you hungry just looking at him / if he’d had meat on his bones, ate good like mama mary wanted him to he would’ve been better off / might’ve pulled that cross right down, popped that flimsy piece of lumber from the ground & said i am thy god
imagine dying on an empty stomach / could’ve been like buddha but chose to be a vacuum, a chasm instead / then have the nerve to make a rule about gluttony when there’s nothing about the sin of denying your own body / like it doesn’t carry you through this world / like it isn’t the one thing that’s with you all your days / the one thing they cannot take away / how am i supposed to believe this skinny bitch can do anything / how can he save me when he can’t even save himself
hide and seek
No one told me you could be forgotten
by your cousins playing hide and seek.
No one told me the light in the fridge goes out
when you climb inside and close the door.
No one told me how the grate on the shelf above
presses into the ridges of your spine, compressing you
and how your legs folded underneath your torso
fall asleep, going numb as the chill sets in.
No one ever tells you the inside of refrigerators
smell like kitchen cleaner spray, arm & hammer powder
and salad greens wilting in plastic bags, or that
your grandmother’s homemade yogurt tempts from the top shelf.
No one ever tells you how impatient you grow and how your breath slows as you breathe the little oxygen you allowed inside with you.
No one tells you how light your head feels, how loud your blood thunders, how desperate your heart screams, louder than the muted world outside.
No one tells you the door suctions shut and you might be folded so small you don’t have the space to push yourself out.
No one tells you that you’ll have to thrash, pound, and flail against the plastic walls until there’s a burst of warm outside air––
No one tells you you’ll roll out gasping, cramped and claustrophobic, victory chilled into your bones when your cousins ask “Where were you?”
Solar power. The end of war. Gender role reversal. Dirigibles. First published in 1905, Rokeya Hossain’s short story “Sultana’s Dream” is steampunk avant la lettre, strikingly advanced in its critique of patriarchy, conflict, conventional kinship structures, industrialization, and the exploitation of the natural world.
Notably speaking to the concerns of our contemporary world as much as its own, it is also striking for being a parodic critique of purdah by a Muslim woman. At a time when British colonialism was using the treatment of women in India as justification for colonial intervention there (a rhetorical strategy still in use by the West today), Hossain’s story imagines a world in which men rather than rather women are kept inside, thus framing her protest against Islamic patriarchy within a larger feminist vision that takes on Western as well as Islamic forms of gender hierarchy.
“Sultana’s Dream” is not just one of the first science-fiction or utopian stories written in India by a woman; it is an integral part of the emergence of sci-fi as a form of speculative fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, more often associated with male Western writers such as H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle. At the same time, it is one of the first feminist utopias in modern literature, published a decade before Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), and part of a wave of fin de siècle utopias that includes Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). It is also one of the first literary works in English by a Muslim writer in South Asia. In all these ways, Hossain’s story is an important part of Anglophone literary history that has yet to be fully recognized as such.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that ‘Sultana’s Dream’ was written in her fifth language by a woman who was denied a formal education.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that “Sultana’s Dream” was written in her fifth language by a woman who was denied a formal education (she also knew Urdu, Persian, Arabic, and Bangla). The Muslim community in India at the time largely did not approve of education for women, and the colonial government, though it had a college for Hindu women, did not open one for Muslim women until 1939, close to the end of the British imperial rule in India. Promoting education for girls and women was thus Hossain’s passion, as evidenced by the stories and essays collected in this volume; it also shaped her career and political work and is one of her enduring legacies.
Rokeya Hossain (1880–1932), known by the honorific Begum Rokeya, is widely recognized in South Asia today as a pioneering educator, feminist, writer, and activist. Because she lived and worked in a region of colonial India that is now part of independent Bangladesh, she is a particularly revered public figure there and is celebrated every year on December 9, otherwise known as Rokeya Day.
India was ruled by Britain from 1857 to 1948. The idea that the English language and literature was superior to Indian languages and literatures, and should therefore be taught as widely as possible, was a racist justification for Britain’s prolonged rule and a tactic of governance: many desirable government jobs required an English education, so it came to be seen as crucial to social, economic, and political advancement. This is part of the reason Hossain educated her children in Britain, wrote “Sultana’s Dream” in English, and argued that Muslims should pursue English educations so they would benefit from the vocational advantages that accrued to those who could speak and write in English. But she was also deeply critical of British rule and its imposition of cultural norms on India; in Padmarag, Tarini Bhavan, a women’s school, workshop, homeless shelter, and hospital, offers a broad and Indian- centered education so that its students would not be “forced to memorize misleading versions of history and end up despising themselves and their fellow Indians.”
Hossain’s story [frames] her protest against Islamic patriarchy within a larger feminist vision that takes on Western as well as Islamic forms of gender hierarchy.
Hossain grew up in a traditional Muslim family. Her father had four wives, favored education for his sons but not his daughters, and imposed purdah: a Muslim practice, also employed in some Hindu communities, where women live in separate quarters to conceal themselves from men, and sometimes unknown women as well, and use veiling to cover their bodies when in public. As a result, Hossain had to largely educate herself by reading on her own, though she was helped by her brother, who taught her English (and to whom she gratefully dedicated Padmarag), and her sister, who taught her Bangla, the language in which she published most of her writing. Like many women at the time, she was married young, at the age of sixteen. It was an arranged marriage, but her sympathetic brother deliberately helped match her with a man, Sakhawat Hossain, who he knew to have more progressive views about women’s education than their father. Her husband ended up not only being supportive of her writing—he encouraged her to publish “Sultana’s Dream,” for example—but also left her money when he died to set up a school for girls, thereby paving the way for her autonomy and ability to pursue her ideals.
“Sultana’s Dream” was first published in 1905 in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine. Edited by Kamala Satthianadhan, it was the first English-language periodical in India run by, and targeted at, Indian women; Satthianadhan’s daughter, Padmini Sengupta, wrote for the magazine and later served as its assistant editor. Both a Christian and an Indian, Satthianadhan saw herself as a syncretic blend of East and West and imagined her magazine this way as well, blending sympathy for Indian nationalism with expressions of friendship with Britain. Thus while hers was one of the first magazines to publish the poems of Sarojini Naidu, who would later become a prominent figure in the nationalist movement, it tended to shy away from publishing the kind of overtly anti-imperialist articles that came to dominate the Indian press by the early twentieth century. But like Hossain’s story, The Indian Ladies’ Magazine was more explicitly part of the burgeoning conversation about women’s rights and published the work of several influential feminists and activists. As well as Hossain and Naidu, it showcased writing by lawyer and reformer Cornelia Sorabji, socialist and politician Annie Besant, and educator-reformer Pandita Ramabai.
While Hossain is celebrated in the present day for her contributions to feminism and education, she endured bitter criticism in her own lifetime.
Satthianadhan’s gender politics, like her nationalism, were cautious; on the one hand, she promoted the idea that women should stick to the domestic sphere, on the other, she was interested in women’s rights and strongly believed in their education and right to participate in public discourse, as evidenced by her own path and that of her daughter. She was also, like Hossain, against the strictures of gender segregation and purdah, which no doubt motivated her inclusion of “Sultana’s Dream” in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine. But in a move consistent with the political balancing act typical of her journal, she went on to publish a satire of the story, “An Answer to Sultana’s Dream,” in the next issue of the magazine, which ends by restoring the gendered division of labor that Hossain’s story so gleefully subverts. The fact that this counterargument may have been authored by her daughter (the author’s name is listed simply as “Padmini”) suggests how radical Hossain’s story was and how careful Satthianadhan felt she had to be in disseminating it.
Although it was one of Hossain’s first published pieces, “Sultana’s Dream” would end up being her most famous. But she wrote for a number of contemporary periodicals and in a range of genres, including essays, stories, poems, and reportage, most often in Bangla. Her choice of language was an intervention in itself. Bangla was a regional language, whereas Urdu was considered the proper language of educated Muslims; as a girl, she had had to learn Bangla on the sly to skirt her father’s disapproval. But she developed a passion for the Bengali language, and since her goal was to shift public opinion in Bengal about women’s rights, she used Bangla as a way to address her community directly; she also made a point to teach it to her students. Her influential works written in Bangla include Motichur (translated as “A String of Sweet Pearls”), a collection of feminist essays in two volumes, and Padmarag (translated alternately as “The Ruby” or “Essence of the Lotus”), reprinted here. Though published in 1924, more than twenty years after “Sultana’s Dream,” it reprises many of that story’s themes, focusing on the injustices of gender disparities, on utopian female community, and on women’s education.
Another influential work by Hossain, The Secluded Ones, was published in 1931. Initially serialized in the periodical Mohammadi, it was later released as a single volume. Audacious both in form and in content, it documented the adverse effects of purdah on women’s lives by gathering together forty-seven anecdotes of absurd and/or tragic situations resulting from inflexible approaches to gender segregation. Hossain drew from her own experience as well as that of other women; for example, one of the anecdotes describes how as a small child she once had to hide under a bed in a dusty attic for four days so that visiting maids, who wandered freely around the house, wouldn’t come across her. The Secluded Ones was not only a significant feminist intervention but also important for having been written by someone who had both experienced purdah herself and who celebrated her Indian and Muslim identities, since many of the accounts of purdah that circulated before this were exoticized traveler’s tales by Western writers who often held derogatory views of Islamic culture and relied on second- or third-hand accounts of gender seclusion.
The protagonist, a Muslim woman living in contemporary India, wakes up in a transformed future world: a utopia in which women are free to explore at will and pursue an education.
The bulk of Hossain’s writing, as we have seen, promoted the cause of women’s education, either directly or indirectly. In an essay included in this volume, “God Gives, Man Robs” (1927), for example, she invokes the Prophet Mohammed to support her arguments. Since he commands that all men and women should acquire knowledge, she contends that it is wrong for men to stand in the way of the education of their wives, daughters, and sisters: not only is this a disservice to women and to Islam, she notes, but it also puts Muslims at a further disadvantage relative to the Hindu community (the dominant religious community in India), which was at the time engaged in a number of reforms related to women’s rights, including increased access to education.
“Educational Ideals for the Modern Indian Girls” (1931), meanwhile, spoke of uniting the religious and moral emphasis of traditional Indian education ideals with the secular knowledge important to twentieth-century life: “We must assimilate the old while holding to the now.” She advocated for a diverse and well-rounded curriculum that included art, physical education, science, horticulture, and health care—a pedagogical vision that is reflected in the utopian communities depicted in both “Sultana’s Dream” and Padmarag. Education for women, considered a break from tradition, is associated with modernity and thus with “the adoption of western methods and ideals.” But as in Padmarag, Hossain argues in this essay against the “slavish imitation” of the West and contends that domestic duties and older forms of knowledge should be integrated into female education, along with the kind of vocational training passed on from parent to child. While her appeal to the importance of feminine duty may have been in earnest or may have been an attempt to harness more widespread support for women’s education, this essay also contained an unambiguous and bold statement: “The future of India lies in its girls.”
Alongside this writing, Hossain devoted much of her relatively short life to hands-on educational work. In 1911, not long after her husband’s death, she founded the Sakhawat Memorial School for Girls in Calcutta (now Kolkata). A letter she wrote to the editor of the periodical The Mussalman appealing to the Muslim community for support shows how challenging and potentially controversial this undertaking was, despite the money left to her for this purpose by her husband.
By forming a collective, the women free themselves from the need for support from husbands or family: entities that the story often depicts as selfish, abusive, or uncaring.
Though Hossain ended up starting the school with only eight students, she persisted against bias in the Muslim community and had over eighty students in her school by 1915. Even while teaching and running the school, she was engaged in other forms of activism to promote women’s rights. In 1916, she founded the Bengali Muslim Women’s Association to cater to less privileged women (since women at her school tended to be from the middle and upper classes); much like Tarini Bhavan in Padmarag, it provided a variety of forms of aid, including shelter, community, financial help, and literacy. She was also involved in the organization of an All India Muslim Ladies’ Conference in Calcutta in 1919, where women’s education and polygamy were debated in the context of modern Muslim community; in a letter to The Mussalman in which she publicized the conference, she demonstrated her commitment to female solidarity by proposing to meet women traveling to the conference from remote areas at the train station and offering them free room and board at her school.
While Hossain is celebrated in the present day for her contributions to feminism and education, she endured bitter criticism in her own lifetime. Many members of the Muslim community, especially religious leaders, deplored her feminism and declared her irreligious and overly Westernized, even though she remained a practicing Muslim and dedicated her life to helping Indian women. But she also inspired a younger generation of activists, who used works like The Secluded Ones to campaign for women’s rights, and her activism and writing helped to change public attitudes toward women’s education. Shortly after her death at the age of fifty-two, her school for girls started receiving government funding. It still exists in Kolkata today, evidence of Hossain’s work and lasting effect on Indian education. And her influence continues to spread—though Hossain’s crucial contributions to feminism are still not that well known outside of South Asia, “Sultana’s Dream” is increasingly included in Anglophone literary anthologies. In 2018, it was also the subject of an art exhibit by South Asian American feminist artist Chitra Ganesh, “Her Garden, a Mirror,” that illuminated how eloquently and urgently Hossain’s utopian visions continue to speak to the crises and injustices of the present.
Because it could be labeled both utopian literature and sci-fi, “Sultana’s Dream” is perhaps best described as speculative fiction, an umbrella category that includes these genres as well as horror and fantasy. Speculative fiction encompasses any form of imaginative literature with nonrealistic elements: objects, situations, places, or beings that have never existed in the past, and don’t exist in the present, but—in the case of much sci-fi and utopian and dystopian fiction—could potentially exist in the future. Margaret Atwood, for example, uses the term to describe her dystopian novels, such as A Handmaid’s Tale, because they present worlds that might emerge out of present-day political conditions. But the term has also been used more broadly to describe fiction, like that of H. P. Lovecraft, that is nonmimetic but also nonpredictive. While some critics argue that this definition is too broad to be helpful as a description of a literary genre, speculative fiction as a label for a wide variety of works has emerged more prominently in recent years, partly because nonmimetic genres have proliferated and partly because it captures the way that the genres encompassed by it tend to intersect and overlap, particularly in the work of contemporary writers of color like Octavia Butler.
The sci-fi elements of ‘Sultana’s Dream’—electric flying cars, the use of science to harness the power of rain and of the sun—are particularly notable for their prescience and innovation.
In “Sultana’s Dream,” the protagonist, a Muslim woman living in contemporary India, falls asleep and wakes up in a transformed future world: a utopia in which women are free to explore the world at will and pursue an education. Their society is peaceful and just, run by a queen who uses scientific principles to put an end to war, conquer disease, harvest clean energy from the sun, and live in harmony with nature. The sci-fi elements of “Sultana’s Dream”—electric flying cars, the use of science to harness the power of rain and of the sun—are particularly notable for their prescience and innovation. Hossain draws on other genres as well, namely satire and parody, to accentuate her critique of purdah. If satire works through poking fun at its object in order to lambast it, parody imitates the form of its object of critique but incorporates a key difference that indicates why the object is worthy of ridicule. The parody of “Sultana’s Dream” operates by replicating the conditions of purdah in Sultana’s utopia but reversing the gender roles, so that men, rather than women, must stay indoors and take care of the home and the children, while women run society and roam the streets happily, free from harassment and exploitation. The unlikeliness of male seclusion is part of the story’s humor, but this detail also draws its strength from the logic of purdah; if women need to be covered and cloistered because of their own weakness and because of male desire, as supporters of purdah believe, then this desire and male strength (or physical aggression) is the problem that needs to be contained. To the degree that the story seems to hold a low opinion of men—who are held responsible for the prior woes of the world and, more comically, are depicted as lazy and hapless—it does so by leveraging and rearranging real-world assumptions about gender.
More pronounced than its sci-fi or satiric elements, though, is the story’s utopianism, and the way it uses those elements as building blocks. The utopian tradition spans most of literary history; it has been traced back to Plato’s Republic (375 BC) and Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), among other influential texts, and has long been an occasion for feminist imaginings. Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) builds an imaginary city of famous women (both real and fictional) in order to advocate, as Hossain does, for female education. Millenium Hall (1778) by Sarah Scott is also similar to both “Sultana’s Dream” and Padmarag in its vision of female community as crucial to the advancement of both the self and society.
Influential theorists of utopia, such as Ernst Bloch (see Suggestions for Further Reading), argue that utopian thought is a key component of human aspiration. Since the word “utopia” means “no place,” utopias are not necessarily meant to be direct road maps to social transformation. Instead, they are designed to show us what’s wrong with the current world and ask us to imagine it differently; they strive to startle their readers into the perception of new possibilities. “Sultana’s Dream” does just this in its reversal of gender roles and in its transformation of the world into Ladyland: a safe and joyous space in which women are able to live productive lives and nature and culture are harmonized. If the fact that this vision entails keeping men separate and inside the home is the story’s most unrealistic element, it is also its most poignant in its indictment of both purdah and gender-based violence.
Hossain is careful to wrest the critique of gender roles in India away from Western commentators by showing how British colonialism itself perpetuates oppression.
When is the time of utopia? Generally, both utopias and dystopias are associated with the future; “Sultana’s Dream” seems like futuristic sci-fi because of its visionary space-age details. But according to the Queen of Ladyland, her country exists alongside India, which she refers to as “your country” when addressing Sultana. Sultana’s dream world, then, is a parallel world; one that might be accessed, the story suggests, via female education, since this is the key reform the Queen instituted that allowed for the radical transformation of society. Hossain’s novella Padmarag is similarly utopian in its depiction of female community; the institution at the center of the story, Tarini Bhavan, functions as a home for widows, a school for girls, and also as a “Home for the Ailing and Needy.” It welcomes women of all ages, ethnicities, and religions and supports them equally, giving them the opportunity to become self-sufficient by supplying work training or allowing them to work on the premises. By forming a collective, the women free themselves from the need for support from husbands or family: entities that the story often depicts as selfish, abusive, or uncaring. The intentional community of Tarini Bhavan, on the other hand, is one of mutual care and sustenance, both material and emotional. The utopian component of the story, then, inheres in the overcoming of differences between women and the success of their enterprise, but there are also many realistic elements to the story. Rather than occurring in “no place,” Padmarag seems to be set in contemporary India, and the depiction of the school and ancillary institutions that make up Tarini Bhavan clearly draw on Hossain’s experiences running both her own school and the Bengali Muslim Women’s Association (such as the letters of complaint from parents that Tarini reads out loud to her friends in chapter 19). If in “Sultana’s Dream” the utopian Ladyland contrasts with the imperfect state of contemporary India for women, in Padmarag, Tarini Bhavan is a small island of utopian community within a real world of grossly unfair gender disparities. As we learn the stories of the different women that live there, we also learn of the different forms of exploitation and bondage to which women can be subject.
Yet Hossain is careful to wrest the critique of gender roles in India away from Western commentators by showing how British colonialism itself perpetuates oppression. Helen, the British member of the Tarini Bhavan community, demonstrates that women in Britain are subject to similar forms of discrimination, while one of the central villains of the story is a British indigo planter whose greedy machinations lead the heroine Siddika (aka Padmarag) to Tarini Bhavan to join the other women who are seeking refuge from patriarchy there. At the end of the story, Siddika foils both the romance plot that would have her reconcile with her true love, Latif, and a utopian ending, by leaving both Latif and Tarini Bhavan behind to return to seclusion in her hometown. Her motivations, beyond a sense of duty and a desire to determine her own destiny, are not adequately explained, but the story as a whole seems determined to flout expectations of both genre and gender in order to show us both a deeply flawed world and people struggling to carve out a better one. As one of its inhabitants puts it, Tarini Bhavan exists to redress the injustices of the society it inhabits: “Come, all you abandoned, destitute, neglected, helpless, oppressed women—come together. Then we will declare war on society! And Tarini Bhavan will serve as our fortress.” Seemingly disarming in their innovation and humor, both the utopian stories collected in this edition are formidable as well, presenting themselves to the reader as mental fortresses against pernicious gender ideologies and other conventional ideas.
Words can, and often do, fail. For Zeina Hashem Beck, a poet and polyglot of three languages, words can, and often do, fail—threefold. This, she says, isn’t a dead end. It’s an invitation. “The words will come when it’s time. And I trust that,” she tells me via an email from Dubai.
Hashem Beck’s newest volume of poetry, O, liaises with language in a way that strays from her previous works. Collections like Louder than Hearts(2017) focus on externality and setting, while O, which she calls “quieter,” preoccupies itself with the body as it oscillates between continents and cultures. Raised in Lebanon, Hashem Beck was educated at a French school before matriculating to American University of Beirut, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Literature. After living in the United Arab Emirates for a decade, Hashem Beck and her family moved to Northern California in the final weeks of 2021. The poet’s myriad experiences are apparent in both her quotidian exchanges—Arabic (“the Lebanese dialect”), with some English thrown in for good measure, is spoken with friends and family—and in her poems. “Bulbul,” for example, elaborates on multi-ethnicity: “I forget the order of your alphabet though I know all the old Egyptian plays by heart.” “I dream in Lebanese. I count in French.” “The students turned their umbrellas to a Sinatra song in Beirut & here I am writing to you about pining for New York City.”
Like many of her contemporaries, Hashem Beck’s poetry mingles with memoir, as well as with more essayistic and less staggered forms. Through multiple emails and direct messages, she spoke with me not only about how language affects her writing and personal life, but also about how the amalgamations become one.
Arya Roshanian: Where in California did you move to? I was born and raised in a suburb of Los Angeles, so I love talking about California.
Zeina Hashem Beck: Ah, then we need to speak after this; I want to learn more! You’re not the first Californian who tells me they like to talk about it. We moved to the eastern Bay Area in December 2021, and though I didn’t expect to like California, I think it’s quickly growing on me. It’s only been six months, so I don’t know much about it, but it instantly helped that the landscape and the weather reminded me of Lebanon. I hate to admit that I love staring at the mountains and trees, since I’ve always defined myself as a city girl. This afternoon, I picked peaches from our front yard; I’ve never had this kind of relationship with nature before (I’m still scared of spiders, bees, and the squirrels who beat me to the peaches). Perhaps California’s distance and quiet helps, on some level; so much has happened in the past two years both in my personal life and back home in Lebanon (the October 2019 revolution, the economic collapse, the August 2020 Beirut explosion) that part of me needed to be at the other end of the earth. The other part wakes up some days and wonders, “What the hell am I doing here?” I was already “away” from Lebanon while in Dubai of course, but California is a totally different kind of away.
AR: New cities can bring out sides of ourselves that we may not have known existed. Was there something you thought would change for you that’s been more or less the same?
ZHB: By the time the decision was made to move to California, I was so exhausted I didn’t even have the energy to think about what might or might not change. And that’s very out-of-character for me, because I plan and I like control, but I think that transition period forced me into surrender. I was taking it day by day, hour by hour even. It was the only way; it would have been too scary for me otherwise.
AR: You moved to California from Dubai, and I’m hesitant to ask how you plan to “establish your roots,” because that idea seems like a fallacy—I feel like we plant seeds of ourselves everywhere we go, rather than setting firm roots. In what ways are California, Dubai, and Lebanon in harmony when you think about yourself?
ZHB: When you’re in Dubai, you’re still pretty close to Lebanon and you’re surrounded by Arab friends, so you somehow feel “rooted.” On the other hand, since you can’t become a citizen, you’re always aware there’s no permanence for you there. Here in California, it’s a much deeper degree of separation, and this time I felt I had really left. When we were kids, my mom always said, “Those who go to America never come back.” My brother left to study in the US when he was seventeen. At the time, I was twelve, and I resented the US for taking him away from me—it felt like a kind of theft, and I promised myself I’d never live there. I recognized a very similar anger, the anger at a place taking your people away from you, in my daughters and their friends as they said goodbye in Dubai. I never thought I’d end up here, but here I am, staring at beautiful maple tree leaves and cursing at squirrels. As for Lebanon, what can I say? It’s home, and it’s a home I seem to constantly be estranged from. To go back to your question: not only is there no harmony, but more importantly, the discord is necessary.
AR: Speaking of harmonies, many of the poems in O are bilingual, which you classify as “Duets.” You do this cool thing where both languages are utilized separately in a single poem, yet they form their own poem when read together. From a craft perspective, how did that come together?
ZHB: With much difficulty, but I like this kind of difficulty. Sometimes the Arabic came first, sometimes the English, and sometimes both of them came together from the start. The most challenging thing was making the poem flow whichever way you read it, whether in English, Arabic, or both, while also keeping some contradiction between the two languages. This took a lot of reading and rereading out loud, a lot of revision.
AR: The irony of being bilingual, or a polyglot, is that words, regardless of the language, can still fail to express our state of mind. How do you navigate the limitations of language in your poetry?
We write poems because we feel there’s something beyond language that we want to reach with language.
ZHB: The urge to write poetry springs from this limitation; we write poems because we feel there’s something beyond language that we want to reach with language. My way of navigating this is to keep writing, to foolishly seek out that impossibility.
AR: What happens if/when you run into a dead end? How do you work around that?
ZHB: It just means you have to slow down and listen. You have to wait. I remind myself that I’m not a machine, that writing is a slow practice, and that I don’t have to prove to myself or others that I’m being “productive.”
AR: Are there times when you feel the “writer” part of yourself speaks its own language? Do you ever have trouble communicating with others outside the written form?
ZHB: Our different selves speak different languages, for sure, while constantly intersecting. That’s part of the beautiful discord, to go back to that! It all depends on context—I definitely don’t walk around speaking lyrically all the time, or speaking in ghazals, though I love intense conversations with friends about the meaning of life, love, friendship, marriage, desire, motherhood. I also love dancing with friends to really bad pop Arabic music and talking about haircuts, nail color, clothes. Any close friend of mine has endless photos of me in different outfits on his/her phone, with questions like, “This one? This size? This color? You like? What do you think? Where are you? Answer!” To return to your beautiful question: no, I don’t think I have trouble communicating with others outside the written form.
AR: What’s your writing style in non-creative outlets? For example, when writing an email or text, how much of your “poet” side are you imbuing into those mediums?
ZHB: I used to read emails a few times before sending them out, and I think that’s the editor in me, but I do that a lot less now, because fuck it, life’s too short. My texting style is super informal, filled with lots of exclamation marks and a wide repertoire of Whatsapp stickers, which are their own genre.
AR: Tell me about the collection’s title, O. An entire collection reduced to a single letter. Could you explain your decision behind the title?
ZHB: I would first like to apologize to anyone who’s read another interview about O because I’m about to repeat myself. So, the collection was initially titled “Ode to the Afternoon,” after one of the poems, with the afternoon being, for me, a period that’s always made me feel uneasy. But then one day, it made sense to reduce it to just that letter, the “O” of lyricism, surprise, wonder, pause. The “O” of God, body, home, mother, ode, love, and joy. The shape that’s present in the body itself, in its openings.
AR: There is a line from one of your poems I keep going back to. It’s the opening to “Everything Here is an Absolute”—it’s, “Look at where this nostalgia has brought us.” Nostalgia can be both beautiful and dangerous. Has nostalgia ever failed you, or set you back?
ZHB: As you say, nostalgia can be beautiful (as a teenager, one of my favorite Lebanese radio stations was a French one called “Nostalgie”), but I have to necessarily write against it, even as I write from it. I’m not saying there is zero nostalgia in my poems, but imagine if it were the only lens? My God, it would be disastrous. The poem you mention recognizes, from the first line, that nostalgia has already separated the speaker from the city she’s describing/longing for. Working on the Duets, by the way, it was interesting to notice that the Arabic seemed less nostalgic for me than the English. In one of the Duets, for example, the speaker still “worships” the city in English but swears to stop doing this in Arabic.
Finally, I want to distinguish between lyricism and nostalgia; I love a lyrical voice, one that’s grounded in the real, the uneasy, the humorous even. As for nostalgia ever failing me, I’m not sure—I don’t think so, because I always had, with whatever nostalgic feelings I’d go through, a simultaneous doubt about those feelings. Perhaps growing up in Lebanon trains you for this.
AR: What are you reading these days? And who are the writers you return to the most?
ZHB: I co-host, with Palestinian poet and friend Farah Chamma, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry, titled “Maqsouda.” In preparation for season 2, we’ve been reading Dalia Taha, Golan Haji, Qassem Haddad, and Riad al-Saleh al-Hussein, among others. I just finished Noor Naga’s If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, am finishing bell hook’s All About Love,and want to start Hayan Charara’s These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. I return to Mahmoud Darwish, Badr Shaker as-Sayyab, Wislawa Szymborska, Audre Lorde, and many more.
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