During a Women’s Studies class a year after our break up, we were assigned bell hooks’s essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” As I devoured the piece, relief moved through my body. I nearly shot out of my seat, taking out my highlighter and marking up every page. It was the first time I felt relief in a year.
In the essay, hooks describes a moment walking behind a group of white jock-type boys in downtown New Haven, near the Yale campus where she taught. She overhears them talking about how they want to sleep with as many women from various racial and ethnic groups as possible before they graduate. hooks breaks down their ranking system: Asian girls are the easiest to catch, Indigenous girls much harder to find. Black women rank high on the list of sexual conquests:
To these young males and their buddies, fucking was a way to confront the Other, as well as a way to make themselves over, to leave behind white “innocence” and enter the world of “experience.” As is often the case in this society, they were confident that non-white people had more life experience, were more worldly, sensual, and sexual because they were different. Getting a bit of the Other, in this case engaging in sexual encounters with non-white females, was considered a ritual of transcendence, a movement out into a world of difference that would transform, an acceptable rite of passage. The direct objective was not simply to sexually possess the Other; it was to be changed in some way by the encounter. “Naturally,” the presence of the Other, the body of the Other, was seen as existing to serve the ends of white male desires.
Through sleeping with a woman of colour, hooks argues, white men believe they gain access to dark, otherworldly territory, transcending their whiteness and innocence and moving into more sexually experienced and dangerous terrain. The man who does this believes that the body of this non-white Other holds the most delectable pleasures, a tale to share with his friends, and a checkmark on his list.
But, hooks says, after “consuming” her multiple times, he becomes bored with his ethnic conquest and spits her out—moving on to the next one.
It was as if hooks had been in my head. What I couldn’t articulate was there, on paper, immortalized as a theory. And that meant what I was feeling wasn’t made up.
Feminist theory is all about theory, and praxis—enacting that theory. hooks’s work, as well as the writings of many feminist scholars I was reading in my Women’s Studies courses, made it easy to write about Anthony using already-established theories, through documented experiences. I realized my own were already part of a legacy of these stories.
I wrote an article for an acquaintance’s blog—tying in hooks’s analysis and my relationship with Anthony and other men I’d come across in London. The next morning, an editor at the Huffington Post contacted me to ask if they could run it on their website. It was my first published piece. It went viral, sparking heated debates.
Dozens of people sent me messages, thankful to see their experiences reflected in a mainstream publication. They used the article to start having long-overdue conversations with the people in their lives about race and relationships. People of colour from around the world shared their experiences of being fetishized, while others reflected on how they had exotified past partners.
And so my unconventional Greek tragedy goes, except nobody poked their own eyes out or accidentally killed their father and married their mother. Anthony and his girlfriend broke up a year or so later. He is now married to a woman of colour and has a child.
I still haven’t gone out with another white guy. But I’m open to it—I do love me some Patrick Wilson and white boys in cardigans. While I don’t get many sexually racist messages anymore, I don’t get approached by white guys either. It will still take some work to open up again, for someone new to gain my trust and vulnerability.
And that is the real tragedy—the way the body remembers past lovers, the way it seizes at a scent or a memory. How it can pack itself up in a flash at the reminder of them, leaving nothing but impenetrable, impossible borders for the next person to try to cross.
The Necessary Survival Guide for Token Students
The Token in the Residence Bathroom
WHAT TO EXPECT: Quite possibly the most stressful part of the communal dorm experience and a coordinated effort. You will be at the mercy of a bunch of catty, shit-analyzing people who have nothing better to do than try to figure out everyone’s fecal sights and smells like it’s a murder mystery. As a minority, you will break into a cold sweat every time you need to do a number two. You will study everyone’s bathroom habits to know exactly who goes when and in what stalls, because if it’s ill-timed, they will see your little brown toes planted on the ground and you will get a shit nickname (literally, a shit nickname) like Vegan Shits or Bitch With Floaters. I don’t want this for you.
HOW TO DEAL WITH IT: Using this four-pronged approach, you will never get caught taking a shit as yourself again. All you need is another person with a similar skin tone.
1. Blame the other person. If your nosy shithound floormates are having their daily shit talk, and on the agenda is an unidentified poop that belongs to you, just point the finger at the other person of colour. Tell them you saw OBP (Other Brown/Black Person) running to the bathroom in a hurry this morning. The case of who smelt it dealt it doesn’t apply here—save yourself, you need this.
2. Steal their identity. Most people in residence leave their doors wide open. Take advantage and swipe the other person’s slippers in case anyone is brazen enough to look under the stall. You can also lift your legs up and press them against the stall door (ghost shits)—this way you can confuse and disarm Shitlock Holmes by making them think that there’s a Moaning Myrtle situation happening up in there.
3. Use their nail polish. If some people say they can’t tell minorities apart then you can be damn sure our toes all look the same too! Observe the painted toenails of the other person of colour. Comment on how great their nail polish is and ask if you can borrow it. They will most likely say yes (if not, go buy one that looks similar). Paint your toenails with their polish and go to town.
4. Wear their pants. Okay—extreme, I know. But depending on how dire your situation is and your level of friendship, wear their bottoms (lounge pants are roomier) to the porcelain throne. Return what you take as soon as you can—you’re not a damn crook.
relationshit
If they were to ever have a baby, my father said to my mother, he didn’t want a Gemini.
Years later, on Thanksgiving Day, she stood in the living room as she told her parents that she was twenty-two and pregnant—the only person in our family to have a baby out of wedlock. She was due June 23—a Cancer, two days out of Gemini territory. From the beginning of her pregnancy, family members and strangers predicted she was having a boy—from the way she was carrying, the changing shape of her nose, and their own symbolic dreams. As she prepared for life with her Cancer son, something else happened: I arrived one month early, in the middle of May, a Gemini. Even my arrival was dramatic and spiteful, our key traits.
My mother was young, and with me being their only grandchild, my grandparents willingly became my primary caretakers. They showered me in affection, took me travelling around the world, and enrolled me in every extracurricular activity imaginable. Still, my grandfather was disappointed; he’d wanted my mom to establish herself before having a child. But he was adamant that she not give into pressure to get married just because she had a baby.
My mom called off her engagement when I was six months old and, following an easy court win, she was granted sole custody, and my father was given visitation. He rarely used it. He’s in and out of our family albums, mostly before I was born—photographed with his arm draped around my mother before she was pregnant, or sitting comfortably on our couch with his feet up, or posing at family events. There are a few photos with me: a close-up of him cradling me as a newborn; the two of us on a family vacatio
n to Disney World when I was eight months old; me sitting on his lap during my first Christmas. In other photos, he’s been scratched out with scissors.
When he did show up to school events or dance recitals, I felt proud to show the other kids that I had a father just like they did. But his presence made me uneasy. The way he smelled like car cleaner. How he chewed mint gum. His silver tooth filling. A smiling face that always seemed to betray his fickleness. I despised how he could disappear for months and then show up like he had done nothing wrong. When my grandmother was battling cancer, he didn’t come around to thank the woman who had raised his child. When she died, he didn’t come around to comfort me, or help care for me. He didn’t come around at all.
I haven’t seen my father in a decade. Before that, it was six years. Before that, five. Each time he makes his grand appearance, he sticks around longer. Each time he decides to leave, his time away becomes greater. My grandfather refers to him as “your father” before shaking his head in disappointment, though he’ll never utter an unkind word. My mother and I give him nicknames—Mr. Worldwide, Mr. International, Sperm Donor. It makes him easier to talk about.
Most of what I know about my father is superficial, things that I’ve seen during our brief periods of contact, or that my mother sees in me: his oily skin, his wide nose, his long legs and short torso, his love for carrot cake, the way his eyes turn into crinkled slits when he smiles. I hope that I haven’t inherited his temper, his lack of commitment, his selfishness. If she’s noticed anything else, she hasn’t mentioned it. I pray that she doesn’t.
* * *
///
The moment I learned that my father had other children was captured on camera.
I was twelve, and finally old enough to be home alone while my mom went out. I had been wanting to find my father for some time, starved for pieces of information about his life that she wouldn’t give. I hadn’t seen him in several years, not since my grandmother was alive. I went searching through the family phone book, a beaten-up heirloom from the Chinese market with a red, decorative cover, containing phone numbers inscribed from before I was born. As I flipped through the thinning pages, I found his name in my grandmother’s writing. I started to cry, overwhelmed by happiness and fear. What would I say? Would he recognize the voice of his own child? I rehearsed how our conversation would go, and an hour later, when I finally called, he didn’t answer. I left a voicemail—this was Eternity, his daughter. Did he remember me? I was looking for him. Could he call me back, please?
He didn’t call back that day, or the next. I left him several messages. Finally, on the car ride to school the following week, my mom gently asked if I had been trying to get in touch with my father. Heat rose to my face.
“Yes,” I said defiantly as I thrust my chin up to knock back the sting of embarrassed tears. “And you can’t stop me.”
“I’m not trying to stop you at all,” she said. Her empathetic tone made me angrier; I thought she was pitying me. “You can have a relationship with him, but I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”
“He’s my dad,” I said, with a little less conviction.
“I’m just saying that he’s known where you’ve lived for the last twelve years, that’s all.”
She didn’t say anything more, and neither did I.
A week after the conversation with my mom, we went to his mother’s house, where he lived, for our reunion.
My mother and I got into the shaky elevator and entered the off-white hallway that smelled like cooked food and onions. I made my mother knock on the door. My grandmother, a small and fragile Black woman, answered.
“Oh, Eternity! How are you? Come hug Grandma!” I hugged her back to be polite. My father wasn’t home yet, so she gave us a tour of the apartment, a cluttered unit with parquet floors, beige walls, and brown furniture.
It was daytime but the brown suede curtains were fully closed. A small crack of light had managed to get through. In its rays were dust particles. I looked around cautiously. I wasn’t familiar with the reality of public housing. It lacked the space and the warmth of the home I lived in with my grandparents. I immediately regretted my choice to seek out this new family.
The living room was piled high with junk—on tabletops, on side tables, in the glass cabinet. The only place that wasn’t covered in fake shrubberies and trinkets was one side of the couch. The dining room table was barely visible under dozens of fake plants, all potted and perfectly lined up in rows. “Try one,” my grandmother said to me, ushering me to push a button on one of the dusty dancing plants, its plastic leaves laced with cobwebs. I reluctantly pressed the tiny red button on the pot and the flower bobbed and played an upbeat jazz tune, its stiff leaves moving up and down.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“Um. Yes?” I hated it. It was awful and ugly. She plucked it from the table and put it in my hands, her eyes glimmering. “You can have it.”
As the flower continued to dance in my hands, my grandmother ran into the kitchen to get her Polaroid camera.
“Come, I want to take your picture,” she said, and I followed her back into the hall.
“Stand there.” She pointed to the middle of the hallway and shaped me into an acceptable pose, like a life-sized doll. I was uncomfortable, fidgeting with my hands until I clasped them in front of me and gave a tight-lipped grin.
It wasn’t good enough, not when I had such a beautiful smile, she said—a smile with front teeth starkly divided down the middle thanks to the gap I had inherited from her son. Her compliment worked. The camera went off with a giant flash.
She wanted to take one more for my father. Feeling more comfortable, I gave her a bigger smile. She said something about how happy she was that I was here.
“I have a photo of all of Nicholas’s kids in this hallway,” she said excitedly.
I thought I’d heard her incorrectly. I struggled to keep some semblance of a smile on my face as my lips shook. I squeezed my hands together tightly, folding my arms in, making myself small, to pretend I could just disappear. The camera flashed again.
“Come, girl. Come see.” She pulled the photo out from the bottom of the camera, waving it back and forth. “You look just like Krystal,” she said.
She brought me back inside the apartment and into the kitchen, returning with a tin box containing several other Polaroid pictures. She pulled one out. It was a picture of a young biracial girl. She, too, was standing in the off-white hallway, her hands also clasped together, looking slightly uncomfortable. My grandmother told me that was Krystal, my younger sister who lived in England, who visited every couple of years. I’d never heard of her until now.
My grandmother took my now-dried Polaroid and tossed it on top of the stack of other photos of brown-skinned kids in the off-white hallway, before shutting the tin. I remember feeling like part of me was now locked in that box, where she collected us all like baseball cards.
I don’t remember seeing my father that day, though he did show up. I do remember that, for a while, we saw each other every week, either going to Harvey’s for hotdogs or eating chocolate in front of my house after school in his busted-up red car.
I was about to enter Grade 8. I’d just grown out of being the target of school bullies, and I no longer had to worry about monitoring how I acted and moved through the day to avoid being made fun of by my peers. But now I was self-policing in other ways. When I was with my father, I watched how I ate, the way I responded to his questions, the way I behaved. I didn’t want him to find me annoying. I didn’t want him to leave me again.
During one of our evenings out, my father bought a bag of Oh Henry! Bites and I ate nearly all of them. I expected him to be disgusted at my gluttony, but instead he laughed. The next time he picked me up, he wanted to get me my own. He drove to a strip mall drugstore near the home he shared with my grandmother, and parked the car right
in front. I begged him to let me come in with him. My mother would never leave me in the car alone in a strange place. But he dismissed my fear, promising he would only be a minute. I was a big girl, right? He’d even put on the radio for me. But I was scared to be in this unfamiliar neighbourhood. Plus, I wanted to go with him, be in public with my dad—be validated as his child. Why couldn’t we just go together?
As he walked away, the panic crept in. And when he didn’t come back—more than five minutes had passed, maybe ten—I got out of the car and went inside the store, frantically calling his name. But I couldn’t find him. I ran back to the car and pulled on the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. I cried hysterically, vulnerable in this unknown place, feeling that I had just become a difficult and emotional daughter who didn’t take orders—locked out of his car, locked out of his life. When he finally came back, Bites in his hand, his eyes were wide and his mouth open. He was shocked at how hysterical I was. He said he didn’t expect me to act this way. I was devastated, ashamed—and worse, terrified that my actions would scare him off. I didn’t bring up how angry I was that he’d left me alone. I remained silent the whole way home, the Bites resting between us, uneaten. Weeks later, after promising to pick me up for dinner, he left me waiting for him on our doorstep. It would be years before he showed up again.
* * *
///
My father came back into my life at two pivotal moments: the first had been during that rocky transition into adolescence; the second was six years later, during my collision with womanhood.
They Said This Would Be Fun Page 16
