Go Home!
Page 1
Published in 2018 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress.org
First Feminist Press edition 2018
Compilation copyright © 2018 by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Individual copyrights retained by contributors.
All rights reserved.
Go Home! was published in partnership with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing March 2018
Cover design by Britt Gudas
Cover photo by Serena Vergano, courtesy of Ricardo Bofill
Text design by Suki Boynton
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo editor. | Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 1971- author of foreword.
Title: Go home! / [compiled by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan; foreword by Viet Thanh Nguyen].
Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York, NY: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017012004 (print) | LCCN 2017032423 (ebook) | ISBN 9781936932030 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature--Asian American authors. | American literature--Women authors. | American literature--21st century.
Classification: LCC PS508.A8 (ebook) | LCC PS508.A8 G63 2017 (print) | DDC 810.9/928708995--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012004
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
Editor’s Note
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Foreword
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Release
Alexander Chee
Things That Remind Me of Home
Kimiko Hahn
Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying
Alice Sola Kim
Ramadan Red White and Blue
Mohja Kahf
My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears
Mohja Kahf
The Place Where I Live Is Different Because I Live There
Wendy Xu
Sit Bones
Sharlene Teo
magritte
Wo Chan
what do i make of my face / except
Wo Chan
Aama, 1978
Muna Gurung
Delicately, I Beg of You
Muhammad Amirul bin Muhamad
The Words Honey and Moon
Jennifer Tseng
Post Trauma
Rajiv Mohabir
Costero
Rajiv Mohabir
Pygmy Right Whale
Rajiv Mohabir
कालापानी
Rajiv Mohabir
Kalapani
Rajiv Mohabir
The Unintended
Gina Apostol
Meet a Muslim
Fariha Róisín
Elegy
Esmé Weijun Wang
Cul-de-sac
Chaya Babu
Esmeralda
Mia Alvar
Love Poems for the Border Patrol
Amitava Kumar
Blue Tears
Karissa Chen
Tigress
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
The Stained Veil
Gaiutra Bahadur
I’m Charlie Tuna
Jason Koo
Bon Chul Koo and the Hall of Fame
Jason Koo
Chicken & Stars
T Kira Madden
For Mitsuye Yamada on Her 90th Birthday
Marilyn Chin
The Faintest Echo of Our Language
Chang-Rae Lee
Biographies
Acknowledgments
Permissions
ABOUT THE EDITOR
ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS
ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS
Editor’s Note
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
In Japanese there is a specific verb for traveling homeward: 帰る (kaeru). Going or coming home is its own enterprise, distinct from traveling to any other destination. There is something so particular about a journey made toward home. The word has a beauty and a comfort to it. But what does it mean to go home?
MY FRIEND AND I were standing in line for the New Museum. It was a lovely New York day and the light was low and violet. People ahead of us were eating food out of little paper boxes. Then we heard it: “Go home!” The man shouting at us was wearing a black plastic jacket and his beard was a blond-white scrawl. He slowed his pace only for the moment it took for the hatred to spill out of his mouth. The insult seemed so weak, like movie-villain stock dialogue. It was most of all ridiculous—because of the sheer impossibility of it.
My friend, let’s call him T, grew up in Michigan. His family now lives in North Carolina. He was born in the north of China. The last time he went back to his birthplace, he was eight years old. We were waiting for our friend M to join us. She’s half-Japanese, half-Sicilian and grew up in the Midwest. I was born in London. My grandfather was born in Tokyo and my grandmother in Shanghai. My mother was born on the Upper West Side of New York. My father’s side is a European hodgepodge. Where is it that Japanese-Chinese-Scottish-English-American people come from?
My idea of home is a verb. Home is a straining toward belonging. For me the feeling of wanting to go home is home. For others, home is a place they want to escape, a place that doesn’t exist, a place that exists only in time, a place that exists in the breath of a parent, or the mouth of a lover. For some, home is geographical, but they cannot return because of political, financial, or personal reasons. Others are seen as foreigners in their chosen homes.
In my conversations with Jyothi Natarajan at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Jisu Kim at the Feminist Press, we agreed we wanted to share many different visions of home. I began compiling this anthology after I moved from the United States to the United Kingdom. At the moment, both countries seem to be becoming less and less united. Xenophobic rhetoric gushes from political podiums. The ideal home they describe has locked doors—not letting anyone in or out. They want to decide who belongs where. But I have seen a pushback. Writers are amplifying each other’s cries to kindness, to empathy, and to understanding.
I hope this anthology can participate in that work. This book binds together fiction writers, poets, and essayists. We reached out to established writers and to those starting out. We searched for stories of homes found and homes lost. It is full of joy and of sorrow. The writers in this book complicate and expand the idea of home. They tell new stories and break down old stereotypes. Each piece is different and each is its own definition of home.
But this one book can’t contain all the vital voices. After you close the last page behind you, please open many more. Consider this book a doorway. The world presents ever-increasing ways in which we can be homed and unhomed. You may not see your own definition of home in these pages, but we hope you find resonances and use them as a starting point for your own
writing and thinking.
Foreword
Viet Thanh Nguyen
When I was seventeen, I could not wait to leave home, even though I was more fortunate than many. My father and mother did nothing wrong in our home, which was in San Jose, California. Our first house was by a downtown freeway entrance ramp, the soaring taillights of the cars visible from my bedroom window. I dreamed of taking off with them. Our second house was in the quiet foothills, where my father still lives, his bedroom furnished with a computer and a photocopier manufactured in the 1980s.
There was no abuse, and there was always food, warmth, light, and religion. There was love, too, the quiet kind that expresses itself not through words and embraces but through acts of sacrifice, through the model of parental lives given to duty: the twelve-to-fourteen-hour days working at a grocery store with hardly a day off, the devotion to the church, the remittances sent home to desperate relatives in a postwar Vietnam—the typical grind of all refugee families.
And yet, despite not needing anything, I wanted more, although exactly what, I did not know. I wanted to leave home because I wanted to find a home of my own creation. My parents’ sacrifice allowed me to yearn for more than they could give, and for more than San Jose or the Vietnamese refugee community there could offer. To my teenage self, it was a bland city of routine desires for suburban homes and expensive goods, not of ideas or “culture.” To me, culture meant the world I read about in books and saw in movies, the charming white fantasies of Paris and New York.
The culture of San Jose that I knew, the Vietnamese one, was neither charming nor fantastic. The Vietnamese community was marked by close bonds of kinship and identity but also by the fallout of war, demonstrated through anger, violence, and bitterness. It was the war that drove my parents to become shopkeepers toiling in their store, where they were shot one Christmas Eve. They were suspicious of their own countrymen and warned me never to open the door to Vietnamese people, for fear of them invading our home (when it happened, when the gun was pointed in all our faces, the hand holding it belonged to a white man). The closeness and the legacy of trauma meant, for me, an atmosphere of suffocation, confined by the walls and boundaries of my parents’ home, of the Vietnamese community, and of San Jose.
I did not know it then, but what I wanted was a home without walls and boundaries. For some, walls and boundaries comfort rather than confine, keeping things out and keeping things in. As a refugee and an alien in the eyes of many Americans, I knew inarticulately that I was an outsider. At my mostly white high school, the handful of us who were Asian gathered in a corner for lunch and called ourselves the “Asian invasion.” Growing up in San Jose, I might have become one of those outsiders and invaders who only wanted to get inside at any cost. But ever since I had seen a sign in a shop window near my parents’ store that read “Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese,” I knew that the yearning to be inside—to be just another American—might also tempt people toward hatred and fear.
Comfortably ensconced at last within four walls and a mortgage, we may be tempted to close the door behind us and lock it shut. Some former Vietnamese refugees do so today when they say the United States should not take in new refugees from the Middle East. They are wrong, forgetting that once they were the outsiders whom the majority of Americans did not want to take in. They are not special or exceptional, only lucky to be the beneficiaries of American guilt (at having abandoned South Vietnam) and American political calculation (for taking in refugees from a formerly communist country was simply another strategic move of the so-called Cold War). In contrast to those who use homes to shut people out, I believe that we need to keep our doors open. Or knock down the walls altogether.
I found a home in language and storytelling. This home has walls of a kind. One needs to speak and read English to be in my home, which can be unwelcoming to some. But no one is locked out, beginning with me. I found my entryway in school, learning to read, and through librarians at the public library. The library was literally my second home and also the home of the books through which I found freedom and flight from a world that I found confining. Books offered adventure, the promise of new worlds, the sight of further horizons. While the San Jose library mostly offered the canon of colonizers, I nevertheless learned from this literature a love of language and storytelling, a desire for beauty in word and narrative. Through books and stories, the world became my home, a place from which I could never be dispossessed so long as I lived and my mind could roam. For a refugee like me who had lost his country of origin and his mother tongue, a home that could never be lost was a way to always feel safe.
It wasn’t until I went to university that I discovered the powerful traditions of decolonization and minority writing, which emerged in part to contest the widely accepted literary canon. These traditions taught me defiance and the values of justice and solidarity, traditions that have their own beauty. Writers deployed them to stake their claim of being at home in literatures often written in the language of masters and colonizers.
The existence of Go Home! testifies to the power of language as a home open to all, albeit one that we must often fight for. Against the racist demand that we go back to where we came from, we say that we are already at home, not just in the United States, but in English.
While this preoccupation with home is a universal human concern, it becomes particularly dire for those whose identities make them vulnerable to the threat of never belonging. This has certainly been the case for Asian Americans, whose experience with racism in the United States has often times occurred through being painted as the perpetual foreigner, the yellow peril or brown terror, with unbreakable ties to a land of origin or ancestry.
But those who tell us to “go home” are no match for those of us who can write back in the very language used against us. The beauty of a home in language is that it allows us to create a multiplicity of homes. The writers in this anthology talk about home as being found in family, history, food, love, place, body, memory, song, and religion. They describe homes filled with all kinds of emotions, from love to hate and everything in between. Their homes are places of comfort and discomfort, of belonging and alienation, of the beginning of life and its end. But if homes are not always idyllic and are often conflicted, and if in some cases it is impossible to go home because home no longer exists or is not a place one wishes to return to, then living with a degree of homelessness might be a necessity. There can be a danger in being too much at home, too secure, especially for writers. Feeling uncomfortable at times—feeling not at home—keeps us alert, empathetic, aware of how so many others are not at home or not allowed to feel at home.
Reading this collection, I visited all of these writers’ homes and experienced their homelessness filtered through their stories and poems. All of their works were gifts to me, and I thought about how homes can be gifts too. While some gifts are given with the hope of receiving something in return, eventually, other gifts are given without any expectation of reciprocity. Stories exist along that spectrum as well. Sometimes writers write and hope for fame or fortune. Sometimes people create homes and expect to reap a return from those they house, a payment in love or at least obligation. But the best gifts, in my mind, are those that we give selflessly. As a writer, I aspire to be that kind of gift giver, hoping that my stories will affect readers I will never know and never hear from, just as I was affected by writers who never knew their words were a gift to me. As the recipient of generosity, I hope to give generously in turn, as I believe many of the writers in this collection are likewise giving of their words and stories.
As for my first home, I think of how my parents gave me so much and how I did not appreciate their gifts in my youth. If I had, would I have stayed home? If I had stayed home, would I have become a writer? Perhaps not. Probably not. And if so, then it was for the best that I left. In my case, as may be the case for many others, I had to leave home in order to go home. This was a figurative return, for I u
nderstood, over time, that the home they provided for me was not literally just a house. Their home was the act of giving itself, which is also to say the act of love. Going home, in my case, was then a matter of learning how not just to receive but to give, certainly to my own family but also to those who may be my readers.
Perhaps the writers in this collection also had to leave home in order to go home. Read them. Their gifts will show you the many shapes home can take, as well as the many ways we can leave and, maybe, return.
Release
Alexander Chee
In the fall of 1996, I moved into a sublet, a room in an apartment in the West Village of New York, at the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh. The apartment belonged to someone I’d met through a friend. The rent was very cheap, and I had always wanted to live in the West Village. I had my eye on West Eleventh Street, and this was close.
The apartment was essentially a narrow hallway, and my room was a small room a little bigger than my bed. There was a bathroom, a kitchen, and his room, which was also the living room, and it had a door I couldn’t go beyond if it was closed, as it meant my roommate was working, which is to say, giving a man a massage with the understanding that at the end he’d get release.
“Release?” I asked, when he first said it.
“A hand job,” he answered. I nodded and then he nodded too, and laughed.
Release always struck me as a strangely hygienic term for it. I imagined men supplicant on the long table, afraid they might not be allowed out of whatever the prison was of their lives. Leaping into the air afterward, maybe even capable of flight.
My roommate was tall, handsome, a former model, Amerasian like me—Dutch and Japanese—and he had a beautiful sleeve tattoo on his arm of a Japanese dragon, like a character out of a comic book. He was like a taller, prettier version of me, the older cousin I’d never had, the spitting image of Crying Freeman, from the manga of the same name about a Japanese assassin for the Chinese mafia—and while I think I mentioned the comics, I don’t remember. I do remember how sometimes I had the uncanny feeling of having entered the comic, as if I’d loved it so much it had come true. Especially when he strode across his room, shirtless, the beautiful tattoo glowing on his pale skin.