nonfiction

Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief by Victoria Chang

Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief by Victoria Chang (Milkweed Editions, 2021)

★★★☆☆

A collection of letters/poems exploring grief, intergenerational trauma, writing, and identity, from the perspective of a Chinese-American daughter and parent.

In some ways, being born Chinese in America means not being born at all.

I felt a profound connection to the subject matter of this collection. Chang writes of her mother’s death and her father’s dementia; between her epistles, she collages her mother’s narrative of escaping Communist China against family photos and documents. Some of my own lines of inquiry have mirrored Chang’s: How did my dad’s family escape the Cultural Revolution? Who are these people whose graves I am visiting but have never met? I’ve found artifacts of my mother’s and grandmother’s lives after their deaths—certificates and passports, journals I can’t read—and my other grandmother lost her mind to Alzheimer’s. I’m affected by the peculiar forms of grief experienced by privileged children of Chinese immigrants, many of which Chang explores here.

Lucky people are supposed to live in the future. (…) The problem is that the space between how you really feel and luck is always shame.

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Editor), Ejeris Dixon (Editor) (AK Press, 2020)

★★★☆☆

Collection of articles/essays/interviews covering the history, theory, politic, and praxis of transformative justice, sometimes positioned as a community-based “alternative”* to prisons and policing.

*Note that contributor and abolitionist Mariame Kaba explicitly denounces this positioning and the binary it implies, calling transformative justice “an ideology, a framework, a political vision, a practice […] to shift and transform our relationships to allow us to build the conditions under which we will no longer need prisons and surveillance and policing” but positing that an institutional “alternative” to the prison-industrial complex, itself an institution of oppression conflating different harms, is impossible, and a trap of thinking.

This is a bit of a hard one to rate because on the one hand, it is undoubtedly an important and pioneering collection, but on the other, it is disjointed in a way that made it difficult for me, a person who is already interested in transformative justice (TJ), to derive learning from. It almost felt like it should have been two (or more) books. Some of this is reflected in the subtitle, “Strategies and Stories.” There has been an editorial decision in this book to position accounts of TJ in practice (successful and otherwise) alongside reflections on the movement’s history and struggles. While I think both are necessary, I didn’t find myself able to take away much from either with the way they were presented here.

I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World

I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World by Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019)

★★★★★

A collection of essays about fracture, harm, and healing in queer and trans community.

I bumped this title up on my list after coming across the author’s thoughtful article about disposability culture in Everyday Feminism, and I’m glad I did, because I needed this. Thom’s writing style is warm and accessible, inviting the reader in even as Thom shares about incredibly vulnerable experiences. I teared up within the first few pages, where she describes a set of terrifying crises she experienced at twenty-five, then goes on to say:

All around me, the people I loved were also in crisis—psychological, financial, medical, interpersonal. When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, and activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier. Among trans women, a life expectancy of thirty-five is the norm.

I lost my faith in community. I lost hope—in social justice, in revolution, in the world.

At time of reading, I was coming off the tail end of my own crisis: I had recently joined a collective of leftist housing activists, and had been through a set of exhausting experiences where I’d learned that—even in as radical a community as this—deep hurts still happen, and healing can seem impossibly far away. Hearing my experience reflected in Thom’s words touched me deeply.

In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press, 2019)

★★★★☆

(content warning: emotional abuse, sexual assault, rape)

A memoir of an abusive queer relationship, told through a collection of short chapters, each presenting the author’s experience through a particular narrative trope.

Harm and abuse have been top of mind for me lately—ever since the #MeToo movement gained momentum, ever since one of my favorite comic book authors was exposed as a serial predator, ever since I learned that someone I was close to committed intimate partner violence and attempted rape.

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018)

★★★★★

A collection of essays about disability justice—a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people—by a queer, disabled femme of color and abuse survivor.

Well, this woke me the fuck up. I think the easiest way for me to talk about this book is to relay a conversation that I had with my friend L., and the thoughts that were going through my head—informed by my reading—as we chatted.

March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell

March: Book One (March #1) by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (Top Shelf Productions, 2013)

★★★☆☆

The first volume of a graphic-history trilogy adapting the autobiography of John Lewis, covering his childhood in rural Alabama and early nonviolent actions during the 1960 Nashville lunch counter sit-ins.

I certainly found the graphic novel format more accessible and intimate than a typical history lesson, and the struggles depicted herein to be worthwhile and important subject matter. Though I’m not sure I connected to this volume to the degree that I did, say, A Brief History of Seven Killings, I think that’s less the fault of the work than my relationship with nonfiction. Ultimately, I’m glad this testimonial exists—and ashamed it took Congressperson Lewis’s passing to get me to read it—and plan to reserve full judgment until after I’ve read the remaining volumes.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World, 2020)

★★★★★

I started listening to this audiobook on May 28, as thousands across the country were marching in protest against the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black lives. I soon felt deeply grateful to be reading work by another person of color that both spoke directly and incisively about white supremacist capitalism and called for Asian Americans to reckon with anti-Blackness in their communities. I also felt incensed at the experiences Hong describes, drawing from her own life and others’ (like David Dao Duy Anh, the Vietnamese American passenger on United Flight 3411 who was brutalized at the hands of aviation security officers), of anti-Asian-American racism, internalized shame/humiliation, and collective trauma. Coupled with everything else going on in the world, I could rarely listen to Minor Feelings for more than an hour at a time.

Still, I was moved by Hong’s scathingly honest assessments of herself, as well as her often profound observations and commentary. What most sticks with me is an anecdote she shares about (finally, for once in her life) standing up to a man who makes a racist remark to her on the subway:

I wended my way past everyone in the crowded car until I stood over him. I quietly told him off. I not only called him a racist but I also hissed that he was setting a horrible example for his baby. When I returned to my friends, my head throbbing, I looked back and saw that he had stood up and was walking toward us. As he approached us, he pointed to my roommate’s boyfriend and threatened, “He’s lucky that he’s not your boyfriend, because if he was your boyfriend, I’d beat the shit out of him.” Then he walked back and sat down. I was stunned and relieved that it didn’t end in violence or more racial slurs. My roommate’s boyfriend kept saying, “I wish I said something.” Then it was our stop. As we were getting off, the guy shouted at me across the crowded car, “Fucking chink!”

“White trash motherfucker!” I yelled back. 

When we were on the platform, my friend, who had failed to say much during the train ride, burst into tears. 

“That’s never happened to me before,” she wailed. 

And just like that, I was shoved aside. I was about to comfort her and then I stopped myself from the absurdity of that impulse. All of my anger and hurt transferred to her, and even now, as I’m writing this, I’m more upset with her than that guy. We walked silently back to our apartment while she cried.

In that single story I recognize every impulse I’ve ever had to make my feelings “comfortable” for a white person, and I recognize, too, the absurdity of it.

This is the sort of collection that I want to buy, re-read, and highlight passages in. For that reason, I don’t necessarily recommend the audiobook; plus, while I enjoyed hearing Hong read her own work and the poetic cadences she brought to many of her own lines, some of her diction choices jarred me. But I grant Hong would argue that, as in her poetry, “To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.”

I can’t remember where I saw it, but an idea that’s stuck with me lately is that white-supremacist-capitalist education won’t give you the tools to dismantle it. (Some Twitter user speaking after Lorde, maybe?) I’ve completed a liberal-arts university education in the United States, but it’s on me—and anyone else like me—to seek out writers like Hong, Lorde, and other activists of marginalized identities to continue educating ourselves about how to dismantle systems of oppression. I’ve been especially grateful for the resources compiled by “BK” on Medium and Kearny Street Workshop, targeted as they are toward East Asians like myself with an eye to how we can meaningfully show up in solidarity with and for the Black community.

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang (Graywolf Press, 2019)

★★★★☆

A fascinating collection of essays charting Wang’s experiences of “the schizophrenias,” illuminating how our institutions both (in theory) care for and (in practice) harm those living with this family of mental disorders.

Well-researched and -written. Wang writes lucidly and analytically about trauma, confusion, and terror. She questions the viability of her ever becoming well, the ethics of what it means to try and medicate an individual toward a hypothetical “person under the disorder” who might not exist. Her essays show the complexity of living with mental illness in American society, and mix awareness and shame, love and loathing, disappointment and hope, beautifully.