Sometimes I wonder how it is that I got here
from a far-flung there. I used to be a different kind of girl: I
growled, scratched, ducked my head when I spoke, balled fist always in
air. Somewhere along the way I've developed some skills I didn't have
before -- patience, and a loud clear voice that carries to the backs of
lecture halls. I explain poststructuralist feminist theory with (I hope)
flare. I'm making an effort here, translating tough girl into
academia.
And then I find myself driving around
the City, blasting the Blatz/Filth split cassette in my car in a
continuous loop, twenty-something mid-term papers on the seat beside me,
all of them outlining the trajectory of Asian American cinema to by-now
monotonous effect. The "check engine" light blinks at me from behind the
wheel and I'm shouting loud and off-key, my words lost out the window,
in the wind: "Berkeley is my baby and I want to kill
it!"
I feel volatile. I want to take a saw to my
furniture and a knife to gut the mattress and shred my clothes like
flags. Ransack the room, I'd like to throw all my books out the window.
There's a dumpster conveniently located below my third-story apartment.
Only a removable screen between orderly shelf and big metal dustbin, why
not?
Are the months of March and April known for
violence? Is it a season for storms, for fierce upheavals?
How did I get here again? On the tail of a
tornado, or was it a war?
::
Karina and I have been swapping tales from our
respective exile communities -- hers, concentrated in Miami and
mine, scattered throughout California. (We are distanced from these,
ideologically.) She says Elian's relatives are crazy; the twenty-two
year-old cousin is prone to hysteria and the uncle--? Driving while
under the influence of alcohol. Even her mother, who is no fan of
Castro, believes the boy should go home with his father. Her mother
says, "Why knows what kind of people the relatives are?" We discuss the
videotape, released by the relatives and which looks like a hostage
video, psychological abuse, the mayor of Miami, the crowds in front of
the relatives' home, struck with ecstatic visions and ideological
fervor, swearing to die for the cause.
And I remember something Karina once said to
me, grinning, "I was taught in pre-school that Castro loves all the
little children. When I saw the grown-ups complain, I figured it was
just adults he didn. t like and no wonder, I didn't like them
either!"
I tell her I am going to a gallery
opening; an American Vietnam veteran and artist has created forty
lithograph portraits of Ho Chi Minh in an effort to reconsider Ho both
as political icon and political revolutionary. The anticommunist
Vietnamese community in San Jose and Westminster (Little Saigon) have
promised to protest. I show her year-old printouts from a Vietnamese
American on-line messageboard, when the controversy centered around a
Little Saigon video store owner who had erected a Vietnamese flag (the
red one, with the star) alongside a poster of Ho Chi Minh. The threats
and the insults are vicious; they mouth slogans I first heard when
protesting the Gulf War: Love it or leave it! Because of racism and
poverty, I find their professed patriotism . real or strategic. for
America jarring.
Karina says to me, "It's like looking into a
mirror."
"My people," I say wryly, "and yours should
get together."
Although we are also refugees, my parents are
not inclined to the same fire; I was not raised with the bitterness of
lost homelands curdling my tongue. They don't object when I tell them
where I'm going; instead, they're merely curious, and a little worried.
My practical father suggested I park the car a
few blocks away from the scene of the protest, saying, "You don't want
them to know what car you're driving, you don't want to have to replace
your windows." And my mother gave me the same thoughtful advice she did
when I first told her I was doing clinic defense, "Wear good tennis
shoes, so you can run if they come after you."
It is dizzying, disorienting. (I find out
later that there are two thousand protesters here.) Mark and I arrive in
the warehouse-business district of Oakland where the gallery is located,
driving past crowds and clusters of Vietnamese holding small, paper
South Vietnamese and American flags and cardboard signs. We park and
approach the block where, it seems, the gauntlet begins: the police have
erected barricades behind which most of the protesters are arrayed. The
rest wander across the road, with bullhorns, in anticipation of
what--?
There is a yellow van painted with three
horizontal red stripes. I think a dummy is strapped to the grill --
it's too dark to be sure-- and there are hundreds of men in their old
South Vietnamese military uniforms staring at the small group of
gallery-goers congregating by the police car. Collectively, we all agree
to make a run for it -- the gallery is at the other end of the block. As
soon we start half-walking, half-jogging, the cacophony surges like a
wave, or a storm.
I wonder if they will recognize me as
Vietnamese, and get especially vicious.
I hold my breath and plow through the crowd
behind a bald white man in a leather jacket, Mark's flash glaring in
continuous bursts as young men behind the barricades call out, "Take my
picture! Hey, over here!" Is it a protest or a football game?
I look into faces and look away, elderly
grandmothers spitting vitriol: "Are you a VC whore?" "Kill communists!"
"You belong in the toilet with Ho!" Their mouths open and shut and open,
shouting epithets endlessly, the way fish breathe in water. Because it
is dark, their features drift in and out of focus, lit-up ghostly and
contorted. (I'm starting to panic.) Shock registers when I pass a large
placard with a grim, goblin-like caricature of Ho Chi Minh labeled "GOOK
HO," and I wonder briefly if Presidential candidate John McCain taught
them the racial slur; I see it repeated once or twice more on homemade
signs, printed posters.
A middle-aged man --he is about
fifty, or sixty even-- in a yellow sweatshirt banded by three red
stripes drags an effigy of Ho Chi Minh by a noose, yelling. In the other
hand he carries a long, thin stick. He runs alongside our small,
beleaguered group and makes eye contact with me before he begins to beat
the mannequin with deliberate strokes, and I understand what he is
saying: You deserve this too.
Later, my mother says she doesn't want me to
write anything about the protests, either for publication or my
dissertation, but not because she necessarily disagrees with me. My
mother is afraid I. ll turn up dead, murdered by the anticommunists,
which was an often-enough occurrence in the 1980s.
She says to me, "Don't write anything that
will make them mad." I say, "How can I not?"
::
I thought I'd purge, like I do every year or
two, and had Mark remove precariously-balanced boxes from the uppermost
shelves of the closet. I hoard things. Newspaper clippings, flyers,
whatever. I revisit former selves I no longer recognize, except this
one, and sometimes I miss her because she amazes me. Once violence
described my everyday and I wonder how I ever made it out, sane.
It's true: at one point in my life
I was surrounded by convicted clinic bombers, stalkers and
potential assassins on a weekly basis. It was a game only not so much, calling
out names and transgressions loudly, brashly, "Look, it's Cheryl!
Remember? She's the one who was convicted of bombing a bunch of clinics in
San Diego!" Matt Trewhella-- founder of the anti-abortion terrorist
group Missionaries to the Pre-Born-- once admonished a Midwestern
Christmas congregation, recommended good Christian parents buy their children
SKS rifles and 500 rounds of ammo. One of the Missionaries working
with Operation Rescue California is an "ex-"Nazi, Brian Kemper, the "777"
of a South African white supremacist organization tattooed on his
thick arm. He punched a woman once, entering a clinic, and participated
in "minutemen" attacks -- bodily rushing clinics and tearing apart
furniture, equipment, files, whatever, in a frenzy of righteousness and
just as quickly, escaping in getaway cars idling on the sidewalks
outside. He organizes Christian hardcore and ska shows in Orange County,
makes appearances on Politically Incorrect , once even
performed his spoken word at Lollapalooza. In some generic lifestyle
magazine --Swing, I think--
a recent profile on Christian punks featured him prominently and nowhere
mentioned his racist past, or his many convictions for violent
harassment.
It was endless. Stone-faced children
chanted in their high-pitched, munchkin voices, you're going to
hell. Their parents promised this. We received death
threats on our answering machine, we were warned to be careful, to stay
away, we were being followed. The disembodied voices were inevitably
male, masculine, disguised; they would identify themselves only as
friends of the fetus and then, in a furious verbal rush, suggest we
stick our heads up our pussies. (I wonder, how did it make them feel to
say such forbidden things?) In Redding they etched the names of clinic
workers on flat-metal bullets before dropping them on clinic doorsteps,
threatening. Godly men pointed their index fingers, squinting along the
length of their thumbs, and mimicked the kick-back gesture of a gun
being fired.
We would come together for birthday potlucks,
go out for beers after work, but the persona of activist became an
embodied one, a second skin. While steaming vegetables or playing cards,
we would watch the news; at the bar we discussed fundraising. It became
woven into the daily fabric of our coming and going. (It was as natural
to me as the impatient gesture I brush my hair back with or the way I
sometimes cover my mouth when I talk, filtering my words between my
fingers.) And when it got to be too much we asked ourselves, quietly,
"How much more? Is there a limit to our ability to endure?"
And once, in a strange airport, I
picked up a TIME magazine, bored, and faltered upon an
investigative account on the anti-abortion movement. It was no different
than any other piece of mainstream coverage, full of shoddy background
checks and partial histories, but there, in that airport lounge, I
became anxious. Wretched, alone, suddenly burdened with a terrible,
secret knowledge. I knew who was capable of killing, or capable of
convincing others to kill, but who could I tell? Who would understand
me? It was an alien language, it would seem as if I were speaking in
tongue, hysterical. I looked up at the passive faces standing in line
behind me to buy their cheap romance novels and Wall Street
Journals and was amazed that this
panic of mine could pass among them so quietly. I was so used to other
bodies. I felt like crying.
::
I am always restless these days, not sure what
I'm looking for. I prowl the apartment until Melanie calls, invites me
over for dinner.
She puts me to work chopping apples and
roasted red bell peppers while she sends Sean forth in search of
oil-soaked olives, which he finds hidden on a store shelf, covered in a
thin layer of dust. It is a full house tonight; Lance, Tom, and Jeff
wander in and out while Arwen fills out survey forms for a nicotine
addiction clinic, a fat packet of multiple-choice questions and
scan-tron evaluations of her moods. ("Do you feel like you need a
cigarette right now? What cigarette will be hardest for you to give up?
The one you have in the morning? After meals? During stressful
situations? Do you feel as if your friends and family are supportive?")
Melanie buzzes around the kitchen, cooking pasta in three inadequate
pots and despairing of the household. s one metal fork. (We are so
punk.) Multiple conversations shifted around the room --about zines,
about advertising, about punk rock, about politics-- and we dish gossip
and theories about record collectors and creeps along with the
food.
We eat with plastic utensils culled from
neighborhood restaurants, which are carefully washed afterward, and play
a speed-game of Trivial Pursuit. We are ashamed of Sean when he misses
the Anne Frank question, and awed by Arwen's supernatural ability to
draw every possible question about fish and sea creatures. We decide to
cheat on Sports & Leisure since no one could really expect a bunch
of punks, geeks and art students to know who was MVP of the NBA in
1984.
"Who knows that stuff?" We grumble. "Let's
make it a wild card category."
Later, squatting against the wall in
the BART station, I read Tourism and Sustainability: New Tourism in
the Third World, pop candy hearts in my mouth and wait
for the 10:55 train. Two police officers are standing only a few feet
away; they discuss my hair --bleached and dyed pink in stripes-- as if I
can't hear.
As I top the stairs coming out of the station
I notice a hand-scrawled sign hanging in the attendant's glass booth:
"NO VALIDATION TODAY." Feeling whimsical, I picture the booth as a
one-stop therapy shop on days when validation might normally be offered.
The neatly outfitted attendant listening patiently through the speaker,
reaching out to touch the glass with a kind murmur, "I hear and
understand your pain, and want you to know that your feelings are
completely valid. You should do whatever you have to, in order to
fulfill your needs. The Fremont train arrives in five."
Later still, walking the three blocks home
through quiet residential streets, I pass a darkened house. A front
porch window is lined with gold tin foil and a giant red crepe-paper
heart hangs suspended among white Christmas lights. I stand transfixed
on the sidewalk across the street: it seems as if the house, all black
and angular against the night sky, has been cut open to reveal its warm,
carnival interior, the bright gay heart of a home.
::
The knots in my shoulders turned to stone, I
need something drastic to force me past this crisis, this lack of
output. Turn over new leaves, throw open doors to china shops, take the
pins out from the doll. I'm in a rut, bored, restless. Too much
substance and not enough style, maybe. Where did my glitter go? No,
never mind, give me my old black jeans, shiny with dirt and grease and
ass-patched, I want to tie a black ribbon around my hair and commit
small vandalisms, like I used to.
I want to clip photographs of technicolor
foods, things like cling peaches and blood-red meatloaf, garish
groceries found in the old LIFE magazines I've been buying at flea
markets and estate stores. (My hands turn black from the dust and dirt.)
I will make flashcards and caption each with non-sequiteur slogans from
long-dead revolutionaries, like, "No more tyrants!" or maybe, "Rent is
theft!" I want to discover the secrets of gelatin molds and that old
adage, "If you can bake a cake, you can make a bomb."
I find that I can't write anymore;
after pounding out ten pages of lecture notes a week, I feel like my
quota's been wasted on reiterating what I already know. (How many
different ways can I outline Derrida and differance? How do
I explain Lacan, the mirror-stage, and the formation of the fragmented
ego to bored, boring seniors?) It's not that I don't care about these
things anymore, but I feel there must be a better way to teach critical
theory to eighteen year-olds. Subliminally, maybe -- I could
broadcast lectures along the emptied streets at three a.m., pitched at a
register where I might trespass their dreams, scrawl Foucault or Spivak
like graffiti, all intimate-like.
And maybe all I want to do is this: discover
the secrets to spontaneous combustion, catch up on my conspiracy
theories and listen to Dutch punk rock with my eyes closed,
dreaming.
::
Make is an amazing political
zine out of Los Angeles. Craig and Jane want you to know that, "Make
is about the dialogues between friends that constitute the backbone
of our politics. Make is about finding ways to communicate radical,
critical thinking that don. t cost twenty bucks at a bookstore.
Make is about ordinary activism: what we see and say, what we do.
Make is about making up, making believe, making out, and making war." I
want to be a soldier in the Make revolution! Get yourself a copy now for a
mere dollar from Craig Willse at 1227 N. Genesee Ave. #3 / W. Hollywood,
CA 90046.
Originally I was going to write my column
about a controversy: the "womyn-born-womyn only" policy at the Michigan
Women's Music Festival that excludes transwomen from entering the
grounds. Some defenders of the policy claim that the women's festival is
a "gender thing," and not a queer event. It's an odd and illogical
distinction to make, one that not only denies the lack of a universal
"women's experience," but rejects transwomen's claims to non-traditional
gender identifications as what--? Illegitimate? Supporters of the policy
have also suggested that some women might not feel comfortable around
transwomen and that the "safe space" must be preserved, but this ignores
how women do not experience their gender the same -- differences of
race and class, for instance, can't be dismissed. But as black lesbian
feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon said way back in 1981 about another
women. s festival and the need not for "home" but for coalition
politics: "Watch those mono-issue people. They aren't gonna do you no
good. I don't care who they are. And there are people who prioritize the
cutting line of the struggle. And they say the cutting line is this
issue, and more than anything we must move on this issue and that's
automatically saying that whatever's bothering you will be put down if
you bring it up. You have to watch these folks." My whole-hearted
support goes out to the transwomen and their allies protesting MWMF. I
hope they fuck shit up, and I'll be writing a column about this in the
future.
Don't be mad if you see the snippet about the
Ho Chi Minh protests repeated; it's part of a longer article I'm
writing.
I listened to a lot of Astrid Otto while
writing this.
As always, get in touch if you're so inclined.
Mimi Nguyen / PO Box 11906 / Berkeley, CA 94712-2906 /
slander13@mindspring.com.