New Romantix

I, along with many, watched Dave Chappelle’s comedy specials “Equanimity & The Bird Revolution” the first moment I could on New Year’s Eve. Chappelle had already lightly tarred his reputation as a good lefty in the last Netflix specials for making transphobic jokes and praising Bill Cosby for his comedic legacy. He did not fail to disappoint in this series, as he criticized American liberalism with American liberalism—stating that the progress of the BGLTQ movement can be in some ways attributable to white privilege, that #metoo focused too dangerously on accusation to avoid backlash, and that Presdient Donald Trump may be good for America as a catalyst of political engagement. He then encouraged comedians to “speak recklessly,” which seemed like two interesting words to place in the book of great Democratic quotes if such a book exists.

In those two hours, Chappelle seemed to symbolize the figure that liberal Americans neither wanted nor needed but certainly lacked—a careless loyalist, who convinced few besides himself of his loyalty to progressivism. His sin: He seemed to understand too well liberalism’s contradictions.Unsurprisingly, liberals on college campuses, especially elite ones like Harvard, live in liberal bubbles. We are held to the same triggers. Our complicated codes of pleasantries work so that in a polarized political landscape, we can miraculously communicate with facades of diversity without encountering an opinion that truly upsets us. This common experience describes an inevitable liberal utopia occurring when its constituents are too immature to be bitter, too comfortable to be ungenerous, and too invested in their perceived greatness to be jealous.

Our classifications of ourselves fall along equally simplistic lines. Liberals support universal healthcare, minimum wages, and anti-racism. Liberal politics seemed to be motivated by a motto driven by stated values of empathy, moral elasticity, and fairness: to do the least harm to those most vulnerable in society. Liberal culture, such as political correctness and trigger warnings, seemed a natural extension of this philosophy. It surrounded an analogous call—to protect socially those most vulnerable through the strict guarding of language.

But this call seems to break down repeatedly in the very effort to apply it—especially in an era of polarization such as ours, where media outlets profit from our anger, the spread of news is virulent, and the capital bar of exposure to other people’s informed or uninformed opinions has never been lower. The reason seems to be an intolerance for negativity, though we are surrounded by political negativity in our daily lives through presidential ignorance, quotidian chauvinism, and angrier extremes. This intolerance does not allow us to treat others with the empathy they deserve as our countrymen. But furthermore, it lends itself to our own division.

Technology never had a bad rap. Technology was Marx’s revolutionary weapon of choice, Keynes’s liberation from labor, and Solow’s panacea to national growth. As a Generation Z-er, I understood technology as dogma—to be against technology was to be against the world as we left it, knew it, and foresaw it. Technology equated itself to innovation, which in a simple narrative arc implied progress. Progress meant longer lives, more access to information, and greater freedoms of association. We watched documentaries on the Human Genome Project while scoffing at apocalyptic representations of its Gattaca-style implications; we embraced big data as new armor to confront the black box of our world. We fake-read Terms of Agreements, privacy settings, delineations of risk, because progress also meant rapidity. Social media sites flew in and out of style. Phones became large, then small, then large again. Scientists even claimed that technology reshaped our brains, which reshaped technology in a continuous feedback loop. As students, we bought into this vision of technological fortitude excessively—counselors, parents, and peers told us to major in technology-related fields precisely because we had no clue where technology would be by the time we graduated.

The previous statements seem outdated, and indeed, 2018 is a decidedly morally ambiguous year for technology. I would posit that before Cambridge Analytica’s perpetual newsfeed coverage, before Mark Zuckerberg stated that Facebook committed a “major breach of trust,” and before Steven K. Bannon attempted to make Crocs cool (metaphorically), the setting for such fear was placed prettily. Years ago, Ellen Pao destroyed the perception of Silicon Valley as an innocuous tech geek haven in her widely publicized workplace sexual harassment case. Last year, credit reporting firm Equifax reported a data leak involving sensitive financial information of 145.5 million Americans; two weeks ago, Saks and Lord & Taylor was hacked, leaking card information of customers.

Here, magnitude is the distinguishing factor. 8.2 million people watched the first season of Netflix series “Stranger Things” about a chemistry lab that kidnapped, trafficked, and abused children with psychokinetic powers; “Black Mirror,” an Emmy-winning show examining the unintentional consequences of new technology such as rating systems and streaming sites, premiered its fourth season during Christmas break. In January, the possibility of a cryptocurrency boom placed the potential for a decentralized and unregulated monetary system, and thus a destabilized social response, on the table. Though many did not discuss cryptocurrency in everyday conversation outside of its get-rich-quick potential, advocates gushed on about the circulation’s existence outside of legislation.

I. A rose is a rose is a rose.

My issue with The New York Times’s “Modern Love” segment is that too many stories either don’t qualify as modern or don’t qualify as love. Modern stories present love as partially formed, never finished, and awkwardly hinted at. Love stories deal with old topics like illness, loss, and sex. Which, perhaps, is the point.

I also say nothing new by calling Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince a love story, but when I first read it at sixteen I felt cut. On the drive back home after taking the SAT, I told my dad about this chapter that stayed in my head like a pop song. A little prince of a little planet loved a little rose, I said. The little rose was angry at the little prince because he loved her so much he smothered her. She told him to leave, and when he left, he entered a rose garden. Each rose was identical to his little rose. His little rose was common, but he’d been too kind to know before. So the little prince cried because his little rose didn’t know either. I told my dad that sometimes I felt like both the rose and the prince, and he laughed, easy as the day. He told me I didn’t have to worry about it if I didn’t want to, and I said sure. Then we turned on the radio and parked in my garage.

In one sentence, clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson is a rising “media darling” who hates identity politics. According to New York Times columnist David Brooks, economist Tyler Cowen believes Peterson is “the most influential public intellectual in the modern world right now.” Peterson originally gained traction by publicly speaking against a Canadian law requiring the usage of preferred gender pronouns. He claims that current campus climates function on group identification, and that student insistence on intersectionality yields a logical conclusion of individualism, which contradicts the initial group assumption. Peterson also states that identity politics’ primary factors of distinction, race and gender, are arbitrary. The chapters of his book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”—with seemingly apolitical titles such as “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”—alludes to a popular criticism that social proselytization arises too often from the unequipped and naïve.

This attack on identity politics—insistence that such frameworks are too indistinct, emotional, arbitrary, reductive, and divisive while being directed by people who are too young—drives current disillusionment with, criticism of, and mockery about the left. But this attack is a mischaracterization. Identity politics has undeniably stirred up political conversation by inundating it with intentional subjectivity, collective perspective, and bias identifications that Peterson himself describes as “post-modern.” The issue, however, is not that these additions are untrue or even invalid. It is that the inclusion of identity in political conversation provides more information than Peterson’s regressive individual-based framework can handle.

To philosophize about redistributive justice is a college student’s rite of passage into academic delirium. This practice is corroborated by literature that veers toward verbosity (John Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice”), proselytization (Mark Greif’s “Gut Level Legislation, or, Redistribution”), and anecdotes (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations”) created by philosophers, journalists, and essayists alike. Though devoid of most practical assessment, the question encompasses an important subject: What reward should we receive for the act of living? For this question, we must think globally.

This argument for redistributive justice is difficult because our economic language places itself around collective growth, not morality. Growth is a meaningful goal, serving as the drawing factor of capitalism. Challenges to growth are deemed inefficiencies. This framework, of course, does not allow political identities to rest on level ground. Liberals stand in an awkward position of arguing precisely the way our world in its current position reeks of inefficiency. In liberal-generated economics, hiring discrimination limits the free sorting that the labor market’s autonomy necessitates; immigration bans actively create bureaucratic stress and interrupt flow of labor in the economy. As America’s economic and social foundations rest on capitalism and democracy respectively, both working ideally to maximize freedom, the two ideologies are inextricably connected in an American mind. Insistence on redistribution—by any means and of any object—is antithetical to the capitalist position that our own choices are sustainable. Its implication of regulation reject the democratic lemma that our individualism is socially beneficial.

Thomas Piketty in his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” challenges the ideological harmony between capitalism and democracy specific to American thought. There are few academic books of such casual placement in personal libraries, indie bookstores, and millennial conversation. Its popularity rests in its presentation of a palatable case for redistribution. The thesis is simple—our investment structures force returns on capital to greatly exceed economic growth, thus privileging elites. This entrenchment results in the inevitable formation of an oligarchy whose rigidity displeases Americans not yet disillusioned with the concept of mobility as a possibility. The mechanism of oligarchy to political unrest is that extreme stability lends itself to instability. What Piketty describes as the driving force for such transition may be a corollary to a rudimentary art history axiom: A genre’s self-consciousness is its demise.

Modern China is to the American right what modern France is to American left—a fantasy. The love is gilded in the politically-correct hatred, fear, and targeting of China, as Stephen K. Bannon characterized the country in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” as “the real enemy,” its people as “the most rational people in the world, until they’re not,” and its government as having “taken total advantage of [the United States].” And I say this appearance is love because rhetoric on China is by nature defeatist—China seems both too old and too big to fail. To target China, as Bannon does, is to target nothing, as the country counters all expectations, holding an economy that thrives inexplicably on investment over innovation—a model of growth Trump would wish was applicable to the United States. There is no wall to build. China is where the second Eiffel tower resides without consent of the original. An ethnostate so insular Google has its own knockoff. The home of a president and a billion countrymen who embrace traditionalism as a brother. While Bannon wanted to evolve former President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” to cultural, trade, and diplomatic war, Trump recently announced tariffs on Chinese solar panels, predicted to significantly increase the cost of going green. American liberals mourn the loss of our country; news outlets tentatively crown China as our inevitable successor. We seem unable to hurt China without hurting ourselves.

But, as reflected in most intersections of policy and culture, an awkward dichotomy exists: Despite political friction, the connection between China and the American right has never been more public. China grows as the United States halts, representing both threat and opportunity for escapism. The New York Times published a widely-cited op-ed entitled “The Alt-Right’s Asian Fetish”, reconciling apparent contradiction between the racist ideology and Asian girlfriends of many major alt-right figures with an excessive buy-in to racial stereotypes, such as the model minority and exotification. In response to the NYT piece, other Asian-American writers stated that Lim’s analysis was incomplete, conveniently leaving out women’s agency. The truth, they argued, citing interviews with major alt-right figures including Vietnamese-American Tila Tequila, was more sinister—Asian countries represented the ethnostate and isolationism alt-righters desired for America. Its women were seen as products of seeming utopias, which was, for the women, a relief from the left’s characterization as political novices. The Atlantic cited a forum user in an article entitled “Why China Loves Trump,” who stated that today’s Democratic Party reminded him of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese opinion exists outside the realm of American respectability, as Trumpism—in strange but convincing logics—is equated to communism and Trump’s billionaire status is seen as commonplace. All of which works to place Asian-Americans, of whom 79 percent voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, in an awkward position. The irony asserts itself here: Very few administrations have centered on anti-China rhetoric the way Trump’s has, and very few electorates have loved Asia so much.

As the American child of Chinese immigrants, I have never loved China. There was simply no incentive to do so. On a local level, China seemed “uncool.” I had never used, or wished to use, my Chineseness as a form of social capital. On a larger level, my parents stayed in America to leave China. I was too close to a large something to claim to know, let alone love, it. On an even larger level, America’s categorization of China was always grotesque, both too neoconservative and neoliberal, too communist and capitalist, too different and radically boring. American messaging about China was in contention. The results: inconclusive. Conversations on China veered too existentially because China challenged the myth of our exceptionalism through its exoticism, communism, and radicalism. The parents on TV watched TV, ate turkey, and did drugs with college friends; my parents survived the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I. Enemies of enemies are not friends.

What outsiders seem not to know about New Jersey’s apparent shift to Republicanism when former Governor Chris Christie was elected nine years ago was the amount of points he gained for not being his predecessor, Jon Corzine. Corzine was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs; Christie was a local lawyer. Corzine apparently tried to sell the Turnpike; Christie was trying to convince people that overweight was not equivalent to overindulgent. Corzine tried to increase the sales tax rate; Christie was into lowering property taxes. The apparent inevitability of a Christie election was palpable even to my seventh-grade self—as my government, biology, and English teachers implored us to convince our parents to vote for the third-party Chris Daggett—anybody but Christie, who was bound to cut our township’s funding by millions of dollars in favor of charter schools.

Christie was one of our high school’s alumni, and our town also had a school named after a Kushner. “How could you trust someone,” my middle school government teacher said, “willing to just turn on his own hometown like that?” Our middle school class went on long tangents about how we wanted control over our own government, doodled anti-Christie-Corzine drawings on our Converses, and complained day and night to our parents as our teachers did to us. When Christie decided to announce his run for presidency at our high school years later, I watched as teachers and students who despised him hold pro-Christie signs while rolling their eyes, and we laughed and laughed at the footage after Christie became Trump’s Gretchen.

Maybe I’m too young to reach the same conclusion Hilton Als did after viewing Moonlight for the first time and before beginning his essay in the New Yorker with the words, “Did I ever imagine, during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I’d live long enough...?” but I did. I skipped a formal on Monday and slipped on the T to Davis. Then I watched a movie entitled Gook. I was stunned when it finished because I, too, had never thought I’d ever see this film. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I had viewed Moonlight as an end because I could never imagine its yellow equivalent, a film based on “yellow beauty, precision, and rhythm.” Oh, but it’s no longer the end. It’s a beginning, and God, what a beginning we have.

Gook, like a fling, was shot in one summer. The lead actor/director/writer Justin Chon is the Asian kid from Twilight, and the other actor David So is every Asian kid’s favorite YouTube comedian. The premise is 1992 Los Angeles, the day of the Rodney King verdict, and the tragedy many Korean Americans call Sa-i-gu, which, to me, had always been the textbook story of multiracialism in the United States, the entry point of many young yellow Americans to our history if the railroad boys in Brinkley didn’t do it for you, since 1992 wasn’t that far away and 2200 Korean-owned shops were burned to the ground. In the film, two Korean American brothers Eli and Daniel own a women’s shoe shop, and often, an eleven-year-old black girl Camilla is seen helping out. The film circles a day but spans longer, as the viewer watches the city’s interethnic tensions, Rodney King trial, and shop-owner struggles as witnesses instead of consumers. The world, political moment, and generation the film touches are all important, yes. The actors are also important, because as YouTubers, they’d informed so many of my generation’s experiences, vernacular, and senses of Asian-ness. But mostly, it is a world in a yellow boy’s eyes, a world that our country very rarely has the privilege to enter through film, which is what stunned me.

Last week at the Kennedy School, I watched the new documentary LA92 detailing the riots in honor of their 25th anniversary, constructed completely of footage. Like many documentaries on the subject, it was gory and difficult and rough. It demonstrated black anger/grief, white ignorance/cruelty, and yellow fear/survivalism. In the documentary, a Korean woman spans her arms and legs against her shop window to (ineffectively) prevent looting, stating over and over again broken, “This is America,” while a Hispanic man tells her, not so nicely, to go back to her country. Korean radios played in the background while iconic shots of Asian/Korean store owners circling their rooftops with rifles flashed continuously on the screen. But I still felt the documentary, like every other source on the riots, never reached the Korean perspective’s interiority. It kept depicting our community as fearful, as broken, as unsympathetic, when it couldn’t have been that simple, because some of the guys circling the roof were, like me, American-born teenagers, and therefore, more fluent in the country’s racial politic. Furthermore, I trusted we were more complicated. As the only Asian American in the room during the screening, I felt compelled to comment on this frustration, so I did. The panelists offered some resources to consider while one stated that the documentary wasn’t going to do the unpacking for me. After the screening, a white girl in the audience went up to me and told me that there was this organization called Saigu (yes, two syllables) that was doing some good work and I should check it out, as if I wasn’t the Asian girl and she wasn’t the white girl in the situation. I nodded, waxed like she was enlightening, and got out. Maybe to me, eleven minutes, pictures, or mission statements didn’t constitute a story, let alone, an interiority. I’d expected too much of a documentary, to really have a voice. But in every telling of this story, even some as Asian-focused as Helen Zia’s, the Asian perspective is brushed off as uncomplicated and undeserving of screen time, consideration, or even answers.

In middle school, the summer before eighth grade, a pair of black kids, rumored fresh from Newark, moved to the purple house across the street, along with their cop mother, single uncle, and more. I didn’t talk to them, since I was under house arrest until I redeemed myself from failing summer school algebra II (no, it didn’t matter that I didn’t know algebra I yet, money was paid, mistakes were made, and our real estate agent’s son already knew calculus) but when July got too sticky, I’d watch them through the living room window. They played football on the street, while their uncle sat on the step smoking. When school started, they ripped the place up in a similar way. When an Asian playing Ninja took out his air gun and shot, one of them told him he was doing it wrong, showed him the right way, and said he knew because his mom was a cop. We got off at the same bus stop and walked on opposite sides of the streets. We didn’t talk, but we were friendly. They once chased down a dog my sister was running away from while I laughed in the corner. Then my family moved two blocks away and I never saw them again, except occasionally at school. There were so few black kids in my hometown that they stood as concepts formed by media, history books, and music, more than real people, especially to the Asian kids, who collectively ate, did calculus, debated Ravel vs. Debussy, and sucked up to biology teachers, separate from even the white kids.

During freshman year, I made my first black friend. She was my roommate, came from Queens, went to an all girl’s prep school on a scholarship, and spent all of first semester thinking I was way too artsy and ridiculous to befriend, since I was a self-proclaimed fiction writer and wore heels quotidian. I thought she was rude for not inviting me to her birthday party, but that was before we were inseparable. My town was so de facto I had never really imagined reaching the interiority of a non-Asian person. I spent a lot of high school reading about Brooklyn’s Red Apple Riots, Rodney King, anti-blackness in Asian circles, and anti-Asian hip-hop lyrics, which led me to believe that on a grand-scale, our racial groups did not get along. She knew the price tag on my boots, my parents’ jobs, and that I was bougie enough to know which Rachmaninoff symphony was my favorite. When she worked in the financial aid office over the summer, her co-workers were surprised when she said her best friend was this rich Asian girl. My Asian friends kept telling me to bring the black girl along more often because they thought she was funny.

Though the college often encourages, funds, and attempts “cross-cultural” connections through grants and rhetoric, genuine ones are rare. When last year, police officer Peter Liang murdered an unarmed black man Akai Gurley, the Asian American Association, Chinese Student Association, and Black Student Association banded together for a discussion at the Institute of Politics, but, by all accounts, the discussion was lackluster. The absence of connection was evident even in how we sat at the table, black students on one side, Asian students on the other. But that wasn’t a surprise. There was a black table in Annenberg, but there was an Asian table too. We knew our friendship was an anomaly, because in many ways, we were privileged enough to be anomalies. Having gone to a mostly-white prep school, she had already learned to explain without asking what some people felt did not need to be explained. She was used to extending sympathy to others more privileged than herself. I was lucky enough to come from a place where yellowness was more or less a norm. Unlike many, I was confident enough in my racial identity to be vocal.

Philanthrocapitalism is the new buzz word on campus. It makes sense, as when presented with the options of either getting rich or being a good person arise, it’s difficult not to answer, uh, both. After the term was coined in 2006 by The Economist as the effort to make philanthropy look more like for-profit capital markets, some rising stars in the field were Bill Gates, who made his own charitable foundation tackling problems with global health, as well as Mark Zuckerberg, who promised to donate 99% of his profits from Facebook to charity and who has already donated millions of dollars to the Newark public school system. They’re not old leaders conquering new regimes; they’re innovators reshaping how the public sector works, rectifying the inefficiencies that really plague how well-intentioned, but antiquated, social programs work. They are social investors, venture philanthropists, and good maximizers—the real superstars. Philanthrocapitalism is a fancy, novel, academic way for the bourgeoisie to be good too. And don’t we all have the right, the freedom, to be good, the way we want to be, regardless of what we want to do? I didn’t think so either.

The term “philanthrocapitalism,” like “intersectionality” and “phenomenology,” is an academized rebranding of a concept that was originally so basic to society there was no need for the term in the first place. When people first started accumulating currency in mountains during the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie, one of the first millionaires, stated, “I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.” Even the first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, donated to health initiatives, the education of African Americans, and the relief of chronic poverty in the South. The primary instinct of those with more money than they know what to do with is to give it to someone else. Therefore, the rebranding of such people today as the “social investors of philanthrocapitalism” is a complication that does not need to occur, since it is rooted in basic human nature to remedy excess with charity.

But I want to look past philanthrocapitalism’s unoriginality and to the paradoxes of its function. It works in two ways: first and simplest, the dumping of huge sums of money made from the private sector into a cause, and second, the using of capitalistic strategies to gain money for the public sector. What stands out as irreconcilable is that many of the incentives for charity occur because of capitalist ignorance: the results of the commodification of healthcare and education; rising inequities between socioeconomic and racial classes; environmental externalities occurring because of competition between industries; forced and exploited global labor in a rush to produce cheaply, efficiently, succinctly; the tendency of a consumption driven society to disregard its lowest echelons of our homeless, prisoners, and poor. This list is not a critique of capitalism but an acknowledgment of the social cost occurring from massive benefits of our economic system; if we were, instead, driven by a socialist system, we would have a new set of spoils, equally compelling and equally difficult. Philanthrocapitalism is an attempt to direct the social system towards these efforts, while charity is an effort to aid those left behind by our social system. But you can’t fix a broken leg by walking on it. An attempt to aid those abandoned by capitalism by exploiting it even further seems counterintuitive because it is.

Andi Mack, the new serialized Asian-American TV show, conceptualized by the white woman behind “Lizzy McGuire”, is airing on Disney Channel. That sentence sat strange with me too. The premise: you’re thirteen and waiting for your first period. You’re in love with eighth-grade Jonah Beck from the ultimate Frisbee team. Your shack is detached from your house. You have a yellow mom and a white dad. You bought an electric bicycle behind your mom’s back, but your very old, very cool sister named Bex has a motorcycle. Then Bex tells you she’s actually your mom. Which means your mom is actually your grandma. Which means America’s new teen mother is yellow, suburban, and rich.

I was also surprised by the show’s novelty (the Sausage Party phenomenon—what’s with people making mature videos with Hannah Montana aesthetics) and if novelty was the only thing that made the show unique. Each actor described the show as “real” which made it different from the rest. I was more surprised because real was ambiguous and America never coddled her teen moms. They were always poor whites, Midwesterners, dumb, hood rats, victims, coerced, bitter, mamis, welfare queens, golddiggers, abandoned. They were exceptions, which was the opposite of real, and never given the luxury to speak for their experiences without a filter, without being framed as the example or counterexample.

Bex is a half Asian girl with style and Polaroids of her boyfriends, plural. Bex is not an exception. Most yellow women in today’s media, regardless of their youth, are marketed as a hipster’s favorite accessory. Margaret Cho, the first Asian American TV show star, is 47 years old, well into her mid-age, sang “My Puss” in a Chinese accent before Awkwafina sang “My Vag” in her Brooklyn backyard. Amy Tan has mentioned her German high school boyfriend who played the guitar. Asian beauty gurus like Sophia Chang and Jennifer Im dominate the blogosphere. Jenny Zhang writes about Shakespeare & Co and blow jobs in eighth grade; Constance Wu writes angry posts about The Great Wall and Casey Affleck. None of the above women have children. Yellow girls write poetry, talk liberal, and dress well. We abort at a rate two times that of white women. While we are always placed under the context of an overbearing mother and the consequent repression that hobbles over, we are never understood as mothers or potential mothers ourselves. We have the means of providing but are not providers. We live as teens, easy, hormonal, trendy. The slight mutation of Bex’s image from cool girl to teen mom is an inversion of the formula many of us understand to be a yellow girl’s past and destiny, albeit self-consciously socially constructed. But what does that mean?

On the 1 Bus to Roxbury a man sat next to me and claimed to be a real live Panther. He placed his feet in the middle of the aisle, cold. I came from Alabama, he said. Power to the people, he said. I’m a real live Panther, he said. He picked a fight with the white boy behind me. The bus driver got up. The man resisted. His side sifted close then far from mine. I looked for sympathy like a wallet, lost. When I was thirteen I walked through a furniture store in Flushing with my best friend, who was a poet, and told her I’d decorate my college room like this, glossy. My fingers passed through red lamps. When we got out, she told me she saw a man talking to himself in the Au Bon Pain across the street. Later, she wrote three poems on him. She remembers him as I do, distant. When we passed through this Christmas we passed by beggars and old men with nonchalance, grace. Do you write poems about strangers anymore? I asked. We walked on, beat, because it was no longer fashionable to love strangers, to imagine their lives with care. The world had expanded since we were children, and we deemed outsiders useless, a survival tactic.

Only very recently have I come to understand my campus as a socialist construct, in every way ideal, in our security and collectivity, our concerns intangible, our focus on self-realization/development/love. Of course, this analogy is useless in the capitalism vs. socialism debate that continues among academics, since our institution exists in the context of capitalism, and our reality is shaped by massive donations to financial aid programs, the existence of cooking and janitorial staff, competitive incomes for Harvard faculty, and most importantly, the truth that our stint here is brief. But like a child, I found it useful to say that we are all happy here on a physical level, to acknowledge the privilege of existing in a society, however insular, however brief, that establishes community in its organization, emphasizes the right to be transformed, and gives us the liberty to do so, to exist how we would like to.

The best argument I heard in favor of identifying as a feminist was from a teacher, who said combatting sexism with semantics provided no armor. I trusted her because she was everything I wanted to be: black; tinged with bravado; brimming with stories of San Francisco, the Bronx, and Ivy League dorms; articulate; cosmopolitan. But back then, I wasn’t too concerned with the flex of self-definition. There were a million reasons to not be a feminist, including that I was too sympathetic to the yellow man’s plight, straight as hell, in love with Rihanna, cuffed up by libertarians, okay with makeup, pretty certain feminists were racists, believed in joint custody as a standard, and attempting to make my virginal body look as un-celibate as possible.

Feminist film critic Laura Mulvey articulated an influential theory of the male gaze, claiming the multiple ways in which perspectives, characters, and planes in films are formed exclusively through a male spectator. She claimed an eroticization of female subjects for both male characters and implied male viewers, that reduced a woman’s humanity to her body. I was skeptical of this theory because I also, as a straight girl, derived pleasure from viewing the female body, and found myself, not unlike males, attracted to the stories of beautiful characters. Furthermore, I grew up racialized. On a basic level, I believed I was never going to be the girl of wet dreams, rape fantasies, and angsty movie plots, because my skin was too dark, my eyes too small, my body too flat, and there was time, countries, a history of colonialism, school, and wealth separating me from a woman who could claim to be their subject. The times a white male was attracted to me were so few and far between that when presented with blunt cases proving the existence of yellow fever, such as David Bowie’s “China Girl” and Weezer’s “El Scorcho”, I couldn’t take them seriously. I mostly considered them as fascinating cases where white guys got socialized wrong. In sum, I was so far removed from the eroticized female subjects of film and magazines that I never thought it was something that applied to me.

But I also reasoned that if a male gaze existed, and if it applied to me, it was inseparable from my understanding of myself. In some ways I would never stop comparing myself to a standard of beauty constructed by men. Some of my most glorious moments of early adolescence were related directly to achieving, in my own view, that standard of beauty, and though I said the objective of my self-decoration was to feel golden, I can’t ignore that my feelings of confidence in presentability took place in a male world, my joy in seeing myself being seen. And it was a special kind of joy. Taking away the male gaze would be like reimagining a world where race did not exist; it was neither feasible nor preferable. I could not ignore that without it almost all my experience living on this planet would not have occurred, so to hate it unconditionally was a form of escapism I could not afford if I wanted to be powerful in my body, to love myself, to be confident in the validity of my experience.

I wasn’t too big on getting Asians into the hip-hop room because I felt it wasn’t our place. Boys I knew were trying to hack simultaneously into Harvard, their neighbors’ wi-fi, and our high school grading portal until one kid got suspended for two years for a prank and they figured that wasn’t the way to go. Most of us were under house arrest until the tail end of senior year, and though I figured there had to be some Asian kid somewhere who knew the struggle past trying to sneak out of the house, back then, it felt a lot like really believing Schrodinger put the cat in the box. We were diasporic, but it wasn’t as cool as the word sounded, because that diaspora consisted mostly of knowing our parents were all friends with bad childhoods that manifested in some ugly competition. We took SAT practice tests on Christmas Eve. We were ridiculously bored. We all had our striving, trifling, petty Asian cards on the table. Then Rich Chigga walked over. It wasn’t that he was hard. The kid was just recognizable.

Rich Chigga is Brian Imanuel from Indonesia, seventeen-years-old, Vine star, home-schooled, and rapper of “Dat $tick,” which went viral and racked 32 million views some time last year. He wears a fanny pack and a pink polo shirt. The track blew up after getting low-key reviewed in a reaction video put out by his manager with rappers Tory Lanez, Desiigner, and Ghostface Killah. He never set foot in the United States. He learned all his English off the Internet. He jokes about suicide, police, sex, vaping, Hot Topic, baby-eating, blackout nights, and bad grades on Vine. When he was 12, he posted a picture of his photoshopped serious-as-hell self, wearing a sweatshirt with the n-word, next to a smiling Obama. In a freestyle on his seventeenth birthday he raps, “Tell your mommy and your daddy that you’re losing to a winner,” which hits close to home. Then, in an interview with Pigeons and Planes, he says, “I avoid talking about my race at all times because I think that’s corny,” which hits even closer. He’s that kid whose innocence went way faster than his maturity. He’s got more talk than back. But he’s also an Asian kid with a bad underbite. He may be from Indonesia but most of us learned our styles off YouTube too.

I first heard Rich Chigga in July. My roommate and I, stuck on campus, made a celebratory playlist of the worst rap we could find since the white kid of the trio was slipping from Worcester to visit, and included the classics like Cupcakke and Flynt Flossy. Without classes that summer we didn’t have many hobbies besides blasting the tunes from my third-floor window. We included Rich Chigga no question, next to Ryan Higa’s “Chingsta”, since he was mean mugging in a fanny pack. He looked like he needed some sleep. The humor was obviously the incongruity, how low his voice was compared to his body, how hard he sounded against his look, how young he was adjacent to his claims.

I love the way Nina Simone scowls. What if you cried so much your smile looked like the sun? She sings in “Blues for Mama” that “ain’t nobody perfect 'cause ain't nobody free” and I don’t have to be in love, but I, too, have equated freedom to perfection, have used it as a crutch. Still don’t have the balance right. Kanye popped up in Thanksgiving conversation because he canceled his 21 shows and got hospitalized for acting up. The consensus was that he was immature, but I can’t deny the prettiness of his imperfections, which is his cage. You don’t get poetry like “Slightly scratch your Corolla/Okay I smashed your Corolla” by being a nice guy. I’m not trying to be nice either. I’m just trying to be perfect.

Director Bernardo Bertolucci stated in a 2013 interview that resurfaced last Saturday that a scene depicting rape in his acclaimed 1972 film “The Last Tango in Paris” was not consensual. He was attempting to get actress Maria Schneider’s “reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” which sounds a lot like artistic bullshit, so after, in framing his guilt, he said, “to obtain something, I think that you have to be completely free.” During the film’s premiere, critic Pauline Kael described it as “the most liberating movie ever made,” and though the words “free” or “liberation” may have been nonchalant choices, they still remain political, read holy and coveted to my modern and problematized sensibilities.

I know how fragile and fleeting feelings of liberation can be, but I also know that what you escape defines who you are and feelings can be changed with new music, new weather, new boys. But in the end, we’re all stuck with our demons no matter what kind of rich, color, pretty, young, and dumb we get to be. If you’re living a good life how long and bad are you going to suffer for your ten minutes to feel fresh again? Though “The Last Tango in Paris” might represent some old-school, outdated misogyny, it asks a good question about the bounds of our freedom, due to the incongruousness of their reactions. Bertolucci and Kael still went home upset by the things they had been upset about, and Schneider went home with something different. As Bertolucci and Kael used the words “free” and “liberation” to describe the situation’s product and Schneider used the word “rape.”

We were elite, colored, guarded, and beautiful. We made safe spaces and cried in them for no reason or for the simple reason that they existed. It was possible for a world this tense to be this pretty, the art to be this good, and for once, our art stopped being so angry. Chance used God tones, and Rihanna said “you got me like ahh” instead of “I am not a victim,” and we shifted from “black is beautiful” to “in moonlight black boys look blue.” We were sentimental and heartless with ourselves, and white people were listening to us too. We practiced radical love, which is a kind of God-love, the love that makes you feel good doing it, the love that’s unreciprocated and nonspecific and definitely okay, the love that disqualifies you from being a hardo, the love that forces you to snap at open-mics and gets you to dance salsa even if you don’t know how to with girls and boys and girl-boys and boy-girls, the Maya-Angelou kind of love, the love that’s so present you don’t need a past, the drunken love, the love that makes you cry at the anthem.

The day before the election, Tinashe posted a picture half-smiling, baby blue fingernails, and candid with the caption “HAPPY cuz my new music is out & Donald Trump is finally gonna lose tomorrow.” The day after, my roommate corrected me, saying we were now post-Obama, not Trump’s America, because black presidents create whitelash, and whiny kids don’t invent countries so we should stop giving them all the credit. I listened to Nightride for the first time, which was spooky enough for the day. Pitchfork called it “strictly after-hours,” but the reviewer was probably a little too old and white to figure that being an ice-cold bitch is more of a lifestyle than an aesthetic choice.

Is the radical love that made me feel so good enough? I always hypothesized that the trope was driven by some need to be both sexy and independent, which is important when you have control over only your own body. But even that idea is contested. The racism and sexism in this country is apparent enough for the trope to really mean something, and even though icons like Rihanna and Tinashe are adorned in spaces of radical love, there is something difficult about how the tension builds, something incongruous about a community that expresses that it is both ready to love indiscriminately and too defensive and noncommittal to actually do it on an individual basis. Like we spread love too thin it broke. We romanticized everything too much and related to them all no matter how much they contradicted, from dreams of brotherly love to our inability to love, from our readings of Dubois as too old-school (i.e., How am I supposed to navigate both my double-consciousness and his double-consciousness?) to our readings of Beyoncé as queen.

Growing up, we all knew that the real rich people lived in Millburn, even though the Jewish kids in my town got spray tans and nose jobs and the Asian kids probably spent as much on AMC prep, piano lessons, and science programs. Millburn had both a downtown and debate team that Livingston kids or city planners couldn’t touch, and most of our immigrant parents had to settle for L-Town since Millburn property taxes were sky high. After eighth grade there was a mass Asian exodus to move so people’s kids could have better chances of getting into Harvard. Most importantly, the Short Hills Mall was glitzy as Kim while who would ever want to go to the Livingston one if the kid didn’t have to? Millburn was so rich that rumor claimed it once tried to secede from Essex County, which turned out to be true, but only when we were all in kindergarten and couldn’t tell one set of huge houses from the other set of small mansions. We were small-town rivalry, some of the richest towns in the state with some of the best schools in the country to back it up, and the best evidence of our wealth was our cars, meaning, that you knew you were in Livingston High when the student parking lot looked shinier than the teacher parking lot, and a kid got a Mercedes on his sixteenth birthday, and most importantly, our cars kept on getting stolen. Essex County had a history of car thefts because Newark was the capital of joyriding in the 70s, and someone once famously posted in Millburn’s town Internet forum that they’d had four cars stolen since they’d moved in, to which most people said, it took four times to learn to take the keys out?

On December 15, 2013, Dustin Friedland died in Millburn's Short Hills Mall parking deck defending his car during a carjacking, which was surprising to those of us who hung around there at least once a week. The carjacking was committed by Kevin Roberts of Newark, who defended himself during the trial. Newark was 15 minutes away by car and worlds from my house. I felt tied to it because my dad once lived there, and sometimes I helped him interview residents for his research, and I audited classes in the tech school. But I wasn’t kissing the surface of the good parts. Newark had a dioxin orange sunset. In 2015, according to Law Street Media, Newark was rated the ninth most dangerous city in the United States, jumping up ten spots since 2014 after a 23% increase in robberies and a 16% increase in murders. In 2014, the New York Times claimed that car thefts were going out of fashion, but after Friedland’s death, they published an article stating that carjacking rates were on a massive undeniable high. A Vice video on a major carjacking circle in Newark confirmed that car thefts were going down, but that didn’t mean they weren’t gonna take your car if they had families to feed.

What continues to define Essex County in my memory is the tension between what was close and what was far, faded as girls in the locker room. What it meant to be so rich, school-stressed, cherry-coked, vanilla-milkshaked, bubbly, and aggressively insular, so close to a place that was definitely not. The tension bled itself into the stories we told (i.e. rich pretty white girl was getting with her outta town dealer so what did you think was going to happen), our out-of-school interactions (i.e. he took me to Domino’s?!), our in-school interactions (i.e. if you take steroids and don’t work out you just turn fat right), our claim on New York instead of New Jersey (i.e. a twenty minute drive and thirty minute train ride to Manhattan is not “from the City”), the slang we used (i.e. bruh, yo, alldayerrday, which were appropriations but not flat-out plagiarisms). A boy in a class I audited at the tech school once asked me how smart I had to be to get into Harvard, and I wondered why he was asking that because he aced Python and worked a job and learned English in a year and dealt with a troublemaker brother, and on top of that, was reading Dostoevsky for fun. I was explaining why I went to music school on Saturdays when I wasn’t even trying to be a pianist.

In September, I had the opportunity to meet with, interview, and moderate a campus event for Sophia Chang, manager of the Wu-Tang Clan, Raphael Saadiq, and D’Angelo. I used to play "Voodoo” like a drug. We first met during Joey Bada$$’s lecture here and I recognized her hat from a YouTube video. She was partying it up in a place with light as yellow as her skin. She talked about smashing the box, enwhitlement, and micprogressions. She talked about the soundtrack of her life, which was no longer hip-hop because hip-hop was mad young, brimmed with youth, made by youth, angry as youth, fresh, new, changing, and overflowing with that I’m-going-to-hit-you-up-around-midnight-and-we-are-gunna-go-out sort of energy, and she said, “If you’re my age and hip-hop is still the soundtrack to your life, you are probably an asshole,” which was the first time I’d heard about the complacency of age in such definitive terms.

So I am interested in youth and the special breed of it that exists in yellow Americans, which may or may not be the force that brings people in our motherland to Botox and surgeries and skin rejuvenations, but is definitely the force that drives Eddie Huang to dress like a teenager and listen to hip-hop forever; David Choe, a millionaire at age 40, to roll up peanut butter and Wonderbread in a ball so he could “glue [his] stomach together” in a hitchhiking show in honor of his teenagedom; and Wong-Fu Productions to keep making millennial cheesy romance videos. The way our public figures seem unapologetically young forever. The part of me seeded by nigahiga, kevjumba, JustKiddingNews, and all that YouTube. The memes and text-talk and colors that pervade Maggie Lee’s “Mommy.” That spring of gorgeous, insatiable language coming from Jenny Zhang’s poetry and essays, which can’t be traced to Morrison or Hemingway or Faulkner, but may possibly be traced to the way we talk to one another now, pop, contemporary and fleeting. Tech geeks and new money and fashionistas and foodies and Angry Asian Americans.

I was yellow in the way I was young, which is also the way I was free and the way I was drawn, the way I was perceived and the way I conceived myself. Because before I understood the weight of this country on my parents, I knew how to type by touch. Before I’d seen a photo of my mother in college, I knew how to be Ninja, Gangster, Emo, and Nerd in five easy lessons. My father converted to Christianity because to him, New Jersey reeked of uncertainty and evil. I stuck out in my half-Italian, half-Nigerian church trying to make the eyeliner fit right on my monolid. To me, I was born without precedence, because where was I going to sit on Rosa Parks’s bus? Where was I when Scarlet O’Hara cried to her mammy? Why did I need the history of this country if it didn’t need me?

Everyone loves Constance Wu. She has a sick, no-nonsense TV persona. She’s one of the few public figures who’ll cuss out the white kids saving China with a Tumblr-like vengeance. A couple of weeks ago she took a picture with her white boyfriend’s lips glued to her face, smiling like no one’s business. The yellow boys started out asking what she was doing with this “mediocre” Moby Dick. Someone made a Reddit page called “Constance Wu and her average white boyfriend.” The yellow boys got called out because men shouldn’t feel entitled to women’s bodies, or we live in 2016, or Wu really seems to be in love.

Love’s workings should be unrelated to those of politics. But at the same time, there’s nothing more political than deciding whom you mess with, whose experiences you take on as your own. It seems in every public context other than Asian-American activism, partnerships are factored unapologetically, essentially, into identity. Who did not point to Melania’s plagiarism as a display, also, of Trump’s inadequacy; her immigrant status as contradictory to his nativist rhetoric? Who does not view the Bill aspect to Clinton’s presidential run as significant, a contribution to her identity as an insider? We talk about the social significance of Michelle Obama’s skin color, darker than the president’s. There are sociologies and national histories and tropes that solely exist to define who cuffs you up, because there are white trophy wives to rich black men, skinny yellow boys to hallyu’d-up white girls, black girls to hip-hop posing yellow boys, and of course, white boys to yellow girls. There are forces beyond fluffiness and attraction that bring people together.

In some ways, the yellow boys are asking the same question as the rest of us: Is it ever possible to love an idea, a country, a cause, as deeply or completely or powerfully as you could love another human being?

Two weeks before the end of August, I was on the bus back to New Jersey, stoic as hell. Summer felt like a body, tight. Air was wet, made the trees black. Didn’t know it before, but life has a pace to it. I’d planned on moving through it all like life, people and classes and feelings and music and winter. I kept thinking about freshman fall. Last September, I thought, you keep looking backwards, you won’t move forwards. I took transition hard, the way most people do. I was post-existential, sharp. I was going to take my life like a bad boy and make it work for me because I could. I thought I succeeded until I didn’t because being alone, this place, made me soft in ways I didn’t know I could be. I spent so much of freshman year thinking of home I doubted I could recognize it when I came back. I dreamt so much that year I felt it in my chest.

This summer I kept thinking about growing up. I went to the MoMA and watched Maggie Lee’s "Mommy," her autobiographical video in multiple parts. Lee also grew up in suburban New Jersey, yellow. I kept remembering her story’s colors, the neons, her long thick hair, the words she chose like “think” and “circus” and “daddy’s little girl.” I kept wondering which colors I’d pick, which moments. In what ways could I, like Lee, convey a life, show I was done but not over it, make each aspect as obviously falsifiable as I knew it to be, but breathless, intoxicating, cool.

I think all girls know what girlhood’s supposed to look like, regardless of how far from it they are. My version was tween-skinny, virginal. First cigs on your eighteenth birthday; flings, far and faded like a drug. I was supposed to Abramovic my life, because even then, I knew life was all about how you imagined it. Once a girl a year above me showed me a poem she wrote. She wanted to know how drunk felt like so she locked herself in her room with her parents’ beer in hand. Sipped but wasn’t too dizzy, wasn’t even buzzed. Ended up storing the can under her bed. I kept wondering if it was all true, because I felt the seduction, the click of the lock. We wanted cities bad. We were suburban and bored and we wanted Manhattan lights and thigh-highs and walks at three and noise, jazz, glitz. We were all getting the hell out because we were too dramatic or too smart or too soulful or too alternative for our little New Jersey town with nothing to do but that Starbucks on the corner or boys we’d been bored of for three years already.

July kicked itself into August, and afternoon tailgated into evening. My skin was so covered with sand you could press a handprint on my back and the whole thing felt slightly bleached and dry. I left the beach and went from JFK Street to the Square to meet a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. We were cliché and grabbed boba and headed over to the Charles. I told him about this girl I saw in a fiction reading once who started reciting something about a boba shop. The shop was the center of this neighborhood because all the kids congregated there and the owner would hire the kids and the kids would leave the town and when they got older they would still remember the shop. She killed it, I said. He said, what about all the Asian kids who don’t like boba? What are they gonna like, I said, coffee?

But truth was that not all yellow kids liked boba, and truth was that not all yellow kids wanted yellow the way I wanted it. And truth was if I looked a little more into my life, I hadn’t always been so explicit either. In my town, you knew how to line your monolids and play Ninja while waiting for the bus, but that wasn’t every town, and by tenth grade I was still justifying why all the characters I wrote about were white and ate mac and cheese for dinner and went to football games. I still didn’t know about the other side of the railroad tracks, the sugar plantations. Once, a friend told me that he didn’t choose to be yellow so he didn’t have to do much to put a stake in it, and that for him, it was a simple switch, you were either yellow inside or you were not, and he was not and I was. He suggested that maybe his apathy had to do with his white-as-cream town and the fact I read history books, and maybe it had to do with his non-immigrant parents and my freshly planed ones. He felt his motherland forced herself on him. At that time I could agree and now I can’t. At that time I thought color was what you did. Now I know it’s what you are.

How could you not feel your yellowness was imposed on you? And how could you not see the performance of it? Because you noticed that yellow people were different from the you under your skin. Because there were questions on yellowness, on how to be yellow and smart, yellow and beautiful, yellow and proud, that performances couldn’t answer. There were voids you could not un-see. You wanted to know about the anomalies. What happened to yellow artists, to yellow kids that only spoke English and liked McDonald’s, to yellow people without food or Chinese school or motherlands to back them up? How yellow were you if you didn’t care about the vapid yellow man on the TV screen, if you were not an immigrant or a child of one, if you were not angry? What if your soul was not made of the East, Confucianism, Buddhism?

In a passage near the end of “Between The World and Me”, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls walking behind his newly-made white friend after being treated to a meal. He wanted to ensure his journey would end at an old historic building as promised and not in a dark side alley. He framed his fear, which seemed irrational in a place like Paris, with “my eyes were made in Baltimore”. I read that sentence over and over, because I knew what it meant, to have your eyes made. My eyes were made in New Jersey and dioxin orange sunsets, among yellow and Jewish-not-white people, from cicada shells on a high school parking lot. Not Baltimore, but they were still made. They were made when I agreed last semester with my mostly-white race class that race was a performance because Faulkner’s men put gloves on to hunt bears, but they were also made when I promised my roommate that her blackness and my yellowness coursed inside us like blood. They were made when my mother told me not to forget the kindness of this country, because it let her arrive with little and leave with a six figure salary, because it made me. They were also made when I saw Alton Sterling’s son weep. My eyes were made accepting. My eyes were made to see this country’s facets because I didn’t belong enough to any side to buy fully into its logic.

I’d originally approached this column with one question—how angry did I want this revolution—because I believed, like every other college student, that maybe one was going to happen, that maybe our generation was meant to flip the system. In February, Professor Michael R. Klein said at an IOP event that there was no more room in racial social justice for another Malcolm X or MLK and I agreed, but I still saw so much, maybe too much, anger. Whatever was so shocking about Maggie Lam’s column in UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian, whether it was calling her roommate a “white devil” or dry-humping a white boy to prevent a “Scott Pilgrim-esque romance”, I’d seen it before, that kind of rhetoric or action. I wanted to say that Professor Klein was right, that we didn’t need to be so angry. I wanted to point to the suicide rates. I wanted to say that we didn’t have to be so angry to dethrone whiteness, because one day, it was going to dethrone itself; because one day, this grand whiteness was going to fall with or without the help of people of color. It was going to fall because Egypt fell and Rome fell and even Europe fell, because privilege was necessarily self-destructive, and oh, it had to be so. Oh, power moved in cycles, didn’t it?

My conclusion was that coloredness was naturally more constructive than whiteness. The question of privilege—how to maintain it—was dangerous because its only answer lay directly in the devaluation of others, which could only happen if people fundamentally devalued themselves. On the other hand, the question of how to survive—which was the question of oppression—was about life, the sheer essence of it. We had to wait for all the forces to kick in.

I’d never been one of those yellow boys who collected ill sneakers and smoked weed and tried to live a funky hip-hop inspired life despite being suburban as hell, but I knew them growing up. They were juxtaposed against kids in solid button-downs and Science Olympiad t-shirts. Their counterparts were girls like me, who’d also listened to the Fugees in middle school and tried really hard to make slang fit pretty in a sentence. At one point a friend asked me what was it with Asians and hip-hop, and I said something about simple good music, which I knew was insufficient.

What I couldn’t verbalize then: the yellow connection with hip-hop never felt skin thin because it was swarming. It was everywhere, not just my pretty New Jersey town with the handful of boys I knew in a nice 2010 moment where every other song playing on the radio was Eminem. By the time I left Jersey five years later, I’d accumulated ten dollars in high school library fines for Jeff Chang’s Who We Be. Eddie Huang became every yellow kid’s favorite thought experiment, and Jin got mad Pentecostal with his rap. Dumbfoundead said that the maleness of hip-hop could counteract yellow emasculation, and the guy I was seeing listened to Nas a lot so maybe he was a little sensitive. Everyone tried to own rap even if they couldn’t, the yellow people and the white people, the rich-kid suburbanites and the good-boy nerds, which made rap some of the most seductive music out there. And everyone said they related to it because it was outsider music, which made me wonder if anyone could really be on the inside.

Mostly I wanted to know why I, female and suburban and upper-middle-class and daughter-of-professors and yellow-not-black, wanted to claim it too. After my roommate told me I had the music taste of her father, I decided to switch up the songs. I started falling in love with Tyler the Creator, no sweat. He was fantastic because he was colorful and awkward and intentional and decidedly, self-consciously unsexy. Some time in April we were listening to Goblin, and I realized I didn’t love Tyler the Creator in spite of the fact he talked about rape and cunts and faggots every other sentence but, maybe, because of it. He used misogyny as an aesthetic the way society did. He didn’t try to delude himself about inhabiting a world that he didn’t believe existed. His persona didn’t pretend to be happy or sane. He made machismo and misogyny and homophobia look like weak defenses against the pathetic outline of himself.

In Terrance Hayes’s title poem “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy” of his book "Lighthead," the first poetry book I ever owned, he writes “I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us / Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes.” Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is found in James Joyce’s Ulysses and is exactly one sentence: It’s five pages long, has zero punctuation, and choruses the word “yes.” I guess part of me always knew I was the type of girl who’d love the soliloquy, even before I reached any semblance of sexual maturity. Molly Bloom’s world seemed attainable, because I had a suspicion that I was almost there, that if I waited, I could be beautiful, and if not beautiful, I could be wild, and if not wild, I could be free. More than any other person I ever encountered, Molly Bloom felt things as if she were alive.

I was plagued with the distinctly feminine, distinctly modern, distinctly middle-class issue of choosing what type of girl I wanted to be. Later, I realized the model I had chosen—Molly—was problematic because she thought about men too much, was too sexual and submissive, and allowed herself to be constricted by the patriarchy. She was written by a male; a dead white male writer, canonized by other dead white males.

In his hour-long HBO special from 2000 entitled “Killin’ Them Softly,” comedian Dave Chappelle says, “The only thing in our society that bothers me the most is the way that men and women don’t get along no more.” He proceeds to talk about magazines killing chivalry and the different things men and women desire (women: material goods; men: a woman). I would agree with him if I wasn’t so heterosexually female in my experiences and my counterparts weren’t so heterosexually male. There are slips in our empathetic abilities that this newly-justiced society requiring correctness and inclusion and respect does not forgive, because even if we try, we will always imagine the other wrong.

When I was 13 and at the peak of my social justice warrior phase, I believed that being a girl hurt, everyone thought yellow people looked the same, and cat-calling was absolutely horrible. There were a lot of other things I thought, but I probably don’t believe them anymore.

Websites all over the internet say that it’s typical for teenagers to question their sexuality. I’m on the tail-end of teenagedom, but I still do that multiple times a week. I think that means I find life interesting. The number’s up from two weeks ago, because I just got into The Internet. My roommate found them going through her brother’s Spotify. I play Ego Death beginning to end, beginning to end, three or four times a day. It makes an hour feel like nothing. Syd Tha Kyd has a slow kind of look about her. She says “girl” like the wind at the tip of a roller coaster. Her voice sounds worse live. She doesn’t show skin, but her clothes still look like they’re threatening to fall off. If it takes Syd Tha Kyd to turn me queer, I must be the straightest girl I know.

Once, on a trip from the Quad to the Yard, I decided to take an off-route. Since Syd Tha Kyd was telling me to loosen up, I walked slow. I had on a cardigan with an obnoxious amount of faux fur. I got it for $30 at Primark in October because back then it seemed classy. A girl smoking a cig told me she loved my sweater, and I said I loved the pink shoelaces on her Dr. Martens. She asked me what I was doing later, and I told her I was going to study. She told me I didn’t have to be in a box, that I was beautiful enough to make it decently on the streets. I told her that I must be one of those smiling ballerinas in music boxes because sometimes I loved it, the box. She told me her name was Syd. I felt like it was fate. She asked where I lived, and I pointed to Matthews’s tall slick bricks. You’re a Harvard kid, she said, don’t you think it’s your human duty to get people like me off the street?

In tenth grade, I heard from some poet that real emotions were complicated, and since I was cheesy as hell, I believed it before I believed anything else—even the easy things, like that my parents actually loved me or skin and water were made of the same stuff. There’s a section in Sheila Heti’s "How Should A Person Be?" where she talks about personality as a social construct—how you can look like you have a soul—and while the rest of my fiction-writing class said “I remember thinking like that” I was thinking, I think like that now. I think I’ll live to 100. I’m less than a quarter of the way in this life thing. I think there’s a bit of poetry in everything, which means there are double meanings and mistakes, line breaks and metaphors. I’m too old to crave poetry. I’m too young to be fascinated. But I still want to know what it means for a phrase like “take care” to lilt the way it does. To understate or overstate.

The first time I took a fiction writing class, I was surprised by how many systems it took to make falseness believable, how many differences there were in being real and pretending to be real. I questioned anything that cut too perfectly, that ended with someone being just right. I hated characters that grew to be functional rather than deep, that were able to say how exactly they became better people. They were formulaic. They sang clichés.

I wanted characters that messed with darkness until they hardened, that hurt when they loved. I wanted my narrators unreliable. I wanted them to say they were happy when they weren’t and to beg, plead for your pity when they didn’t deserve it. I wanted my dialogue raw. I wanted monologues littered with the kind of brutal slang that did not care. I wanted lowercase instead of capitals and sentences longer than breath. I wanted language that ripped. I thought everything I wanted in a story illustrated complicated people that surrounded me. I thought I loved writing fiction because it was so real, because it felt like life.

For a long time, I didn’t understand the whole Asian male emasculation thing, because to me, yellow boys were as boyish as boys could get, and they were masculine not because they were tall (some are) or sporty (ditto) or charismatic (you guessed it), but because I wanted them. And I grew up with them. And I liked them and hated them and learned the big life revelations about them—boys are immature/need to grow up—just as well as anybody in paper-white Ohio or Kendrick’s Compton did. But that is real life, and society is a theoretical one.

Yellow men have historically been emasculated in the United States; here is a story. Ko Shigeta is 17 years old and arrives to work on a Hawaiian sugar plantation in 1903. Years later, he remembers this: bathing in the same place as other yellow men’s wives and feeling them step over him “as if [he] were a dog or cat in their path.” He remembers their indifference to his nakedness. This story describes a difficult emasculation, one created but not directly imposed by a white presence. It feels tragic because it speaks of helplessness. It is one thing to be hurt by someone who is supposed to hurt you. After a while, you build resistance to that kind of hurt. You find yourself. You learn to shrug.

But Shigeta’s story talks about a completely different kind of hurt: the hurt that comes from being ignored by the people who are supposed to notice you, if not love you. Yes, when you are a yellow male and “the people” you are referencing are yellow females, this sentiment may be a problematic seed of male entitlement. But that does not mean that it slips through fingers. This is the type of historicized emasculation The Yellow American Man comes from.

We played Kill, Screw, or Marry to study for APUSH, and I decided that Emilio Aguinaldo was the prettiest man on the pages of Brinkley’s thirteenth edition, while someone else said Alexander Hamilton hands down, and another person said Toussaint L’Ouverture no question. We put them against each other. Feeling especially liberal, we decided Hamilton had too much glory to live, L’Ouverture actually got things done, and we were giving an Asian man some sort of chance to get with a girl, which was pretty good, given he was the only Asian man in Brinkley’s thirteenth edition that wasn’t Mao Zedong or a railroad worker. We shook on it and kept going. At that point, invisibility was slightly annoying but not vital, and even if I felt happy seeing an old Asian face on the pages of a history textbook, I didn’t think too much about the fact there weren’t more. Being invisible wasn’t from the kind of racism that killed. It was better than getting Rodney King’d in the head by the police.

But once I asked a yellow-American friend if she’d march in a Black Lives Matter protest, and she hesitated before saying no, she wouldn’t. I got mad and waxed colored solidarity like no one’s business because she let me. I told her we weren’t just talking about stupid representations in media or taking too many AP classes, we were talking about lives, blood on the street, and a system built to hurt or criminalize, which was the system of white supremacy, which was the same system that made sure Jet Li never kissed Juliet, our SAT scores were mad high, and that we were still asking if we were Asian or if we were American. She said it was cute I carried around a Helen Zia book and could spit Tumblr back to her, but I didn’t get it, none of the un-cute, scary stuff. Because even if my parents were yellow, immigrants even, they didn’t look at the Red Apple Boycott in Brooklyn with Robert Carson saying “in the future there’ll be funerals not boycotts” and become completely afraid, like her parents did. They didn’t own beauty shops and restaurants. They didn’t know how to use guns, because I never had to see someone break into my parent’s store and hold a gun up to my father’s head. Or to learn, after a decade, that no one would trust them if they had protested, at least not with their accents, at least not with their children looking effortlessly, happily successful. But she did.

I know there is no way for yellow people in the black-and-white United States to claim a real, dangerous, deadly kind of oppression without sounding overdramatic and historically insensitive, and maybe that is fair. But even if Asian Americans were not enslaved or lynched by the Ku Klux Klan or systematically killed by police officers, they were still afraid. People still died in scary disproportion with someone pointing to the color of their skin. Isn’t that substantive? Isn’t that life or death?

In eleventh grade, there was a new girl in my school. She came from the West Coast, landed in close-to-somewhere-but-really-nowhere New Jersey, and looked straight punk with the eyeliner to match. I thought I was hard because I had cut the bubblegum shit a year ago and listened to "Ready to Die" while trig-ing my way through Intro to BC. She was probably looking for the other punk kids at school because there’s always a crew and they’re always “the best people you will ever meet” until you realize Asianized New Jersey is very different from the West Coast or anything in the movies (i.e. no punk kids). When we were both stuck friendless in gym class, I was bland as chewed gum and she’d already convinced everyone she was too cool to talk. It would have been a perfect setup for a lesbian movie (think "Foxfire"), but in real life, the unattached one, me, was straight; the queer one, she, had a steady boyfriend; and everyone was too busy to get seduced.

Before I was in love with Toni Morrison, I was in love with this one phrase everyone associates with her, her style, her characters, her plots, her thinking: dangerous. No. Not just dangerous. Dangerously free. As in can’t be contained, as in dying young, as in nothing to lose. I think I had an idea of what “dangerously free” would look like, and it always involved this raw, breathless, windswept intensity that could only be described as tragically beautiful. Like getting so skinny from meth you could drum your ribs like a guitar. Like laughing, but not because it’s funny. Like cigarette smoke and the skin beneath your knee. I was thinking about a girl, bound by no one, nowhere, nothing but her body; a girl so broken that norms don’t matter; a girl, from no place, going nowhere. It all seemed like straight poetry.

The new girl? I wasn’t sure if she fit that description,—the dangerously free one—but in eleventh grade, she was the closest I’d ever been to it. She was the first person I’d met who’d been to rehab. Her father was in jail, and she wouldn’t tell me why. She’d moved more than five times. She kissed girls and boys. She said she’d once been suicidal, depressed. I’d seen both before, suicidal and depressed, but she managed to become them, to do them in a way that wasn’t corny as hell. And she was leaving next year, she told me, going for good, off to her boyfriend’s farm with two fluffy dogs.

The first singer I ever loved was Lauryn Hill, and by love, I mean want. Deeply. Fully. And forever. She broke up the word “reciprocity,” and it stained itself on the soft parts of my cognition. In her “Everything Is Everything” music video, her eyelids are this sweet shade of pink, and for months, I couldn’t stop thinking of the streets like a record, me spinning along some backbeat, the world whistling with me. In “Ready Or Not”, she has the most poetically mysterious verse ever, where she references Manifest Destiny and voo-doo, Gershwin and Nina Simone, in a single breath, effortlessly. And she was beautiful, the kind of beautiful that didn’t need to be mentioned, just felt, like the pinch of a smile.

But Lauryn Hill wasn’t just beautiful. Just slick, or deep, intellectual. Lauryn Hill made my heart ache, and that’s why I loved her, not just the cute parts but the bad parts too. When MTV Unplugged flopped. When she was jailed for tax evasion. When Rohan Marley said “I feel sad that I loved her so much and I faltered in expressing it to her somehow.” I wonder if what she’s expressing in “Neurotic Society” and “Consumerism” is less preachy than it sounds because I know how easy it is to think macrocosmically if you feel broken and disjointed inside. Sometimes talking about the world is easier than talking about yourself. Sometimes you say what you mean, but mostly, you don’t.

I may be learning that it’s easy to get numb. I’m at the end of my first semester in college, and I’m trying to be reflective. For the first time ever, if I’m bored, I have no one to blame but myself. No curfew. No permission needed to go places. No person’s feelings I have to protect. It’s easy in a place that wants you to be perfect, that grooms you so you may be, to become a robot. It’s sexy not to feel, to have zero tolerance for existential bullshit, to act on and on without the afterthought, but I think it’s also easier than it sounds. Humans have this ability to deny themselves what is natural and love things like dissonance, chaos, spicy food, and abstraction. They could probably tell themselves that feeling is unnecessary, boring, and mainstream too.

I’m not going to pretend I was really invested in everything going on in the world over the last two weeks. Mostly, I was trying to ignore it. I was cracking jokes about how it was so difficult to tell who was who on group chats now that everyone had turned into the French flag. I was rolling my eyes at any mention of our “racist media culture” and the fact that people actually thought we could cover every tragedy going on in the world in a five-minute news clip. I thought the people railing against the media were hypocrites at worst and easily offended at best. I was scrolling through last week’s columns, pointing at every one not about Paris or Beirut or Yale to convince myself I didn’t have to write about bombings or racism this week. I had a plan of attack for every possible conversation, how to deflect every mention of protest and death, and even if I thought I was saving myself from thinking too hard, I realize now that I was walking around with my fists clenched and my jaw so tense I would have imploded if I didn’t explode first.

On Monday, a friend from high school called me up to ask if I was still alive after the bomb threat, to which I replied, I was. Then she said the world was going to shit, and I agreed. Anything else, even a good-bye, after that statement would have felt disrespectful, so we stayed silent for a minute and hung up.

On Tuesday, I saw Joann Sfar’s comic about praying for Paris for the first time and spent most of the day wondering if it was enough to be about life. I thought it was too forgiving. I thought it was too simple. I thought it didn’t have a point. I had lunch with a friend to talk about a short story I’d written for class, and she told me to cut my darlings, so I spent that afternoon eliminating every pretty phrase in the manuscript that was there just to be pretty, and I was surprised by how much it hurt. What was the point of hearing a police siren like a song if it didn’t reflect trauma/enhance the plotline/provide characterization/make the reader want to keep reading/match the aesthetic? Why isn’t it enough to just be?

Two Junes ago, tragedy struck my town and no one talked about it until the September after Michael Brown’s dead body turned into the source of a raw red river on Missouri concrete. But suddenly, it was all everyone talked about. Brendan Tevlin was a nineteen-year-old boy who lived in my town and went to a prep school nearby. He was shot eight times, and he was white, and the shooter was brown, and the shooter had motives that made him seem like a member of the society of Seven Days in Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” The shooter was quoted later saying “All these [Iraqi] lives are taken every single day by America, by this government. So a life for a life.”

The day before Thanksgiving break, Wilson was not going to be indicted, and Michael Brown was dead. Brendan Tevlin was dead, and some crazy brown man was on the loose. I was falling in love with Toni Morrison, and a teacher I had asked if language was always and completely incapable. We said yes, and she stopped class fifteen minutes early. She asked about the jury decision, and we mumbled responses. “I don’t,” she said, “see race. I don’t think Wilson is a racist. I don’t see people saying what happened to Brendan Tevlin is racism. I don’t understand how you can hold a gun up to someone and just see a color.”

So with that statement, without any regards to statistics suggesting institutionalized racism particularly involving police brutality, Brendan Tevlin and Ali Muhammad Brown, Michael Brown, and Darren Wilson became simply other cases where color didn't exist and color was causing problems. Where, while white people had spiraled out of racism, had learned to be inclusive, had foundationally and progressively changed, colored people still could not let go of their color. Where white people could see that safety had sacrifices, and colored people still could not understand that violence was never the answer. Even if my teacher was the most brilliant person I have ever met; even if she seemed to understand everything about love, life, art, language, beauty, and kindness; even if she was so passionate and wise she brushed all her students to silence; even if her classes on “Beloved” were so deep that they hurt; she was indisputably and irrevocably white, and she was still wondering if Toni Morrison would ever write a book that had a more universal theme, that wasn’t so political. Colorblindness is a refusal to acknowledge that whiteness is not an ultimate goal, that color, especially in this country, will never be only skin-deep.

For most of my life I’d been stuck in the poser-perfect New Jersey suburb where Chris Christie resided while he was still skinny. The town had turned so Asian that all my friends knew Psy was too old, too gimmicky, and had the swagger of a real politician, two years before “Gangnam Style” blew up. Before we stopped in high school, we made yellow a religion, and if you saw me in the hallway you’d call me Bok Choy and the girl on my right Napa Cabbage, and even if we all had peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, we’d gush about Kam Man Food like it was some type of heaven, not a fish-smelling, tabloid-selling, Hi-Chew-having thing in the miniature mall right in front of Costco. We memorized nigahiga’s “How to be Ninja” until we made it classic. The azn-pryde sentiment in my adolescence was so strong it reeked. But after it had passed, I hadn’t thought about it at all, until last July, when I’d given a ride to a seventh-grade family friend and he rattled his Asian Man Philosophies the whole way to his house two towns over. I was shocked by how a middle-schooler could be so daring, so unapologetically political, so willing to marry the personal with the general.

In middle school, more than anything else, I wanted to associate myself with something—even if that something was a gimmick, and even if I had to make that thing up myself. I wanted it to be extraordinary and grandiose, as perfect as power. I thought, and still think, we were at the head of a movement that dissipated because our models were teenagers not adults, our roots were in comedy not in history, and our aims were personal not collective. It dissipated like many other attempts at Asian Pride—the cultish “Got Rice?” song of the 1990s, the young business professionals with import model pasts, and all the other suburbs in or around or away from New Jersey with yellow middle-school kids drawing mochis on their English notebooks.

I’m writing this article after watching the first three episodes of the new season of “Fresh Off the Boat,” and replaying the short cameo of Evan and Emery bringing a dog wrapped in a bow to their daughter-wanting dad, and recognizing some version of my mother in Jessica Huang, and remembering how for the first decade of my life my parents survived on four hours of sleep every night. Not many shows elicit that complex a reaction. If you compare “Fresh Off the Boat” to its 1994 predecessor “All American Girl,” which was both cancelled after one season and disowned by the Korean American community it was trying to represent, you can immediately tell that Fresh Off the Boat is funnier, more relatable, tighter, and just better. Even if both are based on the works of iconic Asian American figures, like Margaret Cho’s comedy routines and Eddie Huang’s memoir—their differences lie in a subtle change at the center of the storytelling, at who’s pointing fingers at whom.

If she was a small idea in April, by November, Lucy had become a person—strained, muscled, and as flimsy as guilt. I knew the stiff yellow restaurant she worked at and that Chinese song about the moon she sang to mock her twinkie best friend. I knew that “The Outsiders” was the only book she’d ever really read. I knew she’d kept the same middle school copy in her pocket until the cover ripped straight off the block like an old scar. She was a virgin. She loved driving fast and killing the headlights. She was as suburban as I was. So Lucy was there, birthed from infatuation. She was my muse; she was someone I never wanted to be and someone I’d always wanted to be. Lucy was to me what Sherane was to Kendrick Lamar, what Beatrice was to Dante, what Yunior was to Junot Diaz. She was born from dust, and I loved her.

You don’t have to write to know obsession like I know obsession. You don’t have to create to know what little reward feelings provide, how your personal tragedies sound out loud, how little is left after a relationship’s dissolved like sugar in some wet and blistering heat. You don’t need a broken heart to know that there is nothing as undefined as dissatisfaction. The things that drive you to do what you do are right on the underside of your gut.

I am curious about obsession because it is so powerful yet so unquantifiable. Though it is as musical and romantic as a countermelody or midnight, in some ways, it defines existence. “Lighthead” by Terrance Hayes was the first book of poetry I’d ever bought, and in the pages, the longing was inescapable and inextricable from the intellect, because like him and all the people he writes about in his poems, like Harriet Tubman, like Tupac Shakur, like his wife, like everyone in and out of city subways—I wanted to be “oblong with longing” or “light longing for lightness” or “the devil of longing” or mixed with “solace, survival, multiple genres of longing.” Married happily and so utterly adorably, he seemed to be the expert of longing, the connoisseur of obsession. He seemed to tell me what I’d already known, that life was little more than obsessing over the past and longing for more.

If I should die, I want my death to be as glorious as life. I want to be swung up in flung fate on the brink of a car crash, shifted in the blank air like broken glass. I want to be the oldest person on earth. I want the knife pointed at my throat. I want to protect something devastatingly right. I want it all: elegies, rhapsodies, tears, news clippings, and those wicked laughs in the backroom. I want my body folded wrong; I want destruction for construction. I want to die from Pop Rocks and Coke. I want to die next to someone I’m desperately in love with. I want to have known that person for three days. I want to have known that person for 70 years. I want to do it like Svidrigailov. I want to grow old. I want to dream up heaven, and I want it to look so much like a Greek mansion that even Athena hides in the kitchen. I want to encompass death, to wear it on my sleeve or keep it under my skin, because, well, if you can’t find something to live for, you sure should find something to die for.

That paragraph was blunt. I wrote it with abnormal, un-conversational conviction. I wrote it to both glorify and qualify, to make death as close as breath. I wrote it in a world where the dead do not die but pass away, kick the bucket, depart this life, meet their maker. Where death is often viewed as dark. Where death in the media takes form in ghosts, zombies, and other members of the supernatural more often than not. Where death seems unnatural and deviant, something too far to touch.

But there is no other controversy like death, like Michael Brown’s blood oozing onto the streets of Ferguson, like Trayvon Martin’s and Walter Scott’s and Brendon Tevlin’s and so many others. There is no other market like death, like medicines meant to expand lifespan, like the fountain of youth, like the funeral industry. Americans hate death. Americans love death. While some accuse Americans of erasing and denying it, others accuse them of glorifying it. While some view suicide, especially that of young people, as a catalyst to reevaluate cultural kindness and societal values, others accuse those who do commit suicide, even Vincent Van Gogh or Virginia Woolf or Robin Williams, for not thinking long enough to find a reason to live. We deal with death by “forgetting it.” We deal with death, even with national tragedies, by “getting over it.” Or we don’t deal with death. We love to live. In too many ways in American society, death, unlike life, isn’t individually practical, isn’t profitable, doesn’t have potential to get a college education or raise a family, doesn’t have any potential, period.

I bought a record the other day with a price as insignificant as the name on the disk.

I started out by walking down the stairs in a blank corner of Mount Auburn Street. The walls smelled more like piss than the rest of Cambridge. I noticed good speakers, the kind that makes music more intimate than lust. Noticed what came out of them too—a liquid-smooth kind of rhythm, an uninviting and reckless shift of beats—though I couldn’t name the band. Spent a good half hour in the store. Kept trying to find something that would look pretty and simple on red brick walls. Settled on “Can’t Stop the Prophet” by Jeru the Damaja, not because I liked him or I had heard the song before. Liked, instead, the crisp white of the paper, the red sticker on the black record. Didn’t know much about Jeru the Damaja or the song on the disc. Only saw him two years ago in a video on Youtube arguing with Lauryn Hill, the only rapper I knew from the time period, and figured if he was sick enough to chill with L Boogie he’d be pretty enough to put on my wall. Didn’t think about it much after that, even when someone saw the vinyl gummed next to its cover on my red wall and asked about his albums, and I had next to nothing to say.

There are more examples to list, especially having to do with hip-hop, especially having to do with culture, especially having to do with art and the consumption of art. Like the men I sat next to in the theater for “Straight Outta Compton” who fist-pumped and bobbed their heads drunkenly to the music as if it were a concert, who replied to every part of the movie, regardless of emotional weight, with “isn’t this awesome” and “I loooooove this shiiiit.” Like non-black girls who wear dreadlocks for how it looks and how it feels. Like me, an Asian-American girl from middle-class suburban New Jersey, blasting Tupac while doing calculus homework or doodling “death is my sect guess my religion” when the closest encounter I had with the police was a “good morning” in the parking lot. Like all those self-proclaimed OGs in prestigious college campuses, white-as-cream suburbs, movie theaters, nightclubs, and libraries.