New Romantix
Performing Yellowness
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.
What You Knew
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?
Asians, Girls, and Hip-Hop
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.
Spokespersons and Empathy
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.
Girl
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.
