Undefinition and Hanging In the Middle

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?

To see yellow in America is to re-understand racial realities not through the simple oppressed-oppressor lens but through something more multi-faceted. Because someone can be both oppressed and an oppressor. And just because you feel the same hopelessness and immobility as others, you may not have an easy time empathizing with them. Because as a minority, doing your own thing, running your own store, working hard, and playing by the rules might never be enough. Like photography, adding color to the picture makes things complicated. But it also makes a picture more real, flesh-like, close enough to touch.

But I also think that being undefined in a binary doesn’t have to be that dramatic. It isn’t always life or death. Sometimes it’s just about feeling good, this gut reaction to knowing, really knowing, with everything you are or thought you could be, that you are actually living.

I guess at one point I was frustrated that no one else got it. That not only was it unpleasant, but it was boring, to talk about Chinese food like it was a metaphor for existence, to somehow incorporate Hubei and oxtail soup whenever writing about “my race,” to talk speeches about Japanese internment camps when I was not emotionally mature enough, to get all symbolic with a dragon named Pete, to get angry at the word chink. Which was why, I reasoned in tenth grade, all of the characters I wrote were unapologetically and stupidly white. Somewhere along the line, I, along with the rest of yellow America it seemed, had convinced myself that yellow characters were incapable of experiences that didn’t conclude in the predictable “I’m not Asian, I’m not American, I’m neither,” or even more infuriatingly, “I’m both!!!” It was like we were incapable of anything other than undefinition and insecurity. It was like we hated being marginalized, but once we had the ability to talk for ourselves, we didn’t know how not to be marginalized. It was the difference, as Toni Morrison has pointed out multiple times, between getting freed and being free. I was frustrated, so I tried my hand at one, a Chinese-American girl named Lucy, and I couldn’t believe how boring she was too.

When it’s not deadly, it’s boring to be undefined. Because blurring lines may only be interesting if the lines are there to begin with. If you don’t know who you are, you can’t act, and there’s no consistency in your actions to make them mean something. Truthfully, most people I know live like stars. They feel themselves in a way that humbles. They have worlds in their heads. But sometimes if you point a gun to a throat, only a sliver will come out. Sometimes the box of language is too small to express what you think. And if you have a pretty formula laid in front of you, it’s hard to kill the box and remember the yellow sun.

I am searching for words, the perfect ones that kick me in the stomach. I’ll roll a couple pretty ones, mine and not mine. Bare feet kissing the ground. Hardwood floor like skin. When you fall in love with a city it is forever and it is like forever. You can be nothing and still breathing. You can be a not-breathing something. And the kind you need a context for, like the last line of Pulp Fiction. Or last March when I thought I finished writing my best story ever and told my sister that life is meaningless unless you have the language for it. I keep trying to think of the perfect words to describe my yellowness but I can’t. Nothing kicks me more than life. Life is a cop-out metaphor, but at one point, I’ll have to admit defeat. I guess it’s natural. I guess I haven’t known life or yellow, yellow or life, any other way. But here it goes. My life is yellow, yellow as the sun, and I can’t tell you how good it feels resting in my skin.

Christina M. Qiu ’19 lives in Matthews Hall. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.