last night, I dreamed I had not been able to excise my bio mother from my life. the white woman who physically, mentally, and emotionally harmed, harms my brown, Asian, Muslim dad. re-entering reality took conscious fact checks of the story in my head. she no longer knows my address. she no longer is in contact. she no longer has access to me. but she does have access to him, and with my oxygen mask on by threads some days, I have little breathing room to offer.
the gaseous nightmare that filled yesterday's air felt like a fever dream. a lucid dream? a, I could get lost in this and find myself disassociating in the bathroom again, dream. a, refrain from panicking and asking friends, family if they have self-defense tools on them because one push was not enough to pull bystanders into honoring her life, dream. a, everybody claims Asian people are white, dream, but when I continue on in this daydream I scream in the void about U.S. imperialism, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Japanese internment camps, and the Muslim ban, and dying Filipino healthcare works, and nuclear bombs and the spillover carnage of war, and terrorizing SoutheastAsia and quietly deporting Cambodian refugees, and denied visas, and green cards, and I run out of oxygen because I ripped my mask off and SCREAMED. I SCREAMED. I modeled it after a myth, that Asian people are excluded from the violence of white supremacy, of racism, of xenophobia, of the patriarchy, of homophobia and transphobia, of capitalism. and it landed as softly as when my dad confided in me, that your favorite car company forced him to go into the belly of the gator, where half of the conference attendees contracted Covid, and Florida was maskless in its hatred for bodies as rich and as soft as the earth. and that space isn't alone, I remember the daydream of the Lonestar state after 9/11, or was it yesterday when Texas decided that it still hated Muslims. I'm relieved everyone in the synagogue survived. But it would be unsure to assume the Islamophobic carnage that is to come next is not violence, as well.
it's my white cousin proudly hating immigrants, yet crawling to me to request my Pakistani dad employ him at a Japanese company. it's being named after an elder, an aunt, inheriting the lineage of a family, and being called "Peace in the Middle Anees." it's feeling anxious around border patrol, and TSA, and stepping in front of my dad when a white man thought he might possibly get away with laying hands on him. it's Kasey's dad consistently blaming his discontent on those people over there, and tokenizing my dad to sidestep consequences. it's an ex calling me when Bin Laden was assassinated and asking if my family was "grieving." it's the number of white people who assume I agree with their racist, xenophobic bullshit because they're used to their peers doing so. it's the people who look like my friends and family being stalked by the state, incarcerated, deported. Murdered.
it's somewhere between love and desperation of closing my eyes and making sure I can still see the shape of their hearts, the warmth of their smiles, hear the melody of their names. that the joy, the power, the song of those sounds may be etched into a record that never dares remix with,
"The victim, whose identity has been withheld while officials notify her family, died at the station."
and I think about them. the people who stand by. watch. in real life, in real time. I know they're also the ones to look the other way from their racist family member, or their bro who assaults femmes, or their boss who insists on people putting their health on the line for their profit. they're invested in the performance, but the moment risk enters the room they decide they no longer are a part of this play. they're the ones who describe anti-Asian hate crimes resulting in death as "stuff" and casually share articles of trauma with no grief, just links with bodies, and ages, and names they try to claw into but lack the gentleness on their tongue to pronounce, all the while feeling they should be on the megaphone, directing this call and that response trying to convince us mass death is inevitable, normal. they'll know arigato grande's lyrics, humming thank you, next she'd like to try orientalist on for size when she outgrew appropriating Black culture, order Chinese food on genocidal holidays, but ask Asian elders to repeat their requests for support over and over and over again to prove to them it's necessary. I think about these people, who assume Asians are a monolith, a one class fits all, those other people over there. the ones who love curry, but the hate the responsibility of community care. in real time, in real life. the people who stand by. I think about them.
last night I dreamed, yesterday was another nightmare.
I ripped off my mask, my soul contorted and screamed.
it is a myth it is a lie it is propaganda it is a false god it is spiritual desperation that violence is normalized everywhere.
it has to be possible it has to be true it has to be gospel it has to be ancestral that his food, her hands, their growth, are markers of radical love resisting oppression from anywhere.
