Preparing to See Hope: On the Utopic Potentiality of the Stories We Share

Dear Cathy,

I framed my response to your presidential address as a letter in hopes that this intimate form will find you and others in the vein of the words you cite from Audre Lorde, “the personal as political.” Writing to you in this way allows me to aspire after the intimacy denied by the virtual 2021 ASA conference, to imagine what it would have been like to be in a shared space, feeling the urgency of your call for “Love and Resistance in a time of COVID.” This letter, then, might be read as a yearning for social and intellectual associations that have been made dangerous, not least by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by the increased policing of our work as scholars and teachers in a nation and within institutions organized around the violences of settler colonialism and white supremacist politics hostile to the flourishing of minoritized life and knowledges.

Let me begin by thanking you for the story of your experience growing up as a mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee in Valdosta, Georgia. Your evocative descriptions helped ground me in time and place, from the significance of Valdosta as a site of “refuge” during the American Civil War to its transformation over the course of Reconstruction and Jim Crow to the 1980s, when it became the scene of the “most formative” years of your childhood. The reflections you shared on the loneliness you experienced, and the painful “lesson of indifference” instructed by your father, who believed it best to keep the racist crimes committed against your family “to oneself simply because ‘no one cared’ and doing otherwise would lead to undeniable trouble and unreconciled hurt,” were deeply affecting and illuminating. Your story finds resonance with the work of Leslie Bow, Lee Isaac Chung, and Monique Truong, who elucidate histories of Asian racial formation and sociality in the US South.¹ As a recent transplant to Tallahassee, a north Floridian city that often feels like a part of south Georgia, these texts and your words have helped me negotiate the conflicting feelings and palimpsestic temporal geographies of a place I am still trying to make into home.

To thank you for this piece of your personal history, I want to offer a story from my childhood. Unlike you, whose youth was shaped by constant movement, I grew up mostly rooted in place in New York City, apart from the short move my family made from Astoria to Little Neck, Queens, when my sister and I were entering elementary school, so we could take advantage of the better public education available in this predominantly white and Asian neighborhood. As Vietnamese but ethnically Chinese Americans, we had no trouble finding friends who looked like us. But I do have disconcerting memories, the wrongness of which only took shape upon reflection years after—the teacher who assumed my sister and I belonged in ESL because we were too shy to speak up and another who “let” me take an oral exam for my class because the other students clamored that my inherent “model minority” studiousness would score them all a hundred.

The memory that sticks with me most occurred on a day that felt like any other. It was sunny and warm, and I was annoyed that I had to accompany my mother to Stop & Shop to buy groceries. We had picked up some fresh produce and bagels and were wheeling down the refrigerated aisle when my mother’s cart bumped into that of an elderly white woman. I still remember the look of disgust that creeped over her face, followed by her loud exhortation to “go back to your country” and similar expletives. I remember my ears burning, registering the shock of this unexpected encounter. I remember pushing the cart and my mother along, hurrying us out of range of this woman’s explosive anger. I remember the anguish on my mother’s face when she stopped and cried, “What do you want me to do? I’m going as quickly as I can.” Most of all, I remember the...