Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

But what the people who say that don’t understand is: when in all aspects of life the odds are entirely against you, it can be worth paying for even a tiny increase in hope.

The vast majority of the population walking the streets, coming in and out of stores, was Asian, and I was overwhelmed, my eyes watered as a well of feeling pushed its way up from the bottom of my stomach into my throat. I was so happy to have returned to where I felt I belonged.

Have I made myself this accommodating? A harmless vessel for their confusion and rage? They must see me as soft and small and unthreatening, because I have never suggested otherwise.

I’m sorry, I never saw you as Asian until just now! We all had a good laugh about it. I felt a kind of relief. I had passed, been accepted, blended in—at least with this one woman. It took a few minutes for the initial shame to kick in. Then years for it to curdle inside me, mixed with other instances like this, to really make me sick.

I ask if he’s listening and he says yes, though he has not said anything in response. This is one of his worst qualities, the way he chooses silence in certain conversations, so not only do I feel idiotic and crazed, like I’m talking to myself, I also have to do the work of speculating what he’s thinking.

Somebody once asked me to identify the emotions that most strongly affect my life and the actions I do or don’t take. I couldn’t name them at the time, but now I’ve thought more about the question. Here is the answer I’ve come up with: revenge and regret and fear and guilt.

Maybe I was worried that people would think he was with me because he was trying to stop racism? Maybe I was worried he was actually dating me to stop racism? Maybe it had to do with me knowing he would never stop racism by wearing a shirt that said STOP RACISM!?

Like a newborn with sensory overload, but what you’re overloading on is this sense of race, the colors that stand out against an increasingly white background. And all you can feel and see is this difference, wary and on edge of what could happen wherever you go. And here beside you is somebody who does not understand.

How many improbable moves did it take for us to reach each other? How many miles? How many decisions made by those before us, to carry themselves from one place to another, from the familiar to the new?

It is difficult to parse which parts of me come from my family, from being Chinese, from being Asian American, from being American, from being a woman, from being of a certain generation, and from, simply, being.

There are typically two paths available to the child of an unhappy marriage: unknowingly repeat the same offenses as your parents or deliberately go far off in the other direction to prove you will not be them.

What greater loneliness and longing is there than living with someone you once knew so well, and who is now hardly around?

Do not think that I overstress the horrors of race prejudice. One cannot be indifferent to the sufferings of one’s own people any more than one can ignore a severe personal injury.

Who isn’t here because we are? It was innocent. We were having fun, and for a good cause. Inclusion and exclusion worked in these veiled ways.

our differences feel starker, like whatever is between us is stretching cavernously wide, a gorge cut away deeper and deeper, too dangerous to cross.

Here is my philosophy: a natural response to chaos is the desire for control.

Feels like I have a thousand paper cuts at the back of my head.

It’s as if being white is the one thing that defines me, J said. But not all of us are lucky enough to get to choose how the world defines us.

Knowing what desires we have had (some flaring, beautiful ambitions), And have had to let go, And knowing what questions we have put off answering, Slurring over them, always, Seeing double, gladly, (Fearful, unbigoted minds grasping at both sides of every question), It is not surprising, only regrettable that we should have come to this. —Diana Chang, “Knowing What Desires We Have Had”

“There’s a Chinese saying about this. What do you think is the most important quality to having a good connection with another person?” “That you get along with them?” “Well, of course. You have to have something in common. You can talk to them. You get along, that’s just a basic thing. An obvious thing. What is the next step? Even more important than that?” “I don’t know.” “You have to be able to reflect each other’s hearts.”

So much for no conflict. If I had to chart our relationship, it would look like tall skinny mountains dropping into deep gorges, over and over. Am I replicating this pattern in my relationship? I confirm my suspicions as I scroll through hundreds of photos of J, swinging between high and low emotional states.

It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside, their inner workings built both from memories and habits and histories made up from the exterior world, and from those known only between the two involved, that exist only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other. A relationship is particular in the way people are particular. Whatever lessons one can glean from other people’s relationships can only be taken in pieces, assembled into bare, minimal instructions.

I go through the line. I have no coherent thoughts, just a rush of feeling, like oversaturated, garish bursts of color. I look back and see my dad standing in the same spot, watching me go. He waves. I wave back. I used to see them, the criers, in the security line, and even though it was an acceptable place for public displays of grief and sadness, where everybody blatantly ignored and allowed for them, I had judged. What was wrong with those people? My guesses had been shallow. They were sad to leave vacation. They were scared of flying. They were drunk or high. They were the type of emotional people who cried all the time. They didn’t want to go home. They were upset to leave home. But these are none of the reasons I am crying in the security line, and when the Macau airport agent checks my passport I can barely say thank you.

Mostly, I did sleep, or existed in the space between.

I could see pieces of our lives floating among the snowflakes, melting on the windshield, and for those brief moments I was living with the certainty that I was exactly where I should be, where everything was deeply quiet yet deeply alive. I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand, despite how much I wanted to or tried, how my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past, they were not mine to determine, not mine to map out, no matter how much they shaped what I had become, however much we were connected, I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount, but what was truly mine was only a little, no, a minuscule speck of it all, and while this was a sort of devastation to me, one I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice, at least, to be on the way, in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I had left to go.