Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

Sharing and shouting isn’t the issue so much as the corruption of living in real time. People experiencing everything at a remove through the eyes of a consumer (actual or potential), a future audience to judge. Some are adept at this anticipation; they gain massive followings.

How does one measure the space a person inhabits? How can one be sure of how much or how little one takes? And what is the best way to maneuver given one’s perceived size and status?

One’s early experiences in a new place are the most charged. They imprint the deepest and have the most influence over how one relates to that place.

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.

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.

Why is it bothering you now? One, you have the time. Two, traveling into unknown parts of the country is giving you raw skin and fresh eyes. 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.

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.

Why are we with white men? Is it because we’ve been taught all of these years from all of this white American media that whiteness is the epitome of attractiveness?

Or are we subconsciously trying to climb social and political ladders? Are we fitting into this stereotype of the gold-digging Dragon Lady Asian wife? (We hope not!) Or was it that, where we grew up and went to school, white people were more readily available? (Must play a role.) Or, my sister muses, are we trying to ensure that our kids are part white? (I am probably not having kids, I say. Okay, she says.)

“I’ve thought about that a lot lately—am I dating a white guy to make sure that my future kids are also white, and have it easier? Is that a form of survival?”

No matter how long we stay in this country, and no matter how “accent-free” our children learn to speak English, we are still regarded as foreigners, and as “foreigners” we are suspect as an enemy from overseas. —Helen Zia, 1984

Invisibility as harm, that of being overlooked and ignored. And now I’m thinking there is a third form of invisibility, of choice, of opting out, of going off into hiding, of separating off from the rest, so as not to exist.

“But what if he isn’t trying enough? What if there’s a cultural and experiential gap that can’t be closed? What if there’s something wrong with me?

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.