Which Side Are You On: A Novel

by Ryan Lee Wong

“Young people, these so-called revolutionaries, think they have some key, some big plan that’s going to save us. But what it took me a long, long time to understand is that you have to give up winning. Give it up! You think you give up your diploma now, and you’re gonna get some other trophy tomorrow. No.” He shook his head mournfully. “I watched them burn Watts in ’65. I wasn’t out there, but I was a young man and I understood in my bones why they did it. You know that kind of knowledge?”

I wanted to write about Rosa Parks, the first to sit against bus segregation. No, Dad corrected me, though he admired Parks, she wasn’t the first—the NAACP waited until they had the right case in this respectable, middle-aged woman; furthermore, the way the bus boycotts were taught watered down the influence of both leftist politics and Gandhian satyagraha in order to Mickey Mouse–ify King and Parks and other leaders.

“Of course I’d love to see a democratic socialist state in America. But what we’ve learned, in this time since the seventies, is how brutally this country treats anyone associated with the word communist.”

Mom knew the unromantic reality of radicalism: to follow an order, to be a soldier, to give up your life for a dream that, when it didn’t manifest, meant a lonely lifetime of carrying a decision that no one, not even your child, understood.

But this is what those right-wingers want: they want to take away our options, want to paint us as Reds to delegitimize us. Back then, they probably had to hire someone to find all these old articles and research my past. Now it only takes one Google search, and just like that, all these doors shut.

We didn’t know about COINTELPRO back then, or the extent of the surveillance, but we definitely knew we were being watched. I don’t regret anything. The only difference now is that we’ve seen what this country did to our friends who weren’t as lucky—who didn’t have, as you say, the same privilege. So we want you to understand the choices you’re making. And there are ways to do it that are smarter, aren’t so confrontational, and are no less radical or effective.”

It was the first time I glimpsed the truth that was now so clear: we gathered not just to make demands, not just to overturn the system, but because we needed to grieve together.

“I digitized our home movies a couple months ago, from that old camcorder. I sat there one night and watched them all: Dad giving you your first bath; you in your Superman pajamas, dancing around the living room; you at your first preschool, singing ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ You all sounded terrible, so out of tune. “I sat there and I cried the whole way. Then I watched them again. I cried because I could never have imagined giving birth to someone like that—so untouched by the world. That’s when I knew there was something magic that all our politics and theories couldn’t explain. That you could come from me.”