In my own defense, I will state here at the beginning that I had already fallen in love with her by the time she told me that she, twenty-five years old, was married.  I was meeting her for the first time at a queer Asian mixer held at a West Village bar near the New York University campus.  Hopelessly incapable of mixing at mixers, I’d only agreed to go in order to touch base with her about a community project we were both working on.  I dismissed my last class a little early that night and rushed to the event, but noticed upon ducking into the basement establishment that I was the only person there who didn’t belong to the local gay Asian Pacific Islander men’s group.  Unfazed and rather relieved, I’d just joined some friends for a first round of drinks when I saw her long-limbed figure cut through the crowd.  Slowing to a stop, she meditatively fingered behind her ear a black strand of unevenly cropped hair that had escaped the cowl of her hoodie.  I watched as she pointedly scanned the length of the bar and then turned to say something to the nearest cluster of men, one of whom gestured with a sloshing martini glass in my direction.  Those eyes, which I would learn could mischievously hide themselves from me when she smiled, passed over me once before returning to settle on a frame that she had mistaken for a boy’s in the dim light.

Huay-Yi had just started law school at NYU, and as an advanced PhD student, I’d just joined the fledgling graduate employee union, GSOC/Local 2110 of the UAW, as a new teaching assistant.  Years before, NYU became the first private university in the country to recognize and sign a contract with its graduate employee union, an event which came in the wake of other student-led victories to establish ethnic studies and services for students of color on campus.  That fall, in the fifth year of the Bush administration, GSOC was challenged by a new National Labor Relations Board ruling that absolved private universities of their obligation to honor the will of their teachers to form unions and bargain collectively for healthcare, job protections, and a living wage.  As my colleagues and I returned to the classroom at the start of the new academic year, the deadline for re-negotiating our union contract drew near and then passed, and in spite of our ever-louder demonstrations on campus, the university administration silently began to roll back our benefits.

If Huay-Yi knew that I had a lot on my mind that night, she didn’t let on.  Somewhere between trading stories about large Taiwanese families and comparing our histories as rebellious suburban tomboys, we’d stopped talking about political organizing and begun to deal with the personal, each forcing herself to unlearn before the other that fear and shame of sameness and stereotyping which always looms up between Asian American women.  I recognized something in Huay-Yi, in the solitary child in her, in the immigrants’ daughter in her who learned to play word games with a dexterity to make you forget that her English is hand-me-down.  Sporting her debonaire smile, she caught me in poses that made me laugh at myself, and I knew then that she would be the cause great of changes in me.  The news that I had no right to want her came far too late in that first conversation of ours, and in following weeks, the flush of our initial friendship grew into something that was undeniably more pitched and passionate.  Three months later, Huay-Yi left her wife for me.

I am convinced, however, that our relationship only unfolded as it did due to forces that were highly circumstantial and external to our feelings for one another, not to mention unconventional in the realm of romance.  Because the same week that Huay-Yi and I met, GSOC went on strike. 

This essay is about betrayal, a term which suits the most honest way I’ve found to talk about the mutually-reinforcing decisions I made a year ago to a) engage in a job action and b) pursue a married woman.  It was the first time I’d done either, and like any other queer scholar of color I know, when facing a personal crisis, I turn to theory for therapy.