hsugrits's Xanga

Work-in-progress

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:12:31 GMT

Immigrant Queers of Color and the Critique of the Hegemon

Chapter: On Union-Busting and Home-Wrecking, or Betrayal as an Affect of Contemporary Theory in Practice

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.

she says i'm just a friend

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 06:18:26 GMT

six months later, and also my 27th birthday. i find myself back here, a place she recently referred to as the realm of lost identity. for months, i have called it love. cannibal thoughts, consuming desire, unshakeable anxiety, competitive and self-excoriating reflection, makeshift solutions, devoted paranoia, the hunt for emotional highs, disciplined reactions, ambitious declarations, silent searchings, frenetic journaling, strange romance, nightly nightmares...love. the surprising thing is, this still feels new. i am still worshipful of this wondrous person i am trying to understand, and increasingly more of my life, my identity, is lost at her altar.

peppermint -- i still can't bear to name her here because i am writing, as always, our fiction -- told me tonight that she wants us to take a break. i said i understood, and of my incredibly unproductive but fellowship-funded summer, i do understand more than i have admitted to her. i unknotted my friendship bracelet purchased for a dollar in a mexican zocalo, which objectively (and regardless of the undue gravity of the following) replaced a ring she took off, in order to wash a sink-full of dishes tonight and all i could think about were the tiny tricolored lunches i packed for her as often as i could in tupperware she ridiculed me for coveting all summer long. we all learn from childhood to love people in our individual ways, and my love can be as shamefully modest as it is proud, as myopic as it is grandiose. this summer crawled by at such a slow pace that the act of retracing our earliest steps has been nearly imperceptible.

for the record, these are my impressions of our much-anticipated summer vacation together. i appear in her account as just a "friend," and my general pain at this callous handle has gradually grown to a pointed realization that she is writing, still, for her ex-lover, while i write...for you.

obsidian eyeballs of flattened Aztec birds

clackety wooden animals nodding their heads

pudgy fingers at my hipbones and short annoying men deliberately in my way

handsome young men speaking a shy service-industry Spanish

sweet-faced girls slowing down their words for me

bathrooms with drains in the floor and everything wet with the shower

sleep that never gets the kinks out of my back

patient sitting and watching by a window of a speeding bus, wind buffetting my face and torso, felt even in sleep

salty briney bubbly foamy gush up my nose speeding me ahead, arms stroking until my knuckles clumsily graze a sandy rocky ocean bed and pebbles collect in my chest

peppermint sitting on the terrace, back facing me through a screened door, quiet and simple declaration, "i'm excited about the school year starting." i rush out to kiss her on the head because i know what that is for her to say...

dark streets, graffiti writers crouched down, a small trash fire starting in the middle of an intersection, a crowd of shadowy forms gathering

sheet-sized banner with a woman bearing arms and a baby saying that rebellion is justified when the world longs to be free. letters formed out of rice bags sewn together to spell, fuero ulises

cool walls made entirely of marble, gold on the ceiling, cacti growing impossibly straight (like green churros), the sun of a Merchant Ivory history, me hoping that a world-wise security guard will stop talking to us

dropping to the curb of a shaded side of a sunlit Oaxaca street to look at digicam photos. sitting next to her, feeling like the unfamiliar is colonized by her casual company

mexico city a second time, the feeling of just having missed a tense scene in the zocalo, hammer and sickle flag the size of my bedroom footprint flying above the square

the grandeur i wanted to see in Hotel Isabel's tall ceilings, glass brick floors, narrow balconies, neon sign

by myself in the metro, feeling free enough to put on my headphones and mouth my music, thinking that some spared double-takes means i'm blending in, which is what i love about cities and is all i've ever wanted

walk to frida's house -- the anxiety and reluctance of following a timetable -- with inadequate maps and a finger stuck in a page. thinking frida alternately frivolous, sad, and fearsome as the sole source of the great love that we now associate with her and diego, mexico, avant-gardists, and marxists. i want to understand, harmonize with what i see; bring my friends' loves to this place of endurance, courage, honesty, daring, life but sterility, and where she died

a small black and white snapshot in the bottom right corner of a wooden case with a glass top mounted waist-high shows them kissing in a shaft of sunlight, against an everyday background -- this house, maybe. his big hands surround her, squeeze her forearms without clenching, but what i see is her face, closed eyes, upturned with such a dynamic quality of light that i can read her passion for him, or for this kiss...it's an undated photograph so there's no way of reading her history, her miseries, her forgiveness, or her willing oblivion here

next to this are reproductions of hand-written letters: my dear heart, my dear little boy, your little girl, the love of my life -- salutations that rip from time as much significance as they can, no wasted thoughts, a desire and affection that feeds on itself, a momentum that feels recklessly out of control

on the way back to the hotel, i think about how much i miss her alongside the act of missing her, only with less exactitude and clarity than the conception. i am only bold when i have something to give her, and i had decided to love her again without calculation

for many hours, days afterwards, i think about writing her love letters.

my peppermint wants the peace that makes possible adventure; thinks about freedom more than the average person; wants desperately (and more than i do, even) to be seen for who she is; wants a charismatic fantasy to chase; wants to see for herself; wants you to act first, go first; wants to win by a fraction. we wrestle without knowing why. may the chase keep you in love with me, and may our lucha be libre.

free association

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 05:10:13 GMT

john calls to say, "remember, no matter what happens, everything is going to be okay." he totes his proud heart up and down collegiate streets in another city, and his crisp voice on the phone keeps me wanting to be proud of myself, too. it's strange, i told her the same thing weeks ago on the corner of university and 14th. a slope in the sidewalk had me looking up into her eyes as i promised her what you only believe when it comes from someone you can trust to love you through days you can't see the end of, and from afar.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 06:43:54 GMT

in the very worst moments, which recur in five-minute cycles, i think that my life must be a reprehensible game, and i am sorry for being here.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 06:32:37 GMT

i remind myself that i've been broken up with before, and that i'm fairly practiced at containing the fallout. all the other times, i could imagine her returning to a routine that just simply excluded me, but this time, it's nearly impossible to think about what i am losing next to what she has lost. if it's true that our condition of possibility was a lie, then should i quail at what the truth will bring?

i've spent the last twelve hours waiting for a blizzard, keeping huddled and quiet for fear of making things worse, hating my inaction worse than my hysterical foot injury, allowing my anxiety to cannibalize itself. she's been scanning the ground for pieces of herself that may have tumbled out of her arms, full with whatever she could carry when she left her home. there are not enough gleaners, and soon it'll all be buried under six to ten inches of snow. it seems now like it would be an insult to give this hunched and frantic searching the name of freedom, or selfhood, or newness, but these are precisely what it is, and we recognize those we have loved and will love again by the strange grace with which they dip and move.

tomorrow, she will most surely greet my protests with a line about what i thought would happen, and i will say that i never wanted it to come to this, and we will both try to do each other the courtesy of not mentioning blame, which seems not to fit anyway with romantic outcomes that are as dependent on time and circumstance as they are on the essence of our lovers (but if she must carry it still, i will try to help her, and our eyes will burn together in the hot glare of the potlatch). tomorrow, i will offer her things that she can't or won't accept, i will beg her to remember still-born words and others that struggled briefly for breath, i will try to inspire in her my own dreams of rooms without ceilings. while she moves away from me, i will stand still as long as i can with freezing feet and wait for the thaw.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 06:22:31 GMT

i am indicted by what i don't know. this is purgatory for someone who believes that she can think her way through anything...and who tries, and then subjects her failure to additional analysis. i want to stop being the person that others tell to lighten up, i want to short-circuit the part of me that knows where the joke lies but refuses to approach it, i want to be unafraid of people's laughter. i don't know how i got this way. i find myself alone with these thoughts: maybe their love is like a lick or a melody that finds its way into a humble song intended for a cycle that is more than the sum of its parts; like an inked blueprint of their apartment, an inventory of memory, a still-life, a test; like a black dog who grows and sheds under their watchfulness and for whom the imagined pleasure of a daily trip to the dog run they hope, with spare thought, is enough; like intermingled books whose dotted spines remind them of the intrusion of foreign thoughts; like windows whose unchanging views document the minor birdflights and the blown light bulbs that make up history.

my love, you bristle at my ignorance but i have never been able to conceive of more than these snatches of your coexistence with another. maybe your love is not an accretion at all, maybe it's like never being alone; like never wanting to be alone; like the lease on hope achieved when a wish lands on a receptive ear; like the implacable emptiness of time given a structure and a measure and a personality; like another who breathes for you.

it's scary to hear only the echo of my own words late at night. everything is a metaphor for everything else and the only thing spontaneous is my own creeping silence. it's not unnatural, i suppose, that i do not know what you're thinking right now, but the weight of what has happened sits on me like your familiar dread. i want to share the impact, if only to enable us to keep talking about the same thing, but i know that i can't fill out the emotional contours of my role in this without overturning the honesty of my own feelings for you -- and for what might in fact prove very soon to be my own loss. i only say here that i have done what i have done in order each time to finger your sharp edges just once more. long ago in our relationship i saw the outline of you in my life, a distinct silhouette that you stepped into from time to time, the degree of light the only evidence of whether your body, which glows in the dark of my room, was present or not. i love you, and that is all i know.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 07:38:24 GMT

we're evolving. i see the signs. here's an invisible exoskeleton to protect me from social censure and un-sympathies, here's a new tiny gland to pump out patience, here's a cartilage nob in the inner ear to counter disequilibrium, and here's a sixth sense to remain trained on her when we're apart. oh, wait...she meant we are evolving. we talk for hours with fingertips never leaving each other's skin and think timidly about a day when she can close her eyes and stay. "things are changing, can't you feel it?" of course. i feel nothing else.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 06:52:59 GMT

she said, "you always sound so morose when we talk -- is it because of something i'm doing?" i looked at the bottle of wine i'd uncorked an hour ago and hid from myself between misshapen stacks of books, i looked at my empty glass and imagined filling up another as i told her no, nothing wrong, of course i understand. i'm writing now because it matters...saying things in different ways means essentially saying different things. i have spent so much of the last 2 months trying not to lose her that the time we spend together now demands another way of touching. when i look at her sometimes i feel ten-years-old and it's summer in norcross and the crickets tell us it's cool enough to come out and play for a couple of hours before dark so i lace my shoes and hear the screen door slam behind me and i wanna know what she wants to do today...i would know where we're going if i could stop looking at her but i'm afraid she'll disappear into the trees or cut a sudden path across somebody's lawn so we keep tramping single-file and i can't imagine a love better than this even though sometimes she can't be where i want her to be. for two people who should have nothing to offer each other but fear, we are remarkably strong and full and already knowing about all sorts of things we haven't even had time to tell each other yet.

comps: day four...wait, am i counting friday?

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 03:21:42 GMT

[groan] i have just finished my nearly complete draft of bryan's exam, my second. here was the question:

your minor field can be read as an index of transformations in subjectivity from the late enlightenment through the romantic periods, from the american revolution through the civil war, or from a republican print culture to the advent of a mass public. nearly haf the titles on the list can be categorized as "autobiographical," although only by recognizing the flexibility of that term, which itself emerged in the nineteenth century. [lots of words...] select four works from your list, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, with at least one work from the eighteenth century. spend up to half of your essay discussing the ways in which generic concerns relate to the autobiographical concerns or anxieties in each. then, in the remaining 1500 or so words, develop an argument about variations and transformations in subject formation and literary forms from 1770-1860.

thanks, bryan. i didn't exactly observe the structure he suggested. i'm having shooting psychic pains right now over whether or not i in fact developed an argument in the exam about how subjectivity transformed in a 90 year span that occurred 200 years before i was born. but whatev. listening to ciara now, i just uncorked my last bottle of red wine -- the $7.90 bottle, and it's the pricey one. gurgle. now i move on to outlining phil's exam, the longest and the hardest...PAPER, that is. i can't stop writing/thinking like a 7th grader but as some of you have heard i was cool in 7th grade.

still don't know what affect is! help! gurgle. PEACE.

comps: day three

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 23:27:30 GMT

jjjjuuuuust finished the first draft of my first exam. i wrote on irigaray, cixous, wittig, sedgwick, and sojourner truth. i can't fucking believe i did that. here was the question:

which theorists from your list prove most useful for thinking about marginalization in terms of race, nation, diaspora, and class (regardless of whether they explicity treat these differences in their work)? how do these theorists provide a framework for understanding the relationship between (white?) women's marginalization, the construction of masculinity, and/or queerness, on the one hand, and that of racialized or otherwise socially denigrated subjects, on the other hand? if you wish, you may use a literary text (from your major field, minor field, or one not on your lists) to explicate the intersections between feminist/queer theory and critical race/postcolonial theory that your chosen authors mine.

now i have to start outlining (which is actually my favorite part of the process) my next one. i don't have any original words to spare so i won't blog any more right now. maybe after the L word premiere tonight at 10pm.