Wu had recently moved to L.A. to attend art school at UCLA. Almost immediately, she found a community at a bar called Silver Platter, which flashes its name in ice-blue neon on the corner of Seventh in Westlake, a Latin American neighborhood. For decades, the local Latinx trans community gathered at the Silver Platter, hosting talent shows, dancing with Mexican cis men in cowboy hats, and drinking four-dollar champagne. The bar itself is unexceptional with its scuffed checkered floor and vinyl chairs. But at night, the bar transforms when the women sing in their best taffeta. Some of them have the faces of sad childhoods, which they cover up with mascara and chandelier earrings. Erica, who is interviewed, said her father in Mexico beat her with his boots for being too feminine, but the real hurt, she said, was the shame of being beaten in public. Eventually, she ran away, riding north atop a freight train nicknamed “the Beast,” so called because untold numbers of stowaways had been maimed or killed falling off it. Then she crossed the border and made it to L.A. and the Silver Platter, where she found refuge away from her violent family, the border police, and the hate.

Wu and Erica are especially close, though Erica doesn’t speak English and Wu doesn’t speak Spanish. Still, they understand each other, claims Wu. “My dad didn’t teach me how to speak Chinese, but that missing piece was how I became close to people,” Wu said. By that she means that she was raised learning that love need not be verbal but can be expressed through touch, food, or shared nightlife where, like Swan Lake’s Odette, she and Erica can truly reveal themselves.

    Silver Platter is so special Wu wants to share it. She asks the bar owners if she can throw a party every Tuesday night. They agree and embrace Wu’s other friends, most of whom are black and brown, although to the local trans women, they’re educated, assimilated, and therefore “gringos of all shades.” The Tuesday party is called Wildness, and attracts queers and artists from all over L.A. Wu and her friend Ashland host absurdist live drag shows, like a soprano singing an aria while pulling beads out of someone’s butt. The local women at first feel out of place, overwhelmed by these cool queers whose idea of camp is avant-garde rather than old-school glamour, but then they grow to love Wildness. As Wu hoped, new families are formed.

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Since the 2016 election, I had forgotten how play too can be a form of resistance. The precarity of trans life must be exposed but so too its subversive revelry. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Mu?oz wrote, “We must enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in this world. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present.” Art is to dream, however temporarily, of this not-yet. But how do we create these hidden worlds now when social media uproots these secret utopias to the surface almost immediately and the world in which we now share art and poems is under the algorithmic eye of tech corporations?

    Wildness becomes too crowded, invaded by dumb hipsters. L.A. Weekly runs a transphobic and condescending review of the bar. Wu’s guilt that she is a gentrifying force overrides the tone of the film, a guilt that taints all her virtuous intentions. Eventually, Wu stops having the parties in order to protect the fragile ecosystem of the bar. The last shot is of the local trans women and Wu having a picnic to prove that their friendship is ongoing despite the fact that Wu’s parties almost ruined the bar as a sanctuary space. But I become hypercritical once I smell the artist’s guilt. I admit my hypercriticality comes from a selfish place, since an artist’s guilt is a contagion that I want to swat away so it doesn’t infect me. Did Erica and Wu’s friendship last past the making of this film? Did Wu establish a free legal clinic for the Latinx trans community in order to really effect change or to absolve her own guilt? Due to the success of her film Wildness, Wu’s career skyrocketed and she won a MacArthur Genius Grant. Should she share that money with the women?

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When I was growing up, black and brown kids were casually racist. Korean kids were casually racist. It didn’t hurt so much when a nonwhite kid called me slant-eyed, because I had a slur to throw back at them. I can’t think of a blameless victim among us. But it would be wrong of me to say that we were all on equal footing, which is why I can’t just write about my bad English next to your bad English. In my efforts to speak nearby, I also have to confront the distance between us, which is challenging because once I implicate myself, I can never implicate myself enough. The distance between us is class. In K-town, Koreans worked the front and Mexicans worked the back. I made a friend whom my mother said I couldn’t play with, and when I asked why, she said it was because she was Mexican. The horror of it was that I told this friend. I said, “I can’t play with you because you’re Mexican,” and she said, “But I’m Puerto Rican.”

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    In his book White Flights, the writer Jess Row says that “America’s great and possibly catastrophic failure is its failure to imagine what it means to live together.” Row contextualizes this insight by reflecting on white postwar novelists who erased their settings of “inconveniently different faces” so that their white characters could achieve their own “imaginative selfhood” without complication. In thinking about my own Asian identity, I don’t think I can seal off my imagined world so it’s only people of my likeness, because it would follow rather than break from this segregated imagination.