The question of racial identity can bedevil the children of Asian immigrants. But it’s assumed that immigrant parents themselves are unfazed by the race question because they are either working too hard to care or they identify with the country they hail from and there’s nothing more to say on the subject. But the experiences my father acquired as a mechanic in blue-collar white Pennsylvania and as a life insurance salesman trawling through neighborhoods ranging from Brentwood to South Central had made him highly sensitive about his own racial identity to the point where everything came down to race. If we were waiting for a table, and someone was seated before us, he pointed out that it was because we were Asian. If he was seated way in the back of the plane, he said it was because he was Asian. When my parents moved me into my dorm room during the first week at Oberlin in Ohio, my father shook my roommate’s father’s hand, who then asked him where he was from. When my father said South Korea, my roommate’s father eagerly replied that he fought in the Korean War.

    My father smiled tightly and said nothing.

* * *

—

“There are many Caucasians here,” my father said quietly when he visited me in graduate school in Iowa.

“Where are all the black people?” he asked, as we drove into a Walmart parking lot and found a parking spot.

“Always smile and say hello,” my father said. “You have to be very polite here.”

“My daughter,” my father told the Walmart cashier, “is a poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop!”

“Really,” the Walmart cashier said.

“Don’t ever make an illegal U-turn here,” my father advised after I made an illegal U-turn, “because they will see that you are an Asian driving badly.”

* * *

—

By the time I was at Iowa, I had already decided that writing about my Asian identity was juvenile. As a good student of modernism, I was tirelessly committed to the New and was confident that despite my identity, I would be recognized for my formal innovations. I believed this even after I later discovered a blog post called “Po-Ethnic Cleansing” (italics mine) written by a former classmate from Iowa who used the coward pseudonym “Poetry Snark.” He ripped on my first collection by describing it as hack identity politics poems. Then he compared me to Li-Young Lee (not only do we look alike, we write alike!) and declared that the poetry world would be better off if all mediocre minority poets, like myself, were exterminated.

    I immediately scrolled down to the comments section. Out of the dozen, there was not one comment that came to my defense, not even a weak-willed, half-hearted, “Hey, man, promoting genocide is not cool.”

Instead of being outraged, I was hurt and ashamed. A part of me even believed him. I’d tried so hard to prove that I was not just another identity politics poet, and he had exposed me for the unintellectual identitarian that I was. My shame was compounded by the fact that I didn’t know who “Poetry Snark” was. It could be anyone. Then the post became so popular it was the second link that came up when you googled me. Who were all these people who clicked onto the site and agreed with him? Did they all want me exterminated? Eventually when someone outed my classmate, I was actually relieved. That smarmy asshole? Of course it would be him!

My classmate’s repellent post was almost easier to handle than my graduate school experience, because the slow drip of racism at Iowa was underhanded. I always second-guessed myself, questioning why I was being paranoid. I remember the wall of condescension whenever I brought up racial politics in workshop. Eventually, I internalized their condescension, mocked other ethnic poetry as too ethnicky. It was made clear to me that the subject of Asian identity itself was insufficient and inadequate unless it was paired with a meatier subject, like capitalism. I knew other writers of color at Iowa who scrubbed ethnic markers from their poetry and fiction because they didn’t want to be branded as identitarians. Looking back, I realized all of them were, curiously, Asian American.

    Back when I was a graduate student, whether you were a formalist or an avant-gardist, there was a piety about poetic form that was stifling. Any autobiographical reveal, especially if it was racial or sexual, was a sign of weakness. I remember going to the university’s main library, one of my favorite refuges, and perusing the recent archive of graduate student theses. I saw a few Asian names. Not one of them, from what I could tell, had published after graduation. I was afraid I would disappear like them.

It was at Iowa that I was diagnosed with hemifacial spasm disorder. My tic, which I attributed to caffeine, grew worse, enough so that I believed people noticed, though no one said anything. I remember rising up early in the morning for my CAT scan appointment. I lay on the motorized gurney that slid into the machine. The interior was smooth, white, and cylindrical. I felt like I was inside a gigantic hollowed-out dildo. I am the body electric, I thought, and my brain is going haywire.

* * *

—

A year ago, I read from this book at a small gallery in Crown Heights, New York. Afterwards, while I was smoking a cigarette outside with the curator of the event, the gallery manager, a white man with a beard and tattoos, sauntered up to me and volunteered that he was taking a racial awareness seminar, which was a requirement for his other job.