The Delusional Quest for Individuality
1.
One of my all-time favorite podcast moments happens during Episode 37 of Seeing White, Part 7 where Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen, who created the series as a way to excavate his own whiteness, is confronted with a harrowing question by his guest Chenjerai Kumanyika, a professor, author, and journalist. John is white and Chenjerai is Black. Chenjerai asks John:
How attached are you to the idea of being white?
To which John responds:
I’m not attached to whiteness. I mean, I’m not like “How do I defend whiteness in light of all of this?” And I, honestly, I feel like detaching from it.
Then Chenjerai asks:
When you graduated from college, did you feel like it was a victory for white people?
John:
(Laughing) Oh god, no.
Chenjerai:
(Laughing) Right, right. But like, when I got my PhD? I was told it was a victory for my people.
And then John has this huge revelation:
Right… So you’re pointing out that it’s a double standard. Because one of the greatest privileges of how whiteness works in a white-dominated society is that I get to be seen as myself, as an individual.
2.
This conversation always reminds me of my first “boyfriend.” This white guy I dated for over a year who refused to admit we were even dating. He was my first consistent sex partner, and like any co-eds we had sex in a dorm. The dorm building was an old converted hotel where they crammed five extra-long twin size beds in every corner of this oblong-shaped luxury suite, with no walls separating these living spaces— only dirty laundry and personal objects demarcating where one bedroom ended and the other began. Rumor had it Al Pacino used to stay at this hotel…
On our “dates” we’d pass the time drinking, smoking, or watching movies in this shabby dorm room where we were, more often than not, in the company of his four roommates. But at some point, he’d announce to the other guys that we were going to bed. The four guys would still be hanging out and chatting, doing homework—it was their room too, after all— and the two of us would crawl under the covers and close our eyes. He’d spoon me. I’d feel this guy’s hands all over me. He’d undress me. And we’d quietly have sex right there in front of everyone—
And when you’re secretly
Getting fucked from behind
In front of all your peers
With the fluorescent overhead lights on…
…it makes it hard to say anything, a peep a sigh a vowel, anything at all in the moment. Too despicable. Too embarrassing. But what’s more complicated is that, I didn’t feel like saying anything at all. I was convinced that I was enjoying it. My body gave in to all the sticky stereotypes it could possibly hold—the helplessness, subservience, quiet, excellence, resilience, taking it all without objection—it was the ultimate marriage of an Asian femme body with all of its societal, perverse signifiers. At the same time, I had to create some sort of narrative around agency, or else it would have been too humiliating and shameful. I was inviting the white cock inside me. I let it in. I am a hot barely legal 18 y.o. me-so-horny-me-love-you-long-timey Asian femme with desire: desiring this proximity to whiteness, to be seen by these men (the other guys were white too, and I knew they were secretly watching), “getting turned on” as a means of survival and reclamation of trauma, and indulging myself in the illusion of this individuality. An individuality I never had. Perhaps I never had it to begin with.
I’m doing this for myself.
3.
In Julia’s terrorizing and wickedly comic play, three transnationally adopted Asian siblings are on a quest to find meaning in their lives. The ultimate quest for individuality. But Julia doesn’t make it easy for them. Not only have they been denied access to their birth information for their entire lives, they were cursed with a white adoptive mother recently incarcerated for arson and murder, and an adoptive white father killed by said arsonist and who built a life around his fetish of sexualizing Asian women and culture and aggressively preaching his Orientalist musings. The siblings, plagued with this desire to know themselves as individuals but only wielding their wretched proximity to whiteness as tools, each set off on their dangerous delusions. It’s no wonder that two of the siblings end up in an incestual romantic affair (to which the incarcerated white mom doesn’t even blink an eye), one wants to own a piece of the sky, another goes to Nebraska to find himself with a cowman, and the other randomly goes to Cambodia hoping to reunite with her birth mother. All the while, the children speak to a white specter who is constantly taking up the stage— their father dressed up as a snowman lecturing them on his most asinine opinions of Asia.
All I have to say is, don’t let the smart and fast-paced rhythm of laughter and jokes in this play fool you! Julia has created a truly horrifying spectacle, a hyperreal landscape that’s akin to Jordan Peele’s Get Out or maybe even the super trendy zombie apocalypse series based on the game with the same name The Last of Us, but in Julia’s play the evil, the illness, the contagion is—
4.
“For Asian Americans, there is [no] resolution with assimilation— whiteness is never an attainable state… At once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal.”
- David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
Melancholia is mourning without end.
Racial Melancholia is a phrase often associated with the Asian Diasporic experience in the United States.
For me, the absurdity of this play is in how it portrays this ceaseless feeling of Melancholia caused by our intimate relationship to assimilation—a specifically Asian American dilemma where our brave want to be seen and known is wrapped up in an “at all costs” mentality. To choose assimilation is to be stripped, erased, fractured, and violated from the truth of our souls. But it also means you get to live.
A Great Loss such as this is equal parts displacement from:
home
body
community
mother
culture
language
land
knowing your routes of migration (how to get to and from home)
As well as the treachery of assimilation into:
Whiteness
Heterosexuality
Capitalism
Mainstream
Middle Class Values
Norms
Dominance
Individuality
Individuality.
What a debilitating and cyclical desire! The desire to know oneself in the context of whiteness. Maybe I am or am not the first to say this, that the delusional desire for individuality (which is a myth of whiteness) is very Asian—which also makes this play very Asian.
5.
The birds. They are terribly endearing in a dopey kind of way, but they are never meant to soothe or provide you with solace. Their cacophony isn’t for that.
The birds are emergent in their strategies and principles. They might be tone-deaf to us, but their survival is defined by:
home
body
community
mother
culture
language
land
knowing your routes of migration (how to get to and from home)
6.
If you run into Julia before or post-show, in the theater elevator or at a nearby bar, she may offer you a very charming smile and tell you this play is a “farcical tragedy,” but again— don’t be fooled! The play may look like a regular play with digestible inter-genres, as if family manners and matters are couched within an all-too familiar pace of a living room drama, but this play is far darker and more deliberate. It’s wailing, unrelenting, sharp, insistent. It’s actually really metal.
7.
The character Illy (named after the Italian coffee franchise, I learned) is at a funeral. The last one standing after everything literally and metaphorically burns down. Illy has been a receptacle for all things stereotypically Asian up until now—she’s small and beautiful, she’s exceptional, she’s a world class viola player, she’s type A, she’s a model minority, she’s too content to go and find herself like the others, and she believes in meritocracy—but here, at the end, she’s lost her two siblings who, though deeply troubled and flawed like herself, were the only people in this world anchoring her to a sense of family, of home. Now she is truly alone. At this point she musters all the courage within her to say:
I have this great plan to find mys—
8.
I admit. I am constantly contextualizing myself – trying to find meaning within, and desperately undercover when it comes to the great sea of whiteness. It’s embedded into the constitutions of this land that my family and I have migrated to. My trauma and my pain have become my infatuations. It fuels my desire to become, to be seen as an individual, because individuality in this country is also synonymous with freedom, rights and power. But ultimately, we’re not afforded these same liberties because inside the myth of whiteness we can never detach from our race the way white people can. We can never be free of the very attachments and meanings projected onto our bodies by (white, colonial, imperial) society across time. Assimilation is only a master’s tool to reach some proximity to power. And still, I am in search of myself despite knowing full well I will never attain this dream. Not in this body, in this country, at least.
This American obse– this Asian American obsession to attain individuality despite it being a futile mythos of whiteness… If we were to let it go, what do we do with ourselves in its place?
Maybe the birds might know. But regretfully, they don’t care about us. They roam the freedom of the skies together.
 | Haruna Lee is an Obie Award-winning Taiwanese/Japanese/American theater maker, screenwriter, educator and community steward whose work is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. For Playwrights Horizons Soundstage, they performed in HIS CHEST IS ONLY SKELETON by Julia Izumi. They are a co-director of the Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting Program. harunalee.com |
