How to Read Now Page 2
At heart, my issue with how we read is as much an existential grievance as it is a labor dispute: the industry is simply not serving its employees equally. And it asks, repeatedly, for uncompensated overtime from writers of color who, often in lieu of engaging in detail about the actual book they’ve actually written, find themselves instead managing the limited critical capacity of mostly white readers, here offended by the appearance of a non-English word, there alienated by a conversation not translated for their benefit. Writers of color often find themselves doing the second, unspoken and unsalaried job of not just being a professional writer but a Professional Person of Color, in the most performative sense—handy to have on hand for panels or journal issues about race or power or revolution, so the festival or literary journal doesn’t appear totally racist; handy to praise publicly and singularly, so as to draw less attention to the white audience, rapt in the seats too expensive for local readers of color. Running the gauntlet of book promotion for my first novel, it became patently obvious that much of our literary industry functions as little more than a quaint pastime for its adherents, like Marie-Antoinette in the Petit Trianon’s Hameau de la Reine: a place to merely cosplay diversity, empathy, education. Not a place to truly be diverted from oneself; not a place to be made humble in one’s vulnerability; not a place to be laid bare in one’s unknowing.
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It was my father who first introduced me to books. I grew up in what was once a small town—the tech boom of the Bay Area ensures it will never be a small town again—in which I was never a visible, singled-out minority. Instead, I was part of an exceedingly invisible and thus banal majority: what’s often called, usually with a faintly lurid dash of fearmongering, a “majority-minority town.”
I emphasize the demographic makeup of the community I came out of primarily because I’ve found that so much of our contemporary imaginings of minority lives, especially immigrant lives, always seem to posit the idea of the Only One: the only Asian, in the white town. The one minority, beset on all sides by white people. That narrative is often sold as the preeminent narrative of minority experience in America, and the people who sell this story often frame it as a story of typical American hardship: the difficulty of being the only Asian kid in a white class.
That this dominant narrative bears zero resemblance to my own experience doesn’t make it untrue, of course; I know there are plenty of people who grew up as the only kid of color in a white town. But it’s the way that narrative is deployed that matters here. It successfully centers whiteness in a minoritized person’s story—making their narrative about adapting or not adapting to “America,” which is always a code for adapting to whiteness. It also mistakes difference for oppression, which is not the same thing: to be the only Asian person in an otherwise white town is just as much an indicator of privilege as it is of oppression, because most economically disadvantaged minorities do not live in majority-white towns. In a place like the Bay Area, they more typically live, as I did, in the satellite suburban towns that house a larger urbanized area’s lower-income support workers—my town was made up mostly of Filipinx, Vietnamese, and Mexican working-class immigrant families (with pockets of wealthier immigrant families here and there) whose jobs as security guards, nurses, cooks, domestic workers, and subcontracted landscapers serviced the larger, whiter towns to which we all commuted, for work or school.
I’ve very often seen successful people of color framing their experiences of being the only person of color in their classrooms as narratives about struggle, rather than also being narratives about class and power; I emphasize often, because it seems to me that in fact many successful people of color in our mainstream media happen to be precisely the sort of people who grew up the only person of color in white towns. It is precisely because they grew up adjacent to whiteness and its social and economic privilege, precisely because they were well versed at an early age on how to adapt to and accommodate whiteness that they could thus use those skills as professional adults, living under white supremacy.
Like many other Filipinx people of a similarly working-class, middle-class aspirational background, I grew up surrounded by a wide and diverse (it should not be a revelation that a minority community can itself be diverse) Filipinx community. It meant that I grew up with the assumed sense of my own centeredness, if not necessarily centrality or importance. I was not visibly particularly different, special, or unique from most anyone else I grew up with. And while there were of course conflicts mainly across class and colorist lines, whiteness was not the reference point or framework in my community, and so I did not learn early on to prioritize it in my psychic, intellectual, or sociopolitical life. That includes the way I read—the way, more specifically, my father taught me to read.
My parents had a mixed-class marriage, although on paper, by the time I was born, it wouldn’t have read as such. By then, my father was a security guard at a computer chip company and my mother was a nurse holding down at least two, sometimes three, different jobs at various hospitals and nursing homes. My mother came from abject rural poverty of the kind that has made her literacy shaky, not just in English but in Tagalog, the controversial lingua franca of the Philippines (her first language—and mine, now lost—being Pangasinan). Like many first-generation kids, I spend a lot of my time as my mother’s English safety net, language-checking everything from legal documents to her Facebook statuses.
My father, on the other hand, born in 1930 (and so twenty-two years older than my mother), came from a comfortable upper-middle-class Ilocano background—a dark-skinned boy descended from a mix of the indigenous northerners of Luzon and the merchant Chinese class—in which literacy and literary education were a given. He circulated with people who read widely in English, who discussed the literary and philosophical merits of Philippine national hero José Rizal (the only national hero I can think of who was also a novelist). It’s because of this that my reading life can never be disentangled from questions of class and power, as readership has always been not just a gift but a privilege: Would I have become the reader I became if I’d had a different father? He was making me read Plato’s Symposium when I was in middle school, a fact that none of my white teachers believed, and in fact actively and aggressively tried to disprove—another lesson familiar to many kids of color I know.
One of the first places I ever learned about bad readers was from white teachers in the Catholic schools I attended. (Catholic schools are the nearest thing to affordable private schools for working-class immigrant parents—not to mention the fact that my mother was and remains a devout if irreverent and syncretic Catholic, and wanted her children educated in the faith. In my case, my parents only had enough gas in them to send one kid to such a school—which means my younger brother had a largely public education. That, among other things, has created a palpable class difference that still affects us today.) Some people have great teachers growing up, and I truly envy them, but my great ones were very, very rare; for the most part, my memories of education are of sneering, condescension, and neglect. Teachers in the Mountain View / Los Altos region of the Bay Area where I attended junior high and high school—significantly whiter and wealthier than the Milpitas schools I attended throughout elementary school—often seemed threatened, occasionally enraged, by the idea of a smart, bookish, and vocally irreverent Filipinx kid. It was understood that if kids who looked like me were ever to succeed, we were meant to do so docilely, gratefully, quietly. Not confidently. Not proudly. And when I look back now, despite the casual cruelty of those days, that educational neglect also meant I never really got a successful education in the profoundly incurious way those teachers read books, the world, and me.
Instead, I got my father’s kind of reading. In the world of books that I lived in with him, I was in Plato’s world, playing in the cave; there was no difference between me and James Joyce, and darling, I should really read Finnegans Wake to experience what som
e people called modernism; ditto Rizal, and Bertrand Russell, and Kant, and Virginia Woolf, and buckets and buckets of Greek mythology, which I fell in love with and nearly became a classicist for in college, during my I-want-to-be-the-Pinay-Anne-Carson stage.
We read a lot of white people. But we didn’t read them with a white-centering view; we didn’t read them like those books and the worlds in them were the only ones that existed, or mattered. We read them like they were just books, and they had things to say, and they were sometimes very powerful and fragile and beautiful; just like I was a person, and I had things to say, and I was sometimes very powerful and fragile and beautiful. It was, I realize now, a deeply weird, genreless, freewheeling way of reading. It wasn’t decolonial exactly—I mean, we were still reading the jerks, and Kant obviously didn’t think we were human beings—but the motley, secular, antihierarchical, unacademic way we read this wide swath of books bore the seeds of the decolonial. Reading with my father taught me to read across borders, and to read in translation (he loved Thomas Mann and Goethe, and he loved that I loved Japanese and Latin American writers like Banana Yoshimoto or Manuel Puig). Our practice taught me most of all to read like a free, mysterious person who was encountering free, mysterious things; to value the profound privacy and irregularity of my own thinking; to spend time in my head and the heads of others, and to see myself shimmer in many worlds—to let many worlds shimmer, lively, in me.
So much of why that reading was truly liberating and life-forming was that it went hand in hand with my father’s (and to a slightly lesser extent, my mother’s; lesser not in terms of intensity but only in terms of volume, since she worked so much that she simply wasn’t actually around to do this kind of ideological child-raising) frankly ferocious commitment to instilling in me what I know now to be a furnace of immutable and indestructible pride—its life-giving warmth buried so deep in my bones it must have belonged to someone much, much older than either of us, much older even than either of the countries we came from. An ancient life-source, evergreen.
My father died in 2006, after a long—too long, in his opinion—fight with lymphoma. When it became clear we’d do anything to keep him alive, even if that meant repeated trips to the ICU, repeated nights sleeping in hospital waiting rooms waiting for morning visiting hours to begin, he took the decision out of our hands: he took his oxygen mask off in the middle of the night, hours after insisting on seeing me, for what I didn’t realize was the last time I would ever see him fully conscious. He let himself go first, so we would have to let him go, too.
My father died penniless and indebted, and I inherited nothing from him—nothing but my entire life: the frequency at which my attention to the world resonates, and most of all, that bone-deep, soul-shaped pride, which to this day I feel move in me, like a chord that will not go silent.
Pride is not always one of the best qualities to be abundant in, and it got me into a lot of trouble as a kid; if you’re proud, but treated a little or a lot like shit by either boys in your class, or lighter-skinned wealthier Filipinx friends, or white teachers, you have a tendency to be constitutionally programmed to start rumbling the first person who blinks at you funny. I got into a lot—a lot—of fights as a kid, and the family mythos of my child self is one that alternates near-death fragility (I was also a physically sickly child) and a pugnacity bordering on the feral.
The only thing that prevented that pride from becoming my villain origin story—well, for now—was its steadfast companion, which was the gift of the town I grew up in: the unshakable knowledge of my own smallness, in both a terrestrial and a cosmic sense. I was never the Only One: not singular, not special, not different. My community showed me that I was not best understood by being contextualized against whiteness; I did not have to translate myself for its understanding or approval, which I had little experience with and was never told I needed. I did not have to perform or deform myself for the right to be myself. Growing up in a town like Milpitas taught me that my ordinariness to myself was a gift, and a root; that this ordinariness, uninterpreted, was enough. It did not have to be distilled or bleached to have value.
That I, too, am a full person who deserved respect in my wholeness seems now like such a basic lesson, and yet the enduring force and redemption of that lesson make it one that I’ve gone back to again and again, in my life and in my work. My father in the years I knew him—late in the long book of his life; that last, uneven, American chapter—was mostly a quiet, melancholy, and deeply internal person, who nevertheless had an indomitable sense of his own worth; a worth that was singular, unwreckable, and mysterious, like a diamond core inside a rock-shelter. It was a worth that resisted being misread, but was not diminished when misreading came knocking. He was, of course, misread every single day of his life in America. Old Pinoy security guard at a computer chip company, moreno, poor, taciturn, lives in the town near Newby Landfill, the one that famously smells like shit. What stories could he have to tell?
But the way he lived blotted out that misreading. He might have been foreign or exotic to others, but he was never foreign to himself—mysterious, yes, in the way that we are all mysterious to ourselves—but not foreign. His ordinariness to himself was a treasure, its precious scroll all there to read, for the people who could read it. And then he passed that treasure down to me, so I could read it, too. Moreover, so I could expect to be read like that, in my own life: like a scroll of worth poured out of me, and it was all mine—not something to be bartered or made palatable so I would one day have value in the world. But a gift; glorious, banal, and whole unto itself.
When I describe the way my reading life is inextricable from the way I was raised—built, really, to be a person in the world—and how my reading life now is committed not just to reading books, but to the world that those books helped me to bear witness to, what I’m really saying is that my reading life was also an inheritance; one that came in the form of an ongoing act of love.
Post-2020, it feels impossibly hard and incalculably stupid to say that you love the world. Why bother? Why does reading matter? Why does truly trying to know the world we live in, the history that makes us, matter? It feels impossibly hard and incalculably stupid to commit to that love, to bear it and be borne by it, but that is what I feel—it is the wellspring that reading leads me to, every time. Loving this world, loving being alive in it, means living up to that world; living up to that love. I can’t say I love this world or living in it if I don’t bother to know it; indeed, be known by it. It’s that mutual promise of knowing that reading holds us in—an inheritance that belongs to us, whether we accept it or not. Whether we read its pages or not. This book remains just one small part of that work: that inheritance, and that love.
READING TEACHES US EMPATHY, AND OTHER FICTIONS
People often say that art builds our empathy. Reading, in particular. It’s one of those feel-good lines that gets trotted out at literary readings, writing festivals, panel discussions on diversity in fiction, in classrooms, on book jackets, book reviews, book blurbs, not to mention in uncomfortably long discussions with white people who’ve read your book and want you to know !!!for sure!!! that they’re not racist. When we read books about immigration, our exposure to the toil of good, hardworking immigrants makes us more empathetic to their plight—and so on, for books about queer people, and books about slavery, et cetera. Diverse books are empathy machines, or so the received wisdom would have us believe. Like Trinity in The Matrix, we can upload a book’s world into ourselves and feel our empathy skills powering up, juicing through the veins. I use the impoverished term “diverse books” deliberately here, because it’s the books that fall under the rubric of diversity that are the ones most often prescribed to us as empathy boosters; books built for purpose.
But the idea that fiction builds empathy is one of incomplete politics, left hanging by probably good intentions. The concept of instrumentalizing fiction or art as a kind of ethical protein shake,
such that reading more and more diversely will somehow build the muscles in us that will help us see other people as human, makes a kind of superficial sense—and produces a superficial effect. The problem with this type of reading is that in its practical application, usually readers are encouraged—by well-meaning teachers and lazy publishing copy—to read writers of a demographic minority in order to learn things; which is to say, as a supplement for their empathy muscles, a metabolic exchange that turns writers of color into little more than ethnographers—personal trainers, to continue the metaphor. The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.
The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives, for our daily lives—not just when we’re confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community’s story come alive for the reader who’s come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage.