Selected Writing

First published in Entropy Magazine, February 2021

I’ve tried to tell the story of Kristin a thousand times. She’s been a dream, she’s been a poem, she’s been a sigh after a long breakdown of tears, she’s been a smile after a brief moment of joy, she’s been a rumor to others before I met her, she’s a legend to those who I’ve met after. “She’s been a leather jacket on the back of a motorcycle,” my husband once said. “You are mistaking her with someone else.” And yet now she’s that too.

Here’s attempt 10001 –

November 1999. I’m home from college for the weekend. We are driving to the home of our friend’s new girlfriend. “We” as in me and the three white boys I had been rolling with for the past few months – my friend Steve, my boyfriend Steve and Travis, the one with the new girlfriend. I had known these boys since grade school but we weren’t really close until this past summer. That’s when we became good friends, the type that wear each other’s t-shirts and know the smells of each other’s homes.

We had been spending so much time together since the summer that Travis pulled me aside one day.

“Listen Nina, we have to talk.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“This is getting too hard, we have to give the Steves different names.”

“You’re right,” I said.

And with that, it was decided.  My friend Steve, Steve Levitt, became Leviticus and my boyfriend, Steve Kitt, would become Stevonnegut.  Travis and I decided to keep our names with neither Leviticus or Stevonnegut protesting.  Travis’ girlfriend had a name too, Kristin, but for a while, we simply called her the Older Woman.

“Did you hear that Travis is dating an older woman? Have you met the Older Woman?”

Everyone had been talking about her – the Older Woman, older as in we were 19 or 20 and she was 26.

I sat passenger side as my guy, Stevonnegut, steered my Jeep Cherokee – the car that my parents had bought for me and that was at the epicenter of so many of our adventures. We were traveling from my suburb, Edison, to Kristin’s Scotch Plains. Our final destination was Northern Jersey, Continental Airlines Arena, to see Phil and Friends, Phil being Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia died four years ago. Phil shows were Dead shows when you couldn’t see the Dead.

As we made our way to Kristin’s house, the suburban homes grew closer, more compact. “It’s this one,” Travis said and he jumped out. The Jeep idled in front of a narrow 2-story home with beige aluminum siding, identical to house next to it save for a bright yellow VW bus parked out front. Grateful Dead stickers were plastered all over it. A large banner sprawled across the windshield, the band name emblazoned in giant all-caps gothic font. A rose nested in the middle of “Grateful” and “Dead.”

The Jeep was dark and all I remember was a rumble from the backseat, this woman placing stickers on our winter hats, each stick accompanied by a high-pitched squeal of glee. She’s the Older Woman? I remember thinking with every squeal. Now I wasn’t the only woman. Now the group was changing. She was a white woman, an older white woman of 26. I was a brown girl, a somewhat younger brown girl of almost-20, my birthday was coming up in a few weeks.

“How many Dead shows have you been to?” Travis asked her as she settled in. “She’s been to over 90,” he said before she could speak.

And even after this introduction, I didn’t really hear many complete sentences from her, just more squeals – squeals of excitement about the music to come and wishes for the set list: “I am hoping for a killer Magnolia!” and squeals about her dogs, Winter and Sativa, two majestic rescues now at home with her mother’s nervous lapdog, Murphy: “Smurfeeee!”

In the face of all that excitement, I felt old. I couldn’t match that enthusiasm if I ever tried.

I remember the show being long. Dead Shows are so long and so white, I’d think but never say. I just focused on the long part. “Bathroom,” I said to Stevonnegut. And as I stepped out, I felt a wave of secret relief to be momentarily away from the wilds of “Space” into “Dark Star” and in the stark neon of the halls.  I must have gotten a look at Kristin sometime during that interminable evening but I don’t remember exactly when. She’s forever a blur.

Long black hair done up in white-girl dreadlocks, bouncing with her quick step. Their heft was a counterforce on a petite body, a narrow face with sharp features and wide eyes. And then there were the dogs, not there at the show that night but with her all the days after, jumping up and down and all over her. She was always dressed as if she was ready to walk them. A hoodie, jeans, a couple leashes off the belt loop, a joint or blown-glass bowl buttoned up in some stealth pocket, tinkling as she walked. I remember her always in motion. But I can’t tell you when I first really saw her – not the night of the show, not any other.

Maybe I never wanted to look at her, to look getting older in the face.

I was a 19-year-old brown girl doing her best impersonation of a white hippie. I don’t know if I thought past 20. I could only barely look at this older woman of 26. I could barely look at myself. And I saw any age except ours, mine and the boys’, and anything we were doing beyond what we were doing, tooling around in the Jeep Cherokee, attending Dead Shows and going to college in between, as extremely terrifying. I was a shy girl and found what felt like unlikely community in these friends and then found a greater community in Deadhead culture, people like Kristin, whose ultimate joy was to come together, be kind and generous and love this band.

*

Dropping Kristin and Travis back to her house after the concert, I felt a difference in the Jeep, a different kind of quiet than when it was just me and the boys, a restless quiet maybe.  I was supposed to love that there was another woman now. Now I could be with someone more like me, someone who would make me feel less alone with these dudes, someone who would get me in the way they didn’t. But hearing this girl, the Older Woman, express so much squealing glee, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.  I was bothered that if she could be that enthusiastic, what did that mean for me? I didn’t want to be that enthusiastic.

Do people like that exist? I wondered. People who seem to delight in cacophonous squeals of joy? Is this a way to grow old? I laughed too, with the boys and with my college friends, but Kristin’s laughs felt different. Happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care, an insistence on joy for joy’s sake. Our laughs, mine and the boys’, were a shared snicker, from years together, years we went to the same private school and hated it and lived in the same town and hated it and loved and hated the same bands, movies, you name it. Her laughter was from a life beyond all that, a life we didn’t know, a life I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

I just wanted her gone. I didn’t feel alone. I felt the only.

“I only knew her for a year,” I say now if Kristin ever comes up in conversation.

I always put this at the end of a sentence, at the end of a list of three:

“I have a friend who was murdered.”

“A random act by a serial killer.”

“I only knew her for a year.”

I want to call this the story’s button, a last line that buttons-up the whole thing: “I only knew her for a year.”

*

Kristen was dead at 27. In November, 20 years after we first met, I’ll be 40.

Original Article: http://anmly.org/ap25/nina-sharma/

What the parallels between the violent murders of The Walking Dead’s Glenn Rhee and Vincent Chin tell us about being Asian in America.

When I started watching The Walking Dead, I thought the show needed flashbacks. Based on Robert Kirkman’s comic of the same name, The Walking Dead follows a group of survivors banded together in post-apocalyptic Atlanta, where the dead walk around—“walkers” they’re called, never zombies. It is a world with no pre-existing zombie lore. No George A. Romero, no Zora Neale Hurston, and no flashbacks.

“You know, flashbacks like they do in Lost,” I told my husband, Quincy, as he set down our Sunday dinner.

He’s the one who got me into the show. A comic book and sci-fi fan, Quincy is a self-professed “black nerd.” We had begun to watch The Walking Dead together each Sunday evening over plates of his signature salmon and sweet potato fries, the menu unchanging, our own ritual of nerdom and nourishment.

“You know how in Lost they cut back to periods of their lives before the plane crash, those origin stories?”

“Different show, baby,” he said, cutting another piece of salmon.

I quietly fumed at his logic. There are rules that govern any science fiction or fantasy universe, amid any and all kinds of chaos and wildness. Unlike in Lost, in The Walking Dead there is no time for the past. Or, more simply put, there is no time-past. History, like water, medicine, food, and life itself, is a scavenged thing. Take what’s necessary, what’s useful to the present. The rest is a luxury.

Even the word “past” is a luxury; most often on the show it is referred to as “before.” Characters ask one another: “What did you do before all this?” or, “before it all changed?” One survivor, Sasha, is even more efficient. She recounts a portentous dream, simply saying: “We were at the beach, but it was before.” Sometimes the word holds on its own like that, no more time stamp needed.

Can I even like a show like this? I wondered then. What are we but the past we carry? What constitutes our stories? Our survival?

And then came Glenn.

 

 

I wake up in the middle of the night not so much with a start but with a gnaw, like when you become aware of your own hunger, as if something has been eating at you for longer than you had realized.

Seven years and many servings of salmon and sweet potatoes later, I not only had fallen in love with this flashback-less show, but was now also grief-stricken over the brutal killing of nearly every fan’s most beloved character: Glenn Rhee.

The Korean American Glenn was the only character of Asian descent within the core group of survivors we follow in the nearly seven-year long run of The Walking Dead. Anger swelled among the show’s fans after Glenn’s death became one in a long line of characters of color to get the axe. There was anger because the death scene was incredibly gory: Glenn was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by yet another big bad white man villain, Negan.

The season 7 opener, titled “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” earned the nickname “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be (Watching).” On social media, fans professed they were turning away from the show. The Verge’s popular weekly recap column “The Walking Dead’s Quitters Club,” which was premised on the fact that one day the “Quitters Club would actually quit,” effectively ended its run that week, and show numbers did in fact drop.

“The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be” was directed by The Walking Dead’s longtime makeup special effects supervisor, Greg Nicotero, whose first major special effects makeup job was on George A. Romero’s 1985 zombie classic, Day of the Dead. Under his supervision, gore is a cast member unto itself, and “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be” is an exemplar of Nicotero’s style. The episode debuts Negan, the brutal leader of a community called “the Saviors.” In the previous season the Saviors often made appearances without Negan. “I am Negan,” members of the Saviors often said during confrontations with our survivor group, assuming this white man’s name regardless of their gender or race. Loyalty trumped personhood.

In this episode, Negan has got most of our survivor group down on their knees not merely to meet their death but to meet “Lucille.” Echoing the name of B.B. King’s beloved guitar, Lucille is Negan’s barbed-wired-festooned baseball bat, his go-to weapon and, sometimes, instrument of mercy—a blow to the head from Lucille prevents zombie resurrection. Negan begins to wave Lucille in his hand and sing. “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe…” he hums as he points the bat towards the members of the group. At the end of the rhyme, he lands on the lovably smarmy Abraham and swiftly bludgeons him to death. We think he’s finished. But then the group’s long-time bad boy-heartthrob Darryl lunges at Negan. Negan in return goes after one more. Not Darryl, but Glenn.

The best one can say about this scene is that Negan goes for the head. We do not see Glenn return as a zombie. But the killing is long and protracted. What I remember most is seeing Glenn’s eye pop out of the socket, hearing him tell his wife, the pregnant Maggie, how much he loves her, talking from some place beyond sight and sense.

 

 

“I’m not sure I feel like eating,” I remember telling my husband, looking down at the sweet potato and salmon he had so lovingly made. I’m the jock of the house, and I joke that I’m always hungry and love saving it all up for our Sunday ritual. It wasn’t that my hunger was gone. I’d just had enough.

That night we managed to finish our food, but we did break another tradition. We did not watch Talking Dead, the Chris Hardwick-hosted wrap-up show that follows The Walking Dead. I had often looked to the after-show to situate the past. It was where the actors and show’s crew could reflect on that night’s victories and losses and when callers and audience members could ask questions. Chris Hardwick once joked that the show served as a form of “therapy” complete with a couch.

“No way,” Quincy said. “There is no making sense of this.”

 

 

Waking up in the middle of the night, I turned and watched Quincy, sound asleep. I appreciated that he took Glenn’s death to heart as much as I did. I loved his refusal to watch Talking Dead, which to me felt less like mere refusal and more like an act of resistance.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. Something drew me up out of the dark and made me open my eyes—a gnawing at the corners of my mind that, with the quickness of a flashback, turned into an image:

First the baseball bat, then the dead man rising again. Not Glenn, but this time, Vincent Chin.

 

 

The bat that Vincent Chin’s murderer, Ronald Ebens, used 35 years earlier also had a name—it was a Jackie Robinson model Louisville Slugger. This was Detroit, 1982—30 years after Robinson had changed the game, 20 since he had been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for doing so. And Asians were in the eye of a violent racial storm. American automobile plants were shutting down, and the rise of the Japanese-made car was being blamed for cutbacks at auto plants. In Detroit, people routinely demolished Japanese cars with baseball bats in a show of frustration and force. The United Automobile Workers union even took part; UAW locals marched into town one Labor Day and battered Japanese cars with sledgehammers.

At first it seemed like another barroom scuffle. The barroom was Fancy Pants, a strip club. Ronald Ebens, a local auto plant foreman, and his stepson Michael Nitz were sitting directly across the dance runway from Vincent Chin and his friends. Ebens had his eye not on the runway but on Vincent.

I imagine Ebens watching him—Vincent surrounded by his buds laughing, ordering another round, the vodka they preferred, tipping the dancers every chance they got, Vincent using the tip money he had just earned from his shift at the Golden Star restaurant.

“It’s because of you little motherfuckers we are out of work,” Ebens hurled across the runway. And then the words: “nip” and “chink.”

Ebens says Vincent dealt the first blow. Interviewed in the 1987 documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin, Ebens laments: “He come around and sucker punched me, and that was the start of it all right there, I never even got a chance to stand up, never seen it coming, that’s the way the whole thing started.” This affront warranted Ebens hunting Vincent down long after Vincent left the club. Nitz held Vincent’s arms back as Ebens struck Vincent again and again until, as one cop put it, “there was brains layin’ on the street.” Ebens swung the Jackie Robinson bat with such force that it broke the handle.

 

 

Vincent’s mother, Lily, caught him on his way out their house. He was heading to Fancy Pants. She didn’t like him going to strip clubs.

“Ma, just one last time,” he said.

Maybe Vincent meant it. Maybe “last time” just fit the occasion for the outing, his bachelor party, a party with no one more than Vincent and three friends.

Bob heard “chink,” and Jimmy heard “nip.”

Gary’s the one who heard Vincent reply, “Don’t call me a fucker, I’m not a fucker.”

And later, long after the club, it was just Jimmy in earshot. Jimmy, who followed the route Vincent took after he caught a glimpse of the bat in the Fancy Pants parking lot. Jimmy, who suggested the fluorescent protection of the Golden Arches when he caught up. Jimmy, to whom Vincent yelled out “scram” when he saw Ebens coming with the bat in hand. Jimmy, the only other Asian person in the group. Jimmy, to whom Ebens turned and said after the cops came: “I did it, and if they hadn’t stopped me, I’d get you next.”

Jimmy heard Vincent’s last words emanating out of his disembodied head: “It’s not fair.”

 

 

“T-Dogging” it is called—when a black character on The Walking Dead is killed. The phrase was coined by The Root’s Jason Johnson and it takes its name from the original lone black survivor of the group, Season 1’s Theodore Douglas, nicknamed “T-Dog,” who was killed just as his character gained depth. Most often the “depth” is earned through sacrifice–assuming the position, albeit momentarily, as the group’s moral compass and then risking death for the greater good of the group. In his final scene, T-Dog heroically charges towards a herd of walkers so that his companion, Carol, can escape.

Glenn stands out for the lack of blood on his hands. Over the course of his seven seasons he takes only two human lives, and the second life Glenn takes is on behalf of Heath, a young black male very much like Glenn himself, so that Heath can keep his proverbial hands blood-free.

Glenn outlasts nearly all the black characters on the show. Michonne is a close second: she is a black woman who joined the group full-time in the third season and remains in the fold. She is most identified by her katana, a weapon with which she slices through zombies and human enemies alike.

Glenn, by contrast, is most identified with the pocket watch bestowed upon him by group elder Hershel. If you look closely, there is a small compass set right within it.

Unlike the T-Dogged, Glen survives and thrives. But his belonging seems to require unparalleled goodness, requires a steady grip of not a weapon but the group’s moral compass.

 

The SHOT HOLDS, and just when we think there’s nothing left to break the silence.

A SOFT CRACKLE OF STATIC. A voice.

Voice

(filtered) Hey, you. Dumbass. You in the tank. You cozy in there?

END CREDIT MUSIC begins, as:

CAMERA CLOSES IN as RICK turns his head, stunned. Staring toward the forward compartment at the radio…

These are Glenn’s first words, at the tail end of the pilot, introduced as a disembodied voice emanating throughout the army tank radio that our hero, Rick Grimes, is stuck in.

Rick was late to the apocalypse; he woke up from a coma after being shot before the epidemic had begun. We calibrate to the new world order (or lack thereof) with him.

By the end of the pilot, Rick is failing pretty hard. He has taken refuge from walker-swarmed streets in an army tank that, as the shooting script describes, “will very likely be his tomb.”

Unless you have read the comics, there is no way to know whose voice bursts into Rick’s catacomb-tank. We just know the voice is resourceful, radioing in, direct (“Hey you, you in the tank, you cozy?”), and, indicative of a most underrated aspect of survival, unabashedly smart-mouthed (dumbass, cozy).

To Rick’s “we’re not in Atlanta anymore, Toto” innocence, this voice sounds proficient in apocalypse.

And there is something about the casual banter of hey you, cozy dumbass, that is even a bit nostalgic, the ambling swagger that one would think is more befitting of before.

And in that way, Glenn’s voice sets the tone for the show. A present that is forever channeling the past. A soft crackle of static.

 

 

There is no time-past—that, above all else, seemed to be the verdict in the case against Roger Ebens. No time for a past with any trace of Vincent.

At the trial, not one representative from the prosecutor’s office or any advocacy group was in the courtroom. Only the defendants, Eben’s and Nitz’s legal team, were able to present their case before the court.

There was no jail time, not even the 30 days you’d get in Detroit for killing a dog. Just probation, a $3000 fine, and court costs.

There was no mistaking what really guided the verdict, dealt by a judge who ignored the psychological evaluation that concluded Ebens deserved not only prison time but treatment for alcoholism, a judge who had been captured in a Japanese WWII POW camp, a judge who said the murderers “weren’t the kind of people you send to jail,” adding, “You don’t make the punishment fit the crime: you make the punishment fit the criminal.”

There were no witnesses or family called to testify—not even Lily Chin, who responded to the judge by way of a local paper: “These men wanted my son to die. They did not hit him in the body. They hit him in the head.”

 

 

Sometimes, though, time moves in two directions. A verdict becomes a flashpoint, last words turn into first words.

“It’s not fair,” the protest placards read at the march organized in Detroit in the wake of the verdict. Vincent’s last words were taken up as a rallying cry by Asians across class and cultures: by waiters, restaurant workers, chefs, laundry workers, housewives, engineers, and scientists; by business-owners who shut down their stores so they or their workers could participate; by Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos; by scurrying children and wheelchair-bound seniors alike.

The phrase was honored with precision: the signs all uniform, the words all in straight lines, chants and movements choreographed in 20-second intervals. The joke went: because the planning committee had so many engineers, GM scientists among others, this had to be the most “precisely planned demonstration in history.”

But if you looked closely, there was only one primary calculation to determine all that followed.

His words stood in English, with no other language in sight.

English-only, they said, making their intended audience clear, white America.

His words not a luxury, a scavenged necessity.

“It’s not fair.”

 

 

When the verdict of the Chin case came out, it was almost exclusively picked up by local news outlets and smaller Asian American community publications. The Los Angeles Times, though LA had a sizeable Asian population, held only a two-paragraph wire service story on the judge’s decision. The New York Times had nothing.

Things picked up steam in the most unlikely of places for the beginnings of a movement—a car rental shop. Helen Zia, a long-time activist and co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, a new Asian American advocacy group that was working to challenge the judge’s decision, was waiting in line. She noticed that the tall black woman in front of her had copies of the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press open to articles about the Vincent Chin case. Then she spotted a small notebook embossed with the words, “New York Times.”

She made good use of her wait-time. “Are you interested in this case? I have some press packets right here, if you’d like.”

The reporter turned out to be Judith Cummins, the first black woman to head a national news bureau for the New York Times. She was in Detroit visiting family and looking for a story to do while she was there.

Cummins’s piece included details that had not been mentioned in previous national coverage outside of ethnic new media. She made sure to mention how no law enforcement officials had come to the club to question employees or investigate the case. She included voices from the prosecution including Liza Cheuk May Chan, who said Judge Kaufman’s decision was based on ” ‘material errors of fact’ in the information he considered, including the question of how the fight began.”[1] And she made room for a discussion of race: an “ill feeling against Asians” in Detroit due to the losses of the auto industry.

The story led to national media attention that spurred reporters to delve into the case with more nuance and depth, particularly into the yellow peril inscribed in the auto industry: the United Auto Workers parking lots with “park your import in Tokyo” stickers and the union’s sledge-hammering of imports on Labor Day, the “auto-war” compared to Pearl Harbor, the aggression embedded in “buy American.”[2]

By 1984, all this public pressure, and the joint work of Helen Zia and Liza Chan, led to a federal civil rights hearing—the first involving a civil rights violation of an Asian American to be heard by a federal court.

 

 

A red Dodge Charger is coasting down a highway that looks a bit like two kinds of afterlife. There’s the side that looks more like hell than heaven—the side clogged with a wreckage of cars, an evacuation that never came to be—and there’s the one free and clear of any signs of the epidemic.

Before we even see the Dodge coming on the clear side, we hear its car alarm. As the red speck grows, a back beat slips in, a Bo Diddly cover with a bass-line moving in time with the alarm blast, and then a yell, a cheer—it’s Glenn’s voice. This is how the second episode of The Walking Dead ends. Glenn, not the sheriff, rides into the sunset in the most American of transports and to the most American of songs and in the most American of outfits—a baseball cap and matching jersey.

His unabashed smile as the engines roars reveals that he is well aware of what this car can do on an open road.

The “supply runner” of the group, Glenn has always been skilled at finding the best way in and out of a crowd of walkers. It is the way he navigates Rick out of the tank. It is the way he continues to organize others to get out of the mess Rick started. It is something he does without apology, without deference, and with a little bit of annoyance—“I don’t get in this trouble when I go out on runs on my own,” he says. “You better just trust me,” he says with growing impatience. It is a clue for what life looked like for him before.

“Hey kid, what did you do before all this?” Darryl asks him in the fourth episode.

“Delivered pizzas, why?” he says.

I was surprised by this detail. And still craving flashbacks, I hung upon it. It pointed to a “before” free of the tiresome types of before that emerge around Asian characters. It is the detail that kept me watching, if only to follow this character a little bit further.

Maybe it was not really to learn more, await any kind of flashback. Maybe it was just that Glenn, beyond the familiar banter, had a type of knowing that seemed relatable, applicable not only to combatting an onslaught of a horde of zombies, but also to handling the everyday things that press against Asian American survival.

This is a type of knowing that seems embedded in Glenn’s first words on screen: “Not dead!”

Glenn’s got his hands up and Rick is pointing a gun to Glenn’s head. Rick, who has made a walker shooting gallery out of the escape route Glenn gave him.

“Whoa! Not dead!” are the exact words.

Whoa! Not dead! and I think not of Rick’s gun or whatever the hell is on the other side of the highway at the episode’s end, but all the other ways Glenn has had to stay not dead.

 

 

Of the five-year court battle that followed Vincent Chin’s murder, there is one detail that stuck with me: Lily Chin stuffing and pulling cotton out of her ears so that she did not have to hear the gory details again and again, her own kind of before and after in this eternal present.

“Every time she saw a camera, it reminded her of the tragedy and…she got very emotional,” said Rea Tajima-Pena, who, alongside Christine Choy, co-directed Who Killed Vincent Chin. “Off camera she was the funniest. She loved to cook. She was always trying to set us up.”

That humor I imagine is what Vincent inherited from her. He and Jimmy were laughing in the McDonald’s parking lot when Ebens pulled up.

“[Ebens] was humiliated because Vincent was laughing when he got to McDonald’s,” said a witness, a man Ebens paid to help him track Vincent down.

A killer’s “humiliation.”

It must have been words like these that are worth a piece of cotton. Not just the gore. Words that make me wonder, what was it like for Lily to hear all that quiet?

 

 

“Walker bait,” Maggie calls Glenn in the sixth episode of the second season, “Secrets.”

Earlier in that season, Maggie, new to our gang of survivors, watches a few of the survivors group usher Glenn down a well to kill a walker. The rope they’re using to lower Glenn down goes loose, and he almost hurtles to his death. They scramble to pull him out. “Back to the drawing board,” Dale says in resignation. Glenn, climbing out of the well, is panting but smiling. “Says you,” he rips, passing the rope that was once tied around him to Dale. Turns out he managed to lasso the walker.

Maggie isn’t as ecstatic as the others. “You’re smart, you’re brave, you are a leader. But you don’t know it. And your friends don’t want you to know it. They’d rather have you fetching peaches. There is a dead guy in the well, send Glenn down. You are walker bait.”

“Walker bait,” my husband and I would say sometimes to one another, mostly in moments where we thought we were being used by someone or another. Mostly in the context of white America.

Walker bait when the federal trial is stymied by accusations of “coaching” witnesses, while the prosecution has only asked the questions the police never cared to.

Walker bait when the retrial is held in a city where only 19 of the 200 potential jurors had ever seen an Asian American person; where evidence of Ebens’s racist statements was deemed inadmissible because the jury might be “repelled” and “resentful” of the person who said them; where the judge ruled the autopsy photographs “not relevant.”

Walker bait when the defense takes the position that Ebens’s extreme aggression was understandable in light of his job loss; when that phrase “bar brawl” as in “just a bar brawl gone wrong” is used again and again, until the killers walk away without a day in prison. When Ebens, decades later, millions behind on his fine, only takes issue with the price.[3]

 

 

I sometimes think about why we found Glenn’s death so surprising. It echoes a question I often ask myself–why do I find racism so surprising? And a question I have been afraid of asking–why did Vincent find Ebens and Nitz so surprising—enough at least to throw a punch?

Then, I think of my co-worker, a white man, who spied me doing my Walking Dead research at work. Peering into my cubicle, hovering over my body, he told me how much he hates Glenn. “Don’t you?” he said. He told me that he wished that the writers left Glenn and Michonee, the black swordswoman in the survivor group, alone. The writers should not have let them find love and a sense of place. They were better before—when they were not so much two human beings but a gopher and a “killing machine.”

In that moment, I felt the weight of a rope around my middle, guiding me down a well. I felt my hands tense around an office chair wanting to scream out “don’t call me little motherfucker.”

I did neither. I laughed nervously. I changed subjects quickly. I knew on some level that I was fetching peaches in my majority-white office, as I did.

I thought of Vincent’s two white friends and Glenn’s majority-white survivor community, and all the newspaper reporters who didn’t call Vincent slurs but did call him “oriental” like a rug, a carpet, an object, a machine.

I thought of the PBS higher ups who didn’t “trust” Rea and Christine as they made “Who Killed Vincent Chin.” PBS funded the project but only under the condition that they work with a “Caucasian script consultant.”

I thought of all the white cameramen who kept quitting on them until Rea and Christine learned to operate the cameras themselves.

And I thought of Lily Chin, who knew better than to trust a white camera, prying white eyes, with her whole, funny and vulnerable self. Lily who knew that, even though we can be so many things at one time, a world under the bat-grip of white supremacy wouldn’t know what to do with all that.

 

 

And maybe the day will come when this mistrust will no longer be.

Until then, I ask you. You in the office. You in the strip club. You on the couch. You trapped in the armored tank that is white America. You cozy in there?

 

 

[1] Cummings, Judith. “Detroit Asian-Americans Protest Lenient Penalties for Murder.” New York Times 26 April 1983.

[2] Campbell, Bob et al. “Japan Bashing.” Detroit Free Press 27 October 1985: 17. Print.

[3] Wang, Frances Kai-Hwa and Guillermo, Emil. “Man Charged With Vincent Chin’s Death Seeks Lien Removed, Still Owes Millions.” NBC News 11 December 2015.

The first night of our vacation, I wake up in the middle of the night needing to pee. I’m tired, nestled in the hotel bed, and I debate getting up or not. I have a love-hate relationship with my bladder. I hate how much I have to pee; it feels as if upon the hour sometimes. “Ugh, it’s at it again,” I often groan to my husband, Quincy. “But Nina, it’s your body,” he’ll say. In the rivalry between team Nina and team Nina’s bladder, he always sides with the bladder.

Lately, even if I wake up feeling like a dangerously over-filled waterbed has sprouted up inside of me, I can avoid the half-awake march to the bathroom and fall back to sleep. When I wake up a few hours later, my thought almost always is, “I won.” It’s a relief to know that should the apocalypse require me holding my bladder for an extended period of time, I can do it.

As I contemplate listening to my bladder this time or not, I hear commotion in the hallway. A man yells, “Get down on the ground! Now!” He is yelling this in a voice so certain and sturdy it feels like the scariest part of the whole thing.

A woman chimes in. “Why would you do that!” she screams. I try to imagine what “that” is but I can’t get past my body, which I realize is shaking now, head to toe, a shudder I would otherwise think is reserved for cartoons but it’s real and upstaging my bladder. I draw myself close to Quincy, who pulls me into his arms tightly.

“You ok?” he asks.

“I just want to be very quiet,” I say. I notice there is some part of me that wants to “shush” him, as if he’s talking through a movie, not expressing concern during what could be a shooter, a firefight, who knows. I know he doesn’t warrant this kind of treatment. And I am surprised that the urge to engage in marital bickering remains in me even amid what is happening. The urge runs in me strong like some invisible bladder.

“Run! Run now!” we hear the same man scream, again so sturdily. The woman’s question is never answered and “that” still remains a mystery to me. Quincy pulls me even closer, until we hear nothing, not even a ding of an elevator or thud of a closed door, just the woosh of the steady hotel a.c. and my still-shaking body rustling up their something-thread count sheets.

I decide I won’t tell Quincy that I need to pee. He will worry over it and I will worry over his worry, and then feel forced to walk a kind of pee plank. I want to stay put. I want to stay in bed. Not go to the bathroom close to the door. Close to the commotion.

It’s 4:45 a.m. and I think I can live life in 15-minute increments until around 6 o’clock. The sunrise, I decide, will be the all-clear for me to get up from our king-size lockdown. This is as much logic as I can muster on a full bladder.

Quincy turns to his side for a moment and even that feels like too much.

“What are you doing?” I ask him. I feel that bickering impulse rise up in me again.

“Turning off my phone,” he says.

It’s a smart move. Quincy has multiple alarms set on his phone depending on when he has to get up for one of his several teaching gigs, all set in the tone of a loud dog bark. They often go off unexpectedly if he forgets to turn off the alarm for one gig or another. This is our more familiar middle of the night ruckus. When this happens, I usually groan and jostle the sheets dramatically. “Sorry, sorry,” he says over and over again as he unlatches himself from our cozy spoon to silence the robo-dog. Sometimes I’m so mad I don’t let him resume the spoon. When not barking, his phone also beeps out calendar alerts. Many of them concern me: “Have you asked Nina about her writing?” “Made Nina dinner?” I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a reminder to ask me if I need to pee.

It’s 4:50 and I want to cry. Bladder Standard Time moves slowly, backward it feels like, sometimes. It’s not a clock hand striking forward but a lava lamp sliding back and forth, in slow, honey-like undulations. Usually if we are in bed and I feel I need some comfort or calming, I take Quincy’s hand and guide it down to my lower abdomen, around where I think the bladder might be. I started to do this when I would debate middle-of-the-night bathroom trips but then I began to do it all the time. The feeling instantly puts me at ease. Sometimes his fingers start to slip down lower, sometimes with success, other times I pull his hand back up. Our Equator of Horniness. Either way, I think it’s a win—get some or keep dreaming. Sometimes his hand on my abdomen reminds me of how people put a hand over the heart to steady the heartbeat and it makes me wonder if my bladder is more my heart than my heart is.

I often hear that no matter how awful a relationship is, sex can save it. Lots of sex. I think it’s so true, not only for the obvious getting-off-feels-great reasons but because our bodies are always talking to each other, forging intimacies beyond what our intellect can fathom. Sex is only the logical consequence of all that talk. I don’t know what they are talking about but I know Quincy’s hand and my abdomen engage in something, crisis management perhaps. As much as I want to slip his hand there right now, I know it would be too much. What remains of my better senses at 5:02 a.m. would leave me and I would tell him I need to, have been needing to, pee.

Though it’s only just after 5 o’clock, the argument can be made that I’ve got this. It’s not the first time I have been trapped in a hotel room in the middle of the night needing to pee. Our honeymoon offered an initiation to the upper limits of my bladder. We were staying in an island resort called The Caves. It was our last night, and I thought this was going to be the night we tried to make a baby. I’d had my period all vacation and it had finally ended. I was wearing next to nothing, some skimpy slip. I was about to go do a pre-sex pee when all of a sudden we heard a quiet flap-flap and then saw it: a small bat swooping into our room and right into the mosquito netting that covered our bed, a netting that lurched closer and closer to us as the oscillating room fan passed by it. The bat eventually went up to the rafters but I refused to go to the bathroom until daylight. I found a mug and peed in it and then a glass on Quincy’s side and when I still wasn’t satisfied I went on the bed.

Quincy said nothing really except, “I’m so proud of you,” and later, “In the daylight, it really just looks like a mouse with wings.”

When I think about it now, I think how young we were. How naïve I was about not merely the uses and limits of my bladder but also what lies close by, the uterus and womb. We often tell this story as a dinner party anecdote. We talk about the mosquito netting, the rafters, but I never mention the pee, nor what I think is the true kicker of the story—that I believe the bat was my future child telling me to wait.

At 5:15 we hear a knock on another door, two quick raps and the door clicks open and shut. My mind goes wild. I wonder if the knocking is connected to the original disturbance or if some guest complained and it’s hotel management coming up. I wonder what is worth knowing and what about this might be a mouse in the daylight.

Then the wondering unfurls into all kinds of fears, all orbiting the mysterious “that” which the woman screamed, and then I can’t wonder any more; the lower half of me feels like a distillery, any articulate language dissipating into uric acid.

Just a few minutes later, I break. “Quincy, I have to pee,” I say.

“I think it’s safe to go, the worst is over,” he says.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because of the cop,” he says.

I wonder who he is talking about and then I realize it’s the loud and sure man.

“But what kind of cop, screams ‘run!’” I say.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I think you were more awake than I was.”

This doesn’t satisfy me. All I can think of now is Quincy’s mind went to cop, where mine did not.

I move to put my feet on the ground. I can’t see where they are. My feet are swallowed up in the pitch black and then feel stung by the freezing cement floor. I pause there for a moment.

“Want me to go with you?” he asks.

“Just let me get up on my own time, ok?” I say with more impatience than I want to. I quickly feel guilty. I think of the scene in that movie Titanic where the elderly couple held each other as the ship drowned and another from my favorite TV show Lost when stranded islanders Jin and Song held each other as what was to be their getaway boat filled with water—the thought of which of course makes me want to pee further. And I criticize myself for getting all aggravated with Quincy during what could be a dangerous, life or death time, or at least something that evokes such feelings. This is not how I would want to go I think, all full of pee and marital fury.

I saw my first gun up close just a few months ago. I was taking a community writing workshop at a café in Brooklyn. The class was called “Two Truths and a Lie,” a workshop in memoir and autobiographical fiction. It was early November. Diwali was underway, the Indian festival of lights. The teacher was South Asian and the student body was, largely, too. That evening we were discussing how celebrating Diwali would be a nice way to break up the long and rough stretch of New York City cold that had begun.

We were situated in the playroom section of the café. A small room, just big enough for a folding table and our bodies, but it was sweet and comforting with all the children’s toys, and it even had its own separate entrance for us to come and go as we pleased.

The night felt free and happy, like our own little Diwali party. We were laughing at something together, in fact, when the young man walked in and stood at the top of our table. He was there before we realized it, so deep we were in our laughter. The gun slipped out, not in a flashy way but more like an “ahem,” like, “I guess the ski mask didn’t make a dent, so let me make myself clearer.”

As it became clear that as long as we filled his bag with laptops we’d be fine, I began to wonder if that gun was real or not. It was large, shiny, and silver, bigger than the young man. He was a thin and scrawny boy, really. I remember the gun looking like it could have been a prop in a Western, but maybe that is just what the mind does when it needs to.

As scary as that moment was, I felt even more scared when the cops came. Three different sets— plainclothes, uniformed officers, and a detective. Each set asked the same round of questions, oftentimes misspelling the same set of Indian names we’d already given, and then, dragging two of my classmates into their squad car to go ID some suspects. When my classmates came back, they looked more shaken up than even during the robbery. They told us that “come with us to ID some suspects” was really code for: “Hop along as we stop-and-frisk some innocent black men.”

I worried then about Quincy, who would soon pick me up. I waited by the door, nearly running out to him so that the cops wouldn’t stop-and-frisk him.

***

I get up and back into bed three times and then finally around 5:30 plant my feet firmly on the cold floor.

“Will you go with me,” I say then.

“Of course,” he says.

I come up to the side of the bed and he takes my arm in the way that I know he might take my arm and lead me to the bathroom when we are old. We shuffle down, taking careful steps in that pitch dark.

Quincy stands at the door as I jump into the bathroom and pee a pee that seems to have operatic registers, soaring highs and lows, abrupt breaks and spirited staccatos. It all seems beautiful and majestic. And, just like good opera, even though I don’t understand the language of this song, it makes me want to cry. I don’t. I just pee some more, run out, and then we jump back into bed.

Just as I settle in I realize I’ve forgotten to flush. I tell Quincy and he says he can flush for me. It is no romantic holding-hands-as-a-ship-drowns, but the gesture makes me swoon nonetheless.

Original Article: https://longreads.com/2017/06/02/pee-and-fury-testing-the-limits-of-bladder-control/

Up, up, up, up the stone steps, past the statue of the studious goddess everyone bothers for a picture.  Past a set of smokers at the revolving doors.  Past the crowd just at the entrance, all eyes over shoulders, heads swiveling with every turn of the door.  Shuffling through the coat check line, moving slow, winter layers pried off, wool, down, polyester spilling on the table like so many guts. “See you in there,” I call out sometimes to folks I know.  I pause at check-in table, “Good luck,” the young woman says as I pick up my nametag.

This building is misnamed.  It’s called Low Library but the library is just across the “college walk.”  And it’s not so much low, but high, a large stone dome set atop all those steps upon steps.  Tonight the only books in here are hypothetical. The ones we will pitch.  This is the annual literary agent-MFA alumni mixer event.

She’s the first person I see when I enter the event. It had been nearly a year since we’d seen each other last. I take her in. Her straight black hair in a simple side part. Her petite frame decked in a crisp blue chambray dress and a tight brown brown leather jacket hugging her close. I wonder if she’s taking me in too, everything I did as Tina Fey once put it, “to prepare for my role as human woman.”  My blow-out “with bounce.”  My little cotton black dress, my mom’s gold kara on my wrist, my lucky cowry shell earrings given to me by a former student. She does not wear any jewelry, unadorned save for a black whip of a purse strap hanging off the leather jacket’s shoulder, Indiana Jones-style.

“I snuck in,” she says.

We are in front of a table piled with cheeses, flat breads, olives and grapes.  The first of several large tables piled like this.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she says.

Though I have just entered, it seems as if she has been there for at least a few minutes more.  She is facing me, facing the entrance.  I thought for a minute she might be leaving.

“Because I haven’t graduated yet.”

In here, all is the reverse of what we have just passed outside.  We are studious but mortal, flesh and bone.  The room is encased in stone, marble and concrete.

“I just wanted to see what happens next.”

She smiles.  And I start to laugh.

Just below her grin her tag dangles, more official than her story claims: Amelia Blanquera, nonfiction.

*

Her essay unfolds as a series of vignettes.  Other lifetimes.  Thick New York City summer heat, polyester NYU law school graduation robes, woven Chanel linen.  All of it piled atop her as she jumps into the Washington Square fountain.  WHITE SPACE Then she’s watching a boxing match in Madison Square Garden. WHITE SPACE Then she’s chatting with the ghost of E.B. White on the subway.

“Livin,” I say to my husband.  “This piece should be called ‘Livin.’”

“Livin,” he nods his head.

We are sitting next to each other on the couch as I read her city, her New York.

We keep saying the word, like a toast.

“Livin,” I add, a final comment on her pages.  “I think this piece should be called ‘Livin.’”

We don’t talk about this note at workshop or anytime after.
In workshop, she tells us that the essays are part of a series where she plans to celebrate the ordinary.  “I was told writers follow their obsessions, the ordinary is my obsession.”  But somehow her idea gets lost.  Our classmates are more interested in debating if this piece is “New York enough” or not.  One girl who, when not abroad, lives very well in a very gentrified part of New York, says it is not.

I try to meet her eyes, Amelia’s.  This is all we ever do with one another.

We don’t talk to each other in class so much.  I mostly just meet her gaze.  She always sits close to our teacher and close to the door.  I look towards her, time and again, to share a smile, to share some knowing.

*

A few hours and some nervous helpings of olives and cheese blocks later we circle back to each other, this time at the food table closest to the back.

“I didn’t realize I was drunk.” I scan the table for anything that could soak it up, the most absorbent of the finger foods.

“The strangest thing happened to me,” she says.

I grab a small bread off of the buffet spread.

“A friend came up to me and asked me how many agents I talked to,” she says.

I grab a few more small breads.

“I told my friend only two,” she says. “And then my friend said to me, that’s because you are Asian.”

Everything on my plate remains except for the breads.

“Of course, this stupid place,” I say.

“And I said to my friend, ‘My book isn’t about me being Asian, it’s about public gardens.’”

She just laughs and I just laugh, our laughs squeezing in somewhere between all the other sounds, all the voices elbowing each other, cracking against that stone and the dome overhead.

“Who is it? I want to give them a piece of my mind.”

But I know she won’t tell me.  We just laugh some more.  And I eat some more bread until I’m all soaked up and she says, “I’m ready to go.”

*

The next day, I send her an email while I’m at work.  “Hello!” I title it.  A close cousin to “Livin.”  I ask her how she is today.

I share with her my own experiences of suffering from reduction, what has been termed micro-aggression, but I just want to call it “this stupid place.”

Less than an hour later I get her reply.

“My ‘frenemy’ sent me a nice email this morning, not to apologize but to say she had a nice time running into me and was excited for my writing projects. I have not responded.”

A few more emails and we are settling on dates to meet up. I throw out two.

*

I wait.  A couple weeks.  It’s New York.  People get busy.  Livin.

*

The news comes as a Facebook message.  Natural causes.  That’s the announcement. I find out the rest from her, from her writing: a funny piece on getting a mammogram and how much more comfortable a penis-check machine would be.  This is as much as I know about her earthly body, the past it carried underneath all that sharp leather and chambray badassery. Natural causes remain a mystery.

I try to piece together as much as I can from the internet.  Pictures of her rock climbing.  Pictures of her with her public garden crew.  A picture of her in a yellow dress.  “The one she hung above her bed,” her friend captioned it.  Another of her at an English castle at a wedding.  “And she just wrote to me: ‘the castle was swanky,’” another friend said.  Her piece about her father Googling her boyfriends and keeping a binder of research off his own internet-stalk.

*

I have a picture too, from a photo roll sent to us from the agent-alumni event.  It’s us at the beginning.  We look very serious.

“Let’s practice,” I had said.

My purse is open.  I am reaching for a card.  She is touching my arm and peering straight at me, not even a crack of a smile sneaking in.

*

I don’t know when between all of this she began to leave: our sneaky photo, that laughable, pitch-perfectly-named “frenemy,” a hang-out plan suspended in Gmail.

I want so much to know.  So I do what I do when the trail runs cold.  I write.

*

I start my story in a writing workshop, a stone space more spare than adorned.  It’s a community writing workshop on the second floor of a modest brick building.  As we free write, we can hear the thud of weights and yells from the exercise bootcamp a floor above.  Everyone keeps writing undisturbed.  People write not only at the table but sprawl on couches, put on headphones and angle feet up.

A week later, with all of us holding a full draft of this story in hand, the lights begin to flicker. In and out.  In and out.  In and out.

“That has never happened before,” the teacher says.

I don’t tell the class about Amelia’s flare for the spectral.  Her subway rides with E.B. White.

“And we’ve been here for over a year,” a classmate adds.

I don’t say much of anything. Not because I’m a believer or a skeptic.  It’s just that I’m not there yet.

This is something we did talk about in our grad school workshop: no matter where you begin, endings are always hard.

Original Article: http://www.thegriefdiaries.org/nonfiction-by-nina-sharma/

Marriage is a peep show.  The nudity that I took for granted for the most part as a single girl cannot be discounted anymore- I feel his eyes as I throw my dirty exercise clothes in our wash, I here a whistle as I dry myself off from the shower and he comes rushing up feigning some Fred Astaire sort of dip.  “This marriage is not a peep show,” I say. “Wa-wa,” he says, imitating the game show fail sound.  His face goes hangdog as he rights us up again.

There are always jeans all over the place. Between me and my husband, we accumulate so many pairs. So heavy with loose change and weary, our shape still ghostly in them. For some reason, I feel our marriage burdened by them.

Marriage is the longest dialog of your life.  Weeklong addendums to the grocery shopping list, the unnecessarily rich lives of our fictious kids— “Whose hair texture do you think he’ll have,” he says.  “Yours, that’s usually how it goes,” I say.  He smiles and pumps a fist. If he could high-five his sperm, he would.

When we watch TV and the commercial for a movie comes on where a young Indian man on a boat is being swallowed by a Bengal tiger.  I call out, “Aray yar Sahib!  A young Indian man on a boat is being swallowed by a Bengal tiger.”  His smile flickers. “I cannot be a party to that,” he says.

Quincy shot me a look the time I impersonated Martin Lawrence’s voice as I stubbed my toe. “Damn, Gina,” I said as I rubbed my foot. “That’s strike 1. 3 strikes and I will impersonate a call center person,” he said.

Marriage is strange pleasures as terrific as terrifying- how I am lulled to sleep as he scratches me very low on the butt, the way he gasps with a kiss of the earlobe.

Marriage feels like one eternal dorm-room style mack.  I never know why we are up until 3.  He always knows.

Marriage is only bad when you feel one and another’s lonliness in the same room at the same time.

When we listened to a song by the rock group, The Band, I want him to love it.  But when he just says: “the horns are nice,” I feel very upset.

I love The Band I realize because they idolized American culture, most of the members being from Canada.  They spun stories about an America that neither they or I completely knew, in a style they could not entirely claim as their own.

Quincy might hate the music for that reason, this is my theory for his lack of enthusiasm for most of rock music, Elvis to Justin Bieber— the theft of one culture, placed in the hands of another.  He says, “No that’s not it, I just don’t have an ear for it.”

I wonder then what I don’t have an ear for in this marriage.

On a drive, early on into our marriage, I changed radio stations one time from the classic R&B to what he calls the young kids station.  He said, “I never thought to cut off Smokey before.”

When he keeps the station’s Sunday smooth jazz on for a beat too long, I feel annoyed.

When he changes the young kids station at the slightest auto-tune hiss, I feel annoyed.

I tell him I hate it when he pretends to be a very old man.

When I am mad, I pull a Desi Arnaz and start spewing Hindi galies.  My timing is not as elegant as Desi’s.  In anger, I forget what doesn’t translate.  “You are eating my head!” I say and he looks perplexed.

When he is mad, he listens to Ice Cube’s album Predator.  His favorite album.  And he offers it to me when I’m mad, even if it’s at him.

My mother says our fights are the detritus of our previous lives together.

I am convinced we knew each other and were separated abruptly.

The other day, Quincy was talking in his sleep and he called out: “we better move along now.”  “Where?” I said.  I talk to him, this sleeping Quincy, often. Especially the year he worked so much our Fridays were one long sleep.  That night, he told me about a covered bridge and how he came back.  I looked him in the face, his shut eyes, and talked with him until we were both asleep.

Original Article: http://banangostreet.com/issue12/nina-sharma/

When I call my husband Quincy a peeper, he gets upset and steps away from the roller blinds.

“Looking out the window like Malcolm,” he says, quoting one of his favorite Ice Cube songs.

I wonder what Malcolm X saw from his window. Did he, like us, have a mid-day pigeon-feeding lady? Did 5 pm blister with car honks? Did he have anyone like our I Love You Man, the dapper elderly fellow who nightly chants “I love you, I love you,” while walking up and down our stretch of New York City blocks in his Sunday best? His preacher-ly roll call so familiar now, we worry for him when we don’t hear it. Could a man like Malcolm ever find such steady metronomes in his surroundings? Could he trust a window like that?

“He’s a nerd,” I say to Quincy as he shows me the picture.

It is the famous black-and-white shot of Malcolm parting window curtains with his left hand while cocking a rifle up with his right. He is wearing a grey-toned suit, a white shirt, and skinny black tie with a tie clip on it. His pants ride up high and are fastened with a belt, which leads me to believe that he was not merely a nerd but, perhaps much like Quincy, a thin Black nerd.

“Always was,” Quincy says.

We are in bed talking like this, having one of our early-morning, half-awake chats, our breath still grimy with the burden of our dreams. We are using his laptop to look at Malcolm—looking into those other sorts of windows that compete for our attention.

We look at more Malcolm photos—nerd, nerd, nerd they all cry out, even a mugshot from his “Detroit Red” years.

The computer starts to move slowly.

“You have too many windows open, again,” I say. “I know,” Quincy says.

I let it go, though we have fought over less.

Unlike most of the photos we have come across, I have trouble tracking the picture of Malcolm at the window to any official source. Some think it might have been part of a 1964 Ebony magazine shoot, but the picture was never included in the magazine’s profile. It is a peep itself—never intentionally collected. And yet, looking at the picture, I can’t help but feel like Malcolm knew someone always had an eye on him—be it through a camera lens or past a curtain—and always would.

When Quincy and I got engaged, I remember a friend saying, “You know, I bet he did it just like Malcolm did, asking Betty, ‘want to do this thing?’”

The truth was Quincy had a ring in hand months before he asked me. For at least three months, he jokes, he already felt engaged. We lived on the outskirts of Philly then, in a sleepy “Main Line” suburb. I had moved there a few months earlier from New York City to be with him. I was still getting used to the place—how quiet the suburbs are, how calculated in their quietude. No furious mess of sirens and honks, no neon urgings of 24 hours or delivery, no hawker or vendor in sight. No symphony of languages when walking down a street, no Indian people besides me, no Black people besides Quincy, no slip of smile or passing head nod to a stranger who could easily be an uncle or auntie. I began to have some kind of inverse relationship with the place—the more I fell in love, the more lonely the place felt to me.

But Quincy seemed so still, always looking out our window, out into the unremarkable ’burbs. We lived on the ground floor of an apartment complex and so our blinds there, the metal panel kind, were almost always drawn. The metal had in fact become so old and rusted that tugging on the pull-string would cause the whole contraption to come down. So Quincy really did have to look out like Malcolm—part blinds with his fingers and just peek. It looked as if we lived with a feeling of suspicion, Quincy keeping steady watch like a sentry. But what was there to be suspicious about—how neatly lawns were manicured or sedans were parallel parked? What was the hold-up? What was he witness to that I could not see?

So I began to call Quincy a peeper, when the greatest danger I felt was him turning his back on me.

Original Article: http://aaww.org/looking-out-window-malcolm/

Original Article: https://www.theblueshiftjournal.com/the-way-you-make-me-feel

When people ask if it was love at first sight, I tend to lie and say yes.  The truth is, it was more dread.

Justine turned up the radio, her bedroom thick with the July heat and Michael Jackson’s voice.  It was the sultry murmur-turned-moan intro of “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.”  He had died not more than 10 days before.  Ever since, you couldn’t go too long without hearing his voice. I couldn’t help but feel like I had come down to Philly from New York not to celebrate the 4th but really just to celebrate him.

Justine carried lateness with aplomb.  “Can you text him that we’ll be down in five.”  She nodded to her phone and kept applying her mascara to the rhythm of Michael’s mamase mamasa mamakusas.  I fretted over things like lateness, worrying even now if I was letting down this stranger I was about to text—Justine’s friend who was our ride to a 4th of July barbeque.

“Sorry, what’s his name again?” I asked.

“Quincy.”

“We’ll be right down, Quincy”— I paused my typing.  “This is Nina,” I added.

As we came down, I spotted a man sitting on her apartment complex stoop, a handsome man whom I looked up and down.

“Hi Quincy!” I said.

“No, Nina,” Justine corrected.

She pointed to a man who was tall and gangly and hurriedly moving around a car hoisting stacks of papers into the trunk.  He opened doors for both of us but then rushed passed so quickly, I barely got to see him.

As I settled in, I looked at a sticker pasted on the rear window next to me.  “Brown,” I said.  The school I lasted at for a year before I was shuttled out for a nervous breakdown.  I never knew how much to reveal about that story to anyone or even how to acknowledge that period in my life.  But Justine, who knew me well and was a good, loving friend, did know.

“Quincy went there.  You guys have a lot in common,” she said.

***

I was somewhere in Taos, New Mexico when I began to crack.  My boyfriend and I got stranded on a road trip.  Our car had broken down again and we had been hitching.  This wasn’t usual for us.  We were always on the road.  I would come from Providence to where he went to school in St. Louis, Wash U, and we’d go from there.  Our adventures more often came from our car breaking down than from getting anywhere we intended to.  These were the stories I carried back to friends at Brown.

The breakfast line we stumbled upon was supposed to be for homeless people, but all I could see were hippies, well-kept white hippies.  I saw one hippie of color, a heavy-set young black boy who was talking about how he was “tripping-face” the night before.  A group of people milled around him, other hippie kids.  He didn’t seem to be talking to any one person in particular and no on in particular seemed to be listening to him.  I knew “tripping face” meant it was a good night but I just felt sad.  I wasn’t sure why.  I thought he might have been sad.  I had nothing to go on but a feeling.

I wanted to hear more what this guy was saying but I didn’t draw myself further into the fold of the conversation.  I always let Waspy Lion be our in to this world—that was the nickname my boyfriend gave himself for his blue eyes and shaggy blonde hair.  We once passed a restaurant named “The Waspy Lion” on the road in Colorado and it stuck.  He devised an accompanying impression; he would smooth out and pop the collar to the flannel shirt he always wore, making it look more polished than grungy-prep, and then emit a dull, monotone “rawr.”

Sure enough, some of the people Waspy befriended at the breakfast invited us to the nearby “hippie house.”

“The guy who lives there is a 100 year-old hippie!” said a young man to us while waving us in the direction everyone would be heading.

I wasn’t excited.  I didn’t want to meet the 100-year old hippie.  A new thought kept cropping up in my head: “Would I ever have gotten an invite if I was on my own?”  I was bothered by this new thought.  I couldn’t name why.  I wanted to swat the thought away.

We lost the pack of hippies but kept walking in the direction that the young man pointed.  Once we found the hippie house—a modest white wood shuttered home, I wasn’t in a better mood.  Just a few yards away from it, I stopped walking.  I plopped down in the field near the house, covered my face with my hands and began to cry.  Waspy sat down next to me and pulled me close.

“I don’t fit in anywhere,” I said.

 “Me either,” he whispered.

He gripped me tighter, my body bound up in his flannel.

***

“Do you have enough room back there?” Quincy asked as he pulled out.

I was surrounded by stacks of photocopies, student papers and books.  A teacher’s car, I thought.

“Yes,” I said.

I spied one of my favorite books amid the stacks, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.  I had been introduced to the book a year ago, while teaching a class on fairy tale writing at The Asian American Writers’ Workshop.  It was a youth workshop for young Asian American girls called “UnFairy Tales.”  A friend recommended we read Kingston’s Fa Mulan chapter.  I felt hesitant to admit to her I didn’t know the book and really only knew the story from Disney.

I remember being overwhelmed by the book when first I opened it.  I couldn’t follow what was going on exactly and was panicked to teach that chapter.  But I instantly loved it.  I loved the poetry, the mixing of fantasy and reality.  I loved how familiar the story was, even when I found it inscrutable, more familiar to me than anything I had read in a long time.  And I loved how the young Asian American women in UnFairy felt the same way.  What was Quincy doing with it? I thought.  Who is door-opening-for-women, up-on-his-Asian-American-literature man?

I wanted answers.  But Quincy and Justine were in the throes of discussion.  Justine’s “what’s new” turning into a catch up about the masters’ program where they met.  So-and-so had a new book, a kid, a new job.

“I haven’t seen them since we were at the wedding and that guy’s hand caught on fire from the table candles,” I heard at one point.

I wanted to know what happened then but was reluctant to ask.  Instead, I tried to think of ways of entering their conversation by way of bringing up The Woman Warrior.

But before I could mention any book, I heard a “congrats” from the front.  Justine was congratulating Quincy on the publication of his own book of poetry.

“Congrats!” I chimed in quickly too.

Justine passed the book back to me.  The T-Bone Series.  I flipped to the first poem, “T-Bone and Zeus.”

“Zeus will go ‘cross the world for a good martini” it began, going on to tell a story of nights the narrator, T-Bone, spends clubbing with the Greek god.  “Zeus and I at this Goth club/What’s a black man suppose to do at a Goth club?”

I found myself laughing.  Against all odds it felt like.  Even as I felt the gnaw of my anxieties, a little laugh escaped.

That laugh was enough to make me look up, to lean a bit forward out of the comfort of the back seat and try to get a better look at Quincy.  The most I could see of him was his hair.  His dreadlocks were so long and thick, it seemed as if a helmet of hair was driving us.  I could see that he’d had them for a while.  Each dread seemed to have earned its position, like the one at the peak of his forehead, which insisted on sticking up even when Quincy tried to flick it down.  There was fray too, especially at the top of his head, a tangle of frizz where most of the locks seemed to have lost their hold.

This man is a little bit sad, too, I thought.  Dread meeting dread it felt like, though I couldn’t be sure.  I began to think about his poem and wondered if Quincy was more like Zeus or the friend, T-Bone.  The one who feels invincible or the one who needs convincing.

***

“Jerry Garcia saw a bunch of women at the same time, why should it be any different for you?” Lewis said.

Lewis was my closest friend at Brown.  We’d known each other long before.  We had gone to both grade and high school together.  There, we helped each other get through, sharing notes and homework and the like.  But his group of too-cool record store boys seemed to keep a wide berth from my pack of hippie-cheerleader queen bees.  We got closer after both landing at Brown and ended up doing a campus radio show together where we played, among many things, a lot of Grateful Dead.

His aligning my infidelities with Jerry’s worked for a few weeks.  I managed to get myself to classes, most times without breaking down in tears halfway through.  I saw friends but didn’t stress myself with going out and socializing.  When I stayed in, I painted with my roommate’s fingerpaints.  I tried to be cute and normal but I felt anything but cute and normal.  I could barely concentrate.  Every thought, every decision, even if just to dip my finger in the paint, was a flame.

One day, I called my older sister crying.  After talking to me for a few minutes, she had to go to back to her job.  “Don’t do anything rash, ok?” she said.  A few minutes later, I took a bunch of pills and downed a handle of Vodka.  My father called me, probably tipped off by my sister, and when he realized I wasn’t making proper words, he dialed 911.

I vaguely remember being carried out on a stretcher.  I remember more of waking up in the school infirmary with my mother sitting at my right, a hair brush in her hand; Lewis, sitting at my left, his head in his hands.

***

For most of our ride to the barbeque, we were turning around. It felt less like movement forward and more like an undoing of a knot.  Traffic cops waved us in one direction and then another.

What would be a 15-minute ride out to suburbs was turning into an hour and change.

Philly, because of the annual big 4th of July concert, was a mess of detour signs and orange traffic cones, a maze designed to make Ben Franklin Parkway into a public square and the Museum of Art’s “Rocky” steps a concert stage.

The detours didn’t seem to get Quincy down.  He seemed happy to be stuck in the car with us, listening to the R&B coming from the stations Justine was charging herself with navigating or the beats from old school boom boxes wafting in along with charcoal and meat smoke from grill-fests outside.

“It’s live, live, all the way live.”

Justine and Quincy knew these songs more than I did.  As we made our way, they swapped childhood stories over these songs and traded lyrics.

“Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage.”

I wouldn’t know what it would mean to listen to these songs as a kid.  The soundtrack of my childhood was comprised of mostly Hindi film songs or classical ghazals and bajans.  The only American music I can remember is Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown”— I remember it always played at the New Years parties we’d attend at Indian banquet halls.  I’d watch my aunties and uncles gyrate to the song and feel embarrassed on their behalf.

All of a sudden I felt like I would be found out.  For what, I did not know, but if I didn’t participate in some way, I believed I would be.

“I used to think it was, ‘your blood is mine’ as a kid, not ‘your butt.’ I thought that was the scariest taunt ever, ” I heard Quincy say.  “How are you going to take someone’s blood?”

I thought to myself then, quick, propose a car game.

“What Michael Jackson video would you be in?” I asked them.

They jumped in as if we had been deliberating on this the whole ride.

 “No brainer.  ‘Smooth Criminal,’ the greatest video of all time” Quincy said.

“‘Remember the Time,’ just like ‘Smooth Criminal,’ greatest video of all time but not as much work,” Justine said.

“What about you, Nina?” she asked.

I realized I did not have an answer in mind. “The Way You Make Me Feel,” I blurted and immediately felt self-conscious.  I remembered that this was the one where Michael essentially chases a sexy girl around the car while she is all like no, no!

I could have picked “Thriller” and shared what I always thought of as my central Michael anecdote: I was a toddler when “Thriller” came out.  My mother once told me that she would put the video on at my mealtimes.  Apparently, it was the only thing that got me to sit down and properly eat.  I don’t know why I didn’t share this.  It is not only one of my favorite Michael stories but one of the few family anecdotes I felt I could comfortably deliver.

But Justine and Quincy were either very supportive or really just relishing any memory of Michael through and through.  We only talked about how exciting it would be to be chased around a car by him.

***

The suicide attempt happened at the end of the school year.  I was sent home for a week to recoup and then I finished up the term in what felt like an adrenaline push.  I locked myself up in my room and wrote a few papers.  Then, in what felt like a comedown from an adrenaline push, I completely fell apart.

I withdrew from the New York City apartment I was supposed to live in with friends from Brown.

I went back home to my parents.  I barely got out of bed, though I barely slept.

When I did get out of bed, I fought with my parents.  I wrote on the beam between my two bedroom windows “my moment.”  I wrote this in black marker on a piece of medical tape.  I thought that every other moment in my life was a performance for someone else.  I spent June and July mostly just sitting there alone, quietly staring out this window and fuming.

One sunny August day, I stopped looking out the “my moment” window, went to my closet and pulled out a very beautiful dress, a dress my sister once let me borrow and had not yet asked for back.  It was a long-sleeved dress made out of some soft cotton-mesh fabric with a ruffled v-neck and colored what I thought was a beautifully irreverent fuscia.  I slipped it on, hopped in my car and started to drive.  I drove and drove, not stopping for three days straight.  I thought if I traveled far enough away from my family, I’ll be free to live life however I want, with whomever I want and I’d be happy.

***

Every street in Philly seemed to be filled up with people.  People carrying coolers to parties.  People playing music out of their cars.  People walking on the sidewalks and on the street itself.  Grills set up on patios and lawns and public greens.  No one seemed to be too much in a hurry.

The pace of this city was so different from New York.  In New York I found myself walking like I was weaving through a race, upset at the person walking slowly in front of me, passing them, only to say in my head, “finally, I can enjoy a nice slow walk.” But perhaps it was being in the backseat that made me feel this way.  Neither driving or in shotgun, I was forced to kick back and take in the scene, whether it was my nature to or not.

A girl walked by who seemed to carry the July heat as nothing but one more pleat in a summer dress.  Justine checked her out and Quincy made a show of not checking her out.

“Can’t even look, could be one of my students,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if he was eyeing the young woman along with Justine and just joking or if he was reserved or if he just didn’t care for her either way.  None of that came through to the backseat.  It was a deadzone back there.

All of a sudden I had the feeling that I should be making a party, a fun and lively back seat party, one that everyone wants to go to.  Quick, how do you make a party with a Maxine Hong Kingston book?  I thought to myself.

I watched the girl.  I thought about how even she seemed less shy than me, and I felt frustrated by that feeling.  I felt competitive without knowing what I was competing for exactly.

***

I made it as far as Chicago.  There, I decided I would find the next flight out from O’Hare to Paris.  I called my parents from a hotel room to tell them so.  We didn’t fight.  I hung up feeling if not peaceful, just a little bit more settled and excited about what lay ahead.

In the airport, I thought I looked great in my elegant but playful fuscia dress.  Perfect for the start of my Parisian life.  The red in the dress hid how my period bled through.  I was lost in these thoughts when I felt a tap on my shoulder and I saw my father standing next to me.  He promised me he’d get me a plane ticket if I just got in the car with him.

In the car, he turned on the radio and I recognized the voice of Jagjit Singh.  Usually my dad loved to sing right alongside him, but he wasn’t singing now.  Instead, he just tried to translate the ghazal, losing its beauty as it slipped into English and he broke down into tears as it did.  I grew quiet then and remained so for the rest of the ride.  It still took me sometime to register that we were going home.

The next day I got some kind of escape.  I was checked into New York’s Payne Whitney clinic at Weill Cornell Hospital.  In the waiting room hung pictures of famous depressed people— mostly distinguished white men and Virginia Woolf.  My father tried to cut the tension by doing impressions of their serious faces, tilting down his head and furrowing his brow like Beethoven and then doing another and another.

I don’t remember laughing or not laughing.  I don’t remember much.  But I always think of the story my sister tells.  As they waved us in, she and my mother came upon a man, maybe in his 30s, dressed neatly and having a conversation with a wall.  At the sight of him, my sister felt like crying.  But in that moment, my mom turned to her and said, “I like him.”

As soon as they left, I met my new dorm-mates: there was the woman who said if she was a psychiatrist, she’d just play “Eleanor Rigby” on repeat in her waiting room, an older man who walked around wearing headphones and holding a carton of Newports his kids dropped off, and another man who rode a stationary bike and didn’t do much else.

I mostly just looked out of the window, into New York City summer: a delivery truck’s ample double-park, taxi drivers honking with such ire, people walking, jostling one and another, everyone going somewhere even if it was nowhere, out of the office or back, to the FedEx on the corner, the ice cream truck— all that life moving along without missing a beat, not bed checks or stool softeners or outbursts or nurses rushing, more than anything else, that was the most humiliating and scary thing to me.

***

The sun seemed brighter and less cruel once out of the knot of the city and in this sleepy suburban landscape—an apartment complex of self-same beige apartments with matching mini-porches.  We got to the barbeque very late.  The grill was shut and the party seemed to have moved inside.  The sun was dipping, you couldn’t really see any signs of the 4th of July.

In the distance stood several tall steel poles with blinking red lights—radio antenna towers. Something about them there, looming, read spooky to me.  I felt as if there lay the third level beyond the city, when the curtain of everything drops.

As we got out and all did a stretch, I took Quincy in for the first time.  He seemed to me an impossibly tall and thin blade of a man, with a narrow face on which delicate, sharp features had an almost exaggerated quality to them, all framed by his long, past the shoulder locks, old familiars to me now.  They seemed like the largest part of him, as if they were what buoyed him here, prevented him and all his silly from floating up past those tall towers and into outer space.  Maybe it made sense that I got to know them first.

My attention shifted as we neared the apartment door.  I was nervous about the BBQ from the beginning.  While the car offered distractions and excuses to not to have to socialize, like basically watching the road, there was no avoiding it at the party.

The crowd of people in there were laid back.  I found myself unfettered of my New York defenses.  And soon enough that unfettered-ess became a rabbit hole for me, I delved into discussing all matters of things I usually don’t pull out until the waters have been tested.  Namely, I talked about my crush on Norm, the big fat white man on Cheers.  We talked about that for a good long while.  It seemed as if it was only me and Quincy in the room, he seemed as committed to the rabbit hole as I was.  The anxieties that usually crept about me at the edges, the worry that anything I said was manic, depressed or irrational, were not gone but less on the watch.

We kept up this conversation even as we were walking out.

“You have funny taste,” Quincy said.

“I just know what I like,” I said.  As I said this, I found myself looking him dead straight in the eyes.  My directness took even me by surprise.  It was as if I said it in spite of myself.

We continued walking for a quiet moment and then Quincy spoke up.

“You know, I think I could have a kid and do that whole sort of thing.”  He said it like we had been talking about it all day, not strategizing over the best Michael Jackson videos.  His saying this seemed so far away from how he had been.  There was no Zeus or T-Bone or poet at all now, the words kind of tumbled out of him as if they were tripping over themselves in the process.

He didn’t plan to say this I could sense, just as much as I didn’t plan my hard eye contact.  It was as if another part of him was speaking to another part of me, some daring part, picking up some signal only God and those radio antennas could know.

_________________

That Dress

That dress? It’s so heavy it could kill you. It will cost as much as an SUV, shouldn’t run over you like one. And in the future, no ganda bras. You need to get a wonderful one. Not better. Yes, a wonder. That’s it. Now we are getting somewhere. What a veil, it will rest heavy there but his heart, when he sees you, will come on to you. Yes, love. See, there is no need for the tension. Make sure you can walk in it. You should walk carefully. Like you are balanced on a tightrope. Make sure you cannot fall. If you should tumble, you would go right into the flame. There is no need for tension. Take a joke, just don’t tumble with one. We fought to find a place that understands our codes. Not just fire codes. We fought to find convenience and understanding in one go. Just don’t let this dress fight you.

The Ones

Sounds just like bells— kalira, their jingling the last rattle of the wedding. Even when you are all bangles, kalira long-gone from choora, they seem to remain, still dangling, like a ghost limb, if you can have a festive one. Their flinty crackle, emanating as you grab your keys, shuddering with the engines’ release, and later sandwiched in the parallel park. Tink-tink-tink until you take choora off for the job interview and place bangles, one by one, in the bucket seat, where they sluice around elegantly.

When you pick them up, they are scrambled. You try to remember the pattern—red, red, white, red like bangle code, a tora tora, that perhaps better contains the wishes bestowed on each one of them, by every mama, the uncles you rarely see, knotted the bells, just the way they would your shoelaces, that ordinary grace present again and still there, dangling, even when you pay the meter and tink your way to newsstand, where the discounted glossies strike up strange conversation with your hands. What do you do after 40 days? the counterwoman says as you scrape out exact change. You are short a penny and ask her to break a five. Unsure, you say like an 8-ball, as she hands you back the ones.

For My Brother, My Name

This story, I tell it all the time. Time to commit it to paper I guess.

My name wasn’t supposed to be Nina. My mother wanted to name me Uma. For 8 months she carried me. I came out early, her water breaking as she lifted a sack of potatoes. I was supposed to be born on Christmas and named Uma. I want to blame it on the potatoes but don’t sacks of potatoes get enough thrown their way?

My sisters, then 10 and 8, were at dance class at the time. It must have timed out perfectly— 90 minutes of jazz hands through labor. The kids all went around the room, talking about their day or pet turtle or new shoe. “Today, my mother is going to have a baby,” my middle sister, Neeta, said, as if I was her pet turtle or new shoe, fitting me somewhere in between the two. Her name, Neeta, means wisdom. She tells me that that day all she felt was anger, towards me, for bursting through her mother’s belly like that. What kind of kid is this? She was already thinking.

Sonia, my oldest sister, would be the one to say something like that usually, not Neeta. Sonia was named after a model, not someone famous, but someone my mom noticed, incidentally, on a kitchen calendar, after the one who she didn’t get to name—he passed away that quick.

They must have gotten over me, whatever anger they had that I caused this to our mom, like sisters do. Their first sisterly act towards me. “No, you have to name her after the most beautiful woman we know,” they said to my mother. Perhaps in unison or in turns, breaking up the sentence in urgent staccato.

Nina in Spanish means baby, the enye mark on the second n, giving it a special flourish, a charming toddler wobble of a lilt. But for my sisters the marking was of a different quality.

I imagine them watching the show, so close to the screen, the flicker casts shadows, hazy blue, on their faces. I imagine the generic pained and troubled expressions of the actors, a hand on the forehead folding like an enye mark. Why my mom let my sisters watch All My Children confounds me, as much as her letting her 8 and 10 year old daughters name her child after their favorite character, Nina Cortland.

But it seems like in America something had cracked open inside all of them, even my sisters, laboring for a language to name beauty.

Original Article: http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/05/excerpts-from-jumping-the-jahru/

Original Article: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db19/funnyflash/nina-sharma

When Mom and Kanye West go shopping for jewelry at Sona Jewelers of Islen, New Jersey, they often get their purses confused—not because they are carrying the same one but because each has a version of the other’s at home.

Every time they go to Little India people stare at them together. A crowd of young kids forms around Kanye and my mother in front of the store. Kanye thinks maybe they should say something. My mother says, “So, let them stare” and pushes through the crowd towards the glass doors of the store.

When Kanye jumps at the first thing he sees my mom shoots him a look— the same one she uses on me when she’s talking to someone on speaker phone and wants me to be quiet— she shoots him that look and Kanye knows to shut up and she’ll handle it in Hindi.

Kanye and my mom often encourage each other to indulge their gaudy taste. While they publicly praise what the other bought, they ridicule the other’s purchases in private.

When she shops with me she always says, “It’s funner with Kanye.”

Original Article:  http://aalr.binghamton.edu/mfa-vs-poc-nina-sharma/

“Tell me, Nina, have you experienced any racism before, really?”

Over the expanse of two Staples-variety folding tables, I looked up at the professor, a blue-eyed white man, and saw in his open, waiting face that he really did want an answer.

This was the third workshop of my first semester in my MFA program. I had been workshopping a series of essays that were, generally, explorations of various aspects of my identity. I reflected on my experiences as a South Asian American woman, as a Jersey girl, and as a married woman, with an eye especially toward what it means to be in an interracial marriage. My husband is African American and the bulk of what I handed in to workshop discussed him as much as it discussed me.

All through the semester I had seen the professor bump against my project.

In one particular piece, I reflect on the stereotypes of the “problem” and “model” minority as terms which, in their opposition, speak to a shared history of racism and disenfranchisement between me and my husband. In margin notes, he responded to this section, writing, simply: “how does opposite = shared?”

During our conference, when, against my better judgment, I began to talk about the ironies of “brown peril”—the madness of being praised as a model citizen sometimes and feared as a terrorist-affiliate others, he cut me off to say: “Listen, each immigrant group is called something, it’s part of the process of assimilation, I mean, Irish people are called alcoholics.” And then, back-tracking, “I guess that’s not the same as being called a terrorist.”

And in class, he most often just said that my story was “nothing new,” it had been told already. Sometimes, even by him. He has some writing, I can generally say, that reflects on race relations in America.

All to say, I should not have been surprised by his line of questioning. I should have known, I feel, on some level, that four months of this would lead to: “have you experienced any racism before, really.” And I think I did. It was that “really,” really. The carelessness of it got to me. I wasn’t sure whether it was a postured “really” or truly felt. Though he was in his mid-fifties, he had something boyish about him that made it hard to read one way or another.

I fumbled to reply. I don’t even remember what I said. But he was quick to fill in the gaps—

“You just must be sensitive,” he said.

I am not writing to take this man to task. He was just the gateway into a year where I heard myself and others being accused of being too sensitive, too ideological, and too political in our writing or in our thinking. “Really”-ed at every turn. It was the year, simply put, that I had learned the shorthand of disbelief.

That same fall, the first Indian Miss America was crowned, another Nina. And not more than a split-hair of a second after her crowning did the tweets start coming in—“Miss Terrorist,” “Miss 7-11.” After which Nina said, “I believe myself to be first and foremost an American.” Her reply mystified me and continues to. What did she mean by American? Did she mean “assimilated,” like my professor said? Not foreign-born? Was her American like my American? Was she, like me, named after the All My Children soap opera character Nina Cortland? Did she, like me, have two older sisters who protested a mother’s choice of Uma? Or was the name bestowed by a parent, an auntie, or an outlaw uncle? And I wonder how else we might walk together.

When I discussed how I felt about this professor to a workshop classmate—a woman who because of shared cultural heritage I naïvely thought I could get close to—she just turned to me and said, “Really? I wouldn’t have known, you are so nice!”

Perhaps, in my fumbling to speak, I come off less me and more beauty queen, Miss Congeniality, waving pageant-style, arm-arm-wrist-wrist, in the face of disbelief. But more than anything else, I was struck by this woman’s own disbelief. “I get it, but come on though, he’s a nice guy,” she added. It was not unlike the disbelief which I observed in the responses of so many of my peers, even peers of color. I didn’t hear him say that. I didn’t think of it that way. I didn’t think you would think of it that way. “You are nice, not like me: mean,” this woman said to me again just recently at a welcome back party. And I can’t fault her for wanting to place us in opposition, existing in an environment that does not seem to want to foster more complex engagements with or between their students of color.

That first year in my MFA program, more than learning about writing, I learned something about performing. How to carry yourself in a place where your existence is ceaselessly negated. How to keep conversations short and bland with people who you’d rather not let in. How to not let things get to you if you get drawn into something deeper, or at least know that, like a cold or seasonal bug, the icky feeling will pass in time. How to flag the “really-s” and “come ons,” and all else in the lexicon of disbelief.

This to me is what the MFA of color looks like, or the education we receive by default. What that space should look like is the harder and more worthwhile question. I wish for an MFA of color, in color. A program where inclusion is not contrived by way of a collection of books, some-odd classes, a club or quota of students. I wasn’t the only one of two people of color in my workshop—out of the nine of us, six were students of color, and yet the conversation always felt to me overwhelmingly white.

The true remedy lies in addressing the concerns of not only writers of color, but all groups fighting institutional marginalization, in concert, at all times. This ultimately means eliminating workshops and seminars where race, gender, sexuality, social and economic class difference, and disability are treated as niche concerns and proliferating those courses that consider culture as part and parcel of the craft of writing, as fundamental as anything else. This intention should be held no matter what the makeup of the student body is.

The professor was not asked back to teach. I came to learn that, of all things, this was an evaluation-based decision. The news was surprising to me. I was convinced that I was the only one having problems in the class; my classmates seemed to get along with the professor. But on the last day of class, as I hastily circled numbers on the evaluation form, maybe my peers sat and wrote some thoughtful, honest comments about their workshop experiences. Maybe we had all been beauty queens, waving arm-arm-wrist-wrist in the face of disbelief. Maybe we were all forced to feel alone on the other side of a Staples folding table as a blue-eyed, white man presented himself as the authority of our lives. Maybe we all suffered, really.

This piece does not end with a gun.

This piece ends where it begins.

You see, I had been observing teachers for a year and this is what I saw.

I saw numerous lectures and teaching demonstrations during the pedagogical seminar required for my graduate school teaching fellowship.  I saw instructors walk in with binders full of exercises during two consecutive summer teaching workshops I took in addition to the seminar.  I saw myself, a first-generation South Asian-American woman, filling notebook upon notebook of exercises on race and identity—writing exercises through which the undergraduates assigned to my composition class would discover themselves through their writing.

And in the first weeks of standing in front of fourteen first-years, I saw none of the above could truly prepare me.

Prior to the start of the semester, I reviewed and reviewed all the exercises I could try, timed the “aha” moments of insight down to minutes in my lesson plans.  In the throes of those first weeks, though, I would just come back exhausted, with the less nuanced concern of how teachers manage to do anything.

Teaching to me felt nothing short of sorcery—how do you make students talk, how do you get okay with silence, how do you tell students they are wrong without saying they are wrong, how do you say they are right without singling them out, how much should I talk and reveal about myself?

As we studied the works of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Peggy McIntosh among others, I saw myself struggling not to swiftly correct students who took deeply racist positions on social privilege, their guiding arguments being along the lines of: “for things to get better, people need to not make such a ‘big deal’ of things.”  I saw myself struggling as I realized the common thread of Whiteness among the students who were making such claims.  In particular, I saw myself struggle with a student who, for the better half of the semester, wanted to argue in his papers that White and male privilege simply did not exist.

Beyond that, I saw myself struggle with how to cultivate a sense of authority.  I had a student who would look out the window, doodle, and then say that the material made no sense.  Another student who dismissed writer Rebecca Solnit as a “man-hater” early into our conversation about her essay “Men Explain Things To Me.” One more that hardly came to class even when notified about the absence policy. All young White men.

I struggled not to let these concerns eclipse the moments when things synced up, when a quiet student began to talk, when I could hear new friends make lunch plans together as they packed up—some days even just that felt like a win.

I did this all while, back in student mode, I saw week after week a professor, a middle-aged White man who led a literature seminar I was taking, not struggle in the least to tell us we were wrong and to single us out—both of which he did with what seemed like near-expert simultaneity.

He did not struggle to ask me one session if I were Hindu and then tell me I was wrong about the facts of my own religion.

“Yes, we have many gods, a pantheon,” I said.

“Ah, not quite a ‘pantheon’,” he said.

He did not struggle in the following session, to give a full fifteen-minute lecture on “Hindi” philosophy—confusing the language with the religion.

He did not struggle to share choice details of his personal life.  As when I watched him do a trick I had seen another White male professor do the previous year, describing an overnight prison stay for a reason he kept a mystery.  It seemed like a cred-currying move, the story becoming a running gag.  And perhaps it was funny, just lost on me.

“You were in for murder, right?” a student joked a few weeks later.

“I could take him every semester,” another student said to me.

That same fall, I joined a community writing workshop called “Two Truths and a Lie,” thinking of it as reprieve from grad student and teaching life.

I knew the instructor of Two Truths, fiction-writer Bushra Rehman, from my writing life outside the program, specifically from New York City’s Asian American Writers’ Workshop.  I saw her teach there, then read from what would become her debut collection of short stories, Corona, which follows a young, Queens-born, Pakistani-American girl coming of age.

In Bushra’s class, I could be sure there would be no breezy accusations of man-hating, no prison-pride stories, and no discussion of “Hindi” philosophy, unless as potential material.  In fact, one of the first writing exercises Bushra gave us was to craft a scene around an incident of racial microaggression, using an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’sAmericanah as a model.

Her student body was filled with writers of color, queer and transgender writers, as well as our allies. Bushra seemed effortlessly to weave both matters of identity and matters of craft into one discussion.

Altogether, I found our conversations to be more intellectually rigorous than any I was having in grad school.  I always looked forward to closing off my week with them.

I looked forward also to the change of scenery, the class took place in an area far different from campus, in Flatbush, Brooklyn.  My mind seemed to loosen itself quickly from the grip of grad school and teaching as I made my way down Church Avenue to class.  I almost forgot about New York entirely.  The series of shops on that stretch of Church reminded me of the ones my grandparents would take me to when I tooled around with them as a five-year-old down the streets of Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

As I walked by Bobby’s on the corner, a large department store brazenly displaying its quantity over quality, I thought of how my late grandparents would have loved this store.  I remember watching them delicately examine racks and bins of goods glazed by neon overhead light.  Even though they saw their children making it as doctors in this country, one hundred varieties of rubber flip-flops still did it for them.

As the shops ended, blocks of two- or three-story homes began.  They were mostly wood-shingled Victorians built decades ago.  This section of Flatbush was one of the first intentional suburbs, a model for towns like the one where I grew up, now preserved as historic property.

Soon, the shops started to mix up.  Some seemed dated and in line with the ones my grandparents took me to.  Others seemed fairly new, their shiny wrappers of hipness still un-scuffed, catering more to the young, middle-class families that have been moving into the area.  In fact, our workshop met in the playroom section of one of the newer cafés on Church.  It was a small, but private, space, separate from the main café space.  It even had its own separate entrance for us to come and go as we pleased.

As I got closer to the café, I could see the street sign of Coney Island Avenue, considered by some as marking the end of what is now often called the “Ditmas Park” section of Flatbush.  It always made me think of my parents, who lived on Coney Island Avenue when they first moved to America, but much closer to the shore, as did the parents of Bushra and three other members of our workshop.  Immigrants always start out at the edges.

I imagined my parents living in a small apartment with my oldest sister, still a newborn on their knees.  I’ve heard stories of them cooking dahl while the landlord absurdly claimed the smell brought the roaches.  I’ve heard stories of them working long hours at a hospital where their supervisors bullied them into tears.  I’ve heard them tell these stories with a myriad of voices: sometimes with old anger, sometimes with quiet strength, and sometimes, the best times, with laughter.

It’s laughter from the edges that I believe we share in common: immigrants, children of immigrants, and marginalized people. It’s our collective inheritance, the laughter that keeps us from punching, the laughter that keeps us from crying.  It’s what emerges on the pages.  It’s what enveloped our classroom, what I admired most about Bushra as a teacher, what mystified me.  She told no joke to create a genial and productive atmosphere.  Shared no cred story.  But the room and our work seemed to swell with a sense of humor.

In fact, I was laughing at a classmate’s very funny and very sad short story, when the Black man, no older than my students, came through the playroom’s entrance and walked up to the middle of our folding table.

He was trembling enough that you might think all he was carrying in was the cold.

The young man dressed the part of a robber: classic black ski mask, silver gun so large and shiny it felt like the fanciest thing in the room. But Bushra, sitting to the right of where he stood, seemed more in charge than he did; it seemed, in fact, like she hadn’t stopped teaching.

As he instructed us to put our laptops in the bag he held, Bushra breathed a sigh that seemed more tired than frightened.

I was without a laptop, but I still looked to Bushra for what to do.

She was the first to pick up her laptop and place it in the bag, her movements demonstrative in the way teachers can move when being expressive.  Soon the students who had laptops followed suit.  Soon, the young man’s declarations of “Faster, I don’t want to kill you” were replaced by the quietude of a full bag.  Bushra and the young man exchanged a final look, she nodded to him, and then he took off, fast as he could.

This was the ultimate teacher observation. Bushra simply held space for the young man as she held space for us every week.

This piece does not end with a gun.

It does not end with the subsequent stop and frisks by the police that followed.

Or the innocence of the random Black men they harassed.

It does not end with the race-based bias and melodrama in the media coverage of it all.

This piece ends where it begins—with one teacher observing another.

This piece is dedicated to my Two Truths family.

Original Article: http://www.teachersandwritersmagazine.org/what-i-saw-notes-of-a-first-year-teacher-1078.htm