Author: emcochackhong

Something that stood out to me in their interview with Rosie Knight was when Shing Yin Khor said:

“How much of the American story is shaped by clever marketing but built by the marginalized?” 

This strikes me hard. It then became a powerful lens for me when I think about Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel that, just like The Legend of Auntie Po, shows us the intersectionality of race, queerness, family, and marginalized lives shaped by American narratives. While Khor rewrites the Paul Bunyan myth to center a Chinese American girl, Mei, Vuong documents how the forces of whiteness structure everything from intimacy to labor for Vietnamese immigrants through his own story, a letter, to his illiterate mother.

In a world, the America’s world, where even myths are intertwined with the country’s history of colonization, marginalization and slavery, Vuong’s answer comes through his reframing of the Vietnam War. Rather than accepting the U.S. narrative of rescue or moral authority, he insists, “All this time I told myself we were born from war, but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence, but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.” Just as Khor uncovers the erased labor of Chinese workers beneath the Paul Bunyan myth, Vuong reveals how the war’s mythology obscures the real Vietnamese lives shaped, and scarred, by it, even in our own language: “Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”

“A lot of the experience of being a non-white person in America is about trying to navigate whiteness.” Ocean’s relationship with his first lover, Trevor, is one of the clearest signs of this “whiteness navigation.”

“He was white. I was yellow. In the dark, our facts lit us up and our acts pinned us down.” 

The intimacy between them is always shadowed by racial difference. How even queerness can’t erase the imbalance of how both boys move through America. Trevor’s whiteness shapes the terms of desire, just as Mei must negotiate white expectations in the logging camp, or with Bee, her “bestfriend” who’s also white. 

Whiteness, in a way, also shapes labor. At the nail salon where Ocean Vuong’s mother works, the most repeated phrase is “I’m sorry,” spoken by Vietnamese women whose survival depends on appeasing white customers. This echoes Khor’s observation that marginalized people are forced to adapt themselves to white comfort simply to live. 

Ocean’s words mirror Mei’s imaginative rewriting of myth: “I’m angry that I have to make my own God,” she says, yet she creates Auntie Po as a way to protect herself, her family, and to seek for freedom, when institutions fail them.

But what both Mei and Ocean Vuong has in common, is their creativity as a form of resistance. Ocean himself enters the country without English, bullied for his difference, yet eventually turns the English language, once a tool of power, into his means of resistance. He said: 

“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because… I was trying to break free.” 

Mei, who made up her own God, who speaks English under her dad’s word of how it made her more American, uses that same language to tell her own stories of Auntie Po, both stories that insist on the humanity and creativity of those who have long navigated the boundaries set by whiteness.

 

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America explores the tension between despair and transformation in a world collapsing under the weight of illness, politics, and fear. Taken place at the height of conservative revolution in America’s politics and culture under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the irony is that, conservatism is to resist changes, and preserved traditional ideas and values, but Angels in America also taught us that changes is inevitable. Through a variety of characters who aren’t entirely “good” or entirely “bad”: a drug-addict wife, a gay man dying of AIDS, a closeted Mormon lawyer, etc., who struggle to find meaning amid chaos. The “so what?” of Kushner’s vision is that the “human thing” is our resilience, not about overcoming suffering, but about learning to live through it and finding meaning within that. For however painful, imperfect, or incomplete someone is, change is both inevitable and necessary for survival. What matters is really the willingness to confront loss and uncertainty rather than retreat from them.
What’s striking about Angels in America is that even characters who seem “liberal,” people we tend to think aren’t afraid of changes, like Louis and Prior, are also deeply afraid of change. Prior, when facing death, admits that “even drag is a drag now,” expressing exhaustion and fear in the face of his own change. And Louis, overwhelmed by his partner’s illness, abandons him rather than confront mortality and change directly. On the other hand, characters who initially resist change, like Joe Pitt, the closeted Mormon lawyer, eventually accept truths about himself that he can no longer suppress. And Harper, too, evolves from a frightened, drug-dependent woman into someone who ultimately embraces motion and possibility, saying “The world only spins forward.”
Because change is inevitable, Kushner shows it as one of humanity’s greatest powers of survival. In the motif of migration, we see changes as the unstoppable force of human movement which brought Prior’s family to America as well as Belize’s slave ancestors and Louis’s immigrant ones, and even carried the Mormons across the continent to Utah. All embody an inerasable drive toward progress and transformation. Change, Kushner suggests, is not only inevitable but the essence of human history.
One dialouge that resonates with me the most that captures this idea, was when Harper talks to her Mormon Mother:
“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That’s how people change.”
Change is painful. Change is violent and excruciating, yet necessary. Through pain, through chaos, through persistence, the fragile hope of Angels in America is that the world, and the people within it, must keep moving forward.

“Even if there were a cure for brain cells that died at birth, I’d refused.
I have no idea who I’d be without my specific tremoring, slurring, tense body.” (Clare, 2015)

“The body as home, (…)” (Clare, p.10)

I admire Eli Clare, for being able to see his body as home. To find comfort in that home.
To know every single “room” that made up that home, and still choose to love it even when it was violated, messed up, or broken into.

“The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.” (Clare, p.11)
I remember the first home I ever lived in. Vividly, I see us eating dinner. I always had friends over. People loved coming to my house. My eyes would light up during special occasions, my mom in the kitchen cooking, my grandpa in his chair chatting with guests, my grandma sipping tea, my dad letting me climb on his shoulders. And then I remember the last time we had guests. My dad, lying in the living room. Eyes closed. No one seemed happy. After that, no one ever came to my home again, we moved out.

“The body as home, but only if it is understood that place and community and culture burrow deep into our bones” (Clare, p.11)

When we moved to a new city where my mom decided to build a new life. What we called home was a rented apartment with two bedrooms. One for my brother, the other shared between my mom and me. I never invited my friends to come over. For how they would see the picture of my dad on the family’s altar. For how they would know I’m still sleeping with my mom and never had my own room because we couldn’t afford one.

“The body as home, but only if it Is understood that language too lives under the skin.” (Clare, p.12)

When I first came to the U.S for the first time, in effort of making new friends as an international freshmen, I tried making a conversation to a white man. He asked: “So do you really eat dogs back home?” I should’ve been angry. But I just laughed. No, I don’t eat dogs back home. I swallowed my words. I swallowed my discomfort. I let the lie in. I let it sit under my skin.

“The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies can be stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away frorn us.” (Clare, p.12)

I remember the last time I see my dad, I didn’t think it was my dad. After a year away in China, fighting cancer, he was finally home, but to say goodbye. He’s my dad. But I felt like he was a stranger. He looked scrawny, I think he shaved his mustache away. But dad was home at last. I was mad, because I always told dad to not shave his mustache. It was the first time I see how your body, can be taken away from you.

“The body as home, but only if it is understood that the stolen body can be reclaimed.” (Clare, p.13)

The last time I saw my dad, I didn’t recognize him. But I’m learning that grief, too, lives in the body. And when I let myself feel it, instead of hiding it, I am reclaiming something that was once stolen: my memories, my strength, my love. And queerness gives me something that let me enter “my body finally with liberation, joy, fury, hope, and a will to refigure the world.” (Claire, p.13) For many of us, it’s an act of returning to ourselves, to the body we were taught to reject, to the parts of us that were silenced, ridiculed, or made invisible.
And I used to let people laugh at my English. Now, I speak with intention. Because every word I say in a language that once made me feel small is an act of reclamation. And when I write, I give my body a voice.

It’s calling my body home, even when it still trembles with memories, hesitations, silences and strengths. My body as home.

In “A Poet’s Boyhood at the Burning Crossroads”, the word “drag” appears twice. Both in the context of racial violence, the act of holding or pulling someone down. In the poem “Drag,” the word “drag” now has a different meaning. It means to cross-dress. To perform gender. How can a word originally associated with violence and constraint come to represent such liberation and self-expression? It is of great irony that we queer people are so good at turning pain into pageantry. We say queer joy is resistance. We laugh because it’s the only way we can keep going. There’s a dazzling kind of alchemy in that: to take what was meant to erase us and turn it into something radiant. As Jones writes:

“From here, I see a city that doesn’t know it’s already drowning,” and “How old were you when America taught you that being who you are could get you killed?” The reality that you see, the society that you’re fully aware of the oppression, and it’s you who chooses to put a glamor into it. Make it gorgeous, make it legendary, make it something of your own, and through “the dress” is one of the many ways Saeed Jones did it. The dress, that performs gender, “the dress” that acts as a symbol of perceived weakness, and “the dress” that acts as a means of creating a powerful, new identity. But then, something uncanny happens. The dress becomes animated.

“The dress begins to move without me.”
“I don’t even know what I am in this dress.”

The poem “Drag” doesn’t give us a neat, triumphant arc. Instead, it gives us something more raw and honest: the complicated, often painful, and vulnerable process of transformation. He is caught between empowerment and confusion. Wearing the dress, he feels a kind of becoming, but also estrangement. Is this freedom or another kind of confinement? Is this who I really am, or just who I’m allowed to be? 

And yet, within this instability, there is something unstoppable blooming. Little does he know, inside the pupa of a caterpillar, is the most gorgeous butterfly, and inside each of us queer people, often the most unique “dress” of our own that cannot be stopped. As Saeed Jones wrote: 

“Slow like some-

thing that knows it cannot be stopped,(…)”