I remember the crack of a gunshot in the 2018 debut of Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang’s two-part An American Soldier. I remember the operatic death, the performance of it, the abruptness of it, the sonorous belting, the tall wooden structure on stage right, and the tenor on top of it, playing Danny Chen, crumpling. Then silence.
It felt odd, sitting in the audience, watching an art form stigmatized as elitist retell a brutal hate crime against a Chinese-American soldier in Afghanistan. Opera, a once-aristocratic audience experience backed by the spectacle of theatrics and a harassed young man who shot himself in the head.
That summer, even the grass was hot. The backyard of the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, where attendees were corralled for food and post-show discussion, steamed. Clouds of mosquitoes, gnats, and flies drifted between large white pop-up tents. I idled near the backdoors, swatting them.
Strange how strangeness begets strange.
Six years later, it was summer again. Bright, green, and full of insects.
“Don’t move!” my boyfriend said. He stood by the entrance of the basement. I, walking up the stairs, stopped. “What?” He hesitated. He was looking, I thought, at my head. Or something behind me. My imagination got the better of me.
When I was little, I had a recurring nightmare. I would float to the laundry room, a small tiled room next to the kitchen, and open the door. Or try to. I would push the door handle down and throw my body against the wood but it would not budge, only wobble a bit as if something else pushed back. Then wind, or an unseen hand, would seize and suspend me in the air. I could not move. Much less scream, as if a lead blanket wrapped itself around my limbs and mouth. And as I struggled, deep in sleep paralysis, a rich light would blaze from the door. Blinding me.
“What!” I repeated. “Er-Nevermind! Keep going.” I flew up the stairs. Quickly, he pointed to the wall near the top of the steps. There, crouched by the door jam, high enough to miss my line of sight, was a large scarlet beetle. What- So shiny it looked sharp. Its body big enough to engulf the swarms of similarly red but tinier beetles scuttling over our garage. A foundling of sorts. We never did see those small red beetles again. Besides a few groveling in the grass. –are you?
Later that month, near the anniversary of Danny Chen’s death, we saw the old woman.
The street was damp. The sky, still light, tinged yellow. We had parked near the curb further down our neighborhood to grab takeout, and that evening, I could smell the trees. The musk of wet bark, like the inside of a dog’s mouth. Gasoline wafted from cars rushing down the intersection ahead of us.
She was sitting on the side of the road, butt planted on the pavement between the curb and a parked car. Supported by the car’s rear passenger door and slumped over as if contemplating her position, the act of sitting, the function of placidity and all its immediate accompanying senses. Her lined face, wrinkled most prominently near her cheeks and mouth, was empty, or at least vacant to those looking.
It was still warm then, but my fingertips were cool. And I remember wondering if it was prudent to look. If I had crossed a boundary by slipping into the role of observer. I, a woman, looking at another as if we both were mere points on a graph.
Then a man strode across the street. He leaned towards her and gently lifted her arm as if to help her stand. My boyfriend, now closer, walked forward and lifted her other arm till she stood on both feet. She smiled. “Oh, thank you, thank you, that’s really sweet of you!” She hugged both of us. Then stepped on the curb and immediately fell back on the car. “Where’re you going?” she slurred. Carefully, she balanced one leg on the curb, the other on the road. The stranger, standing next to her, smiled at us too. I realized then they must be familiar or, at least, recognizable to each other. That was good.
“We’re picking up food.” My boyfriend hiked a thumb over his shoulder. “Oh, where?” “At the bar over there.” “Oh, oh… what kind of food do they have there?” “Korean food. Yeah, there’s this little restaurant inside the bar- that’s where we’re going.”
I could see the cogs turning as she looked at me. Eyes wide. Mouth open.
I could have plopped a seed down the middle of her tongue.
“Is that what you are?”
“No.”
“What are you?”
To Danny Chen, a 19-year-old raised by two immigrant parents from Southern China, his compatriots already had an answer. “Gook. Chink. Squint Eye. Egg roll. Jackie Chan. Soy Sauce. Dragon Lady.” And who knows what else while his peers kicked, dragged, stoned, and forced his body through excessive guard duty and pushups for six weeks until his suicide on Oct 3, 2011.
Asian Americanness, in the eye of his attackers, was an “it.” A thing to beat. A thing to dash. A thing to be cleansed after death. And “whatness”? The “what” of me? The orientalist “whatness” in “what are you,” as if I have an internal “ness” to exhume for excision, is baffling. But then again, in the eyes of a strange woman to another, I am simply what I say I am.
Asian Americanness, after all, is a sociocultural costume I slip into not because it is comfy or politically appetizing but because I look the part. And oddly, in a sudden instance of inebriation, ignorance, or bewilderment due to the immense geographical territories within the continent of Asia, I was stripped of any ancestrally significant features and asked to choose.
As if all that I am is imaginary.
Or an arthropod to be pried open.
So I stood there, stumped.
She did not mean any malice. She did not mean to offend. Most folks have the internet and a keyboard for that. But I also did not want to respond. I did not want to confirm or in any way influence our relation to each other as nothing more than what we already were. I did not want to become something other than what I was just because I was asked to define it.
So I went with what was easiest.
And I answered her question.
