Sublime

To make myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human and a little more relevant to American culture.

Illegibility was a political act.

But like many model immigrants, he can be angry.

In my search for an honest way to write about race, I wanted to comfort the afflicted, but more than that, I wanted to afflict the comfortable; I wanted to make them squirm in shame, probably because I too identify with the comfortable.

My heart was skipping in my throat. I knew that anger. How had I managed to find it in Ohio?

“You know, I don’t think she ever lost her shit around her white friends.” “Yeah, well,” Erin said ruefully, “we were family.”

“Our cities today glow with crosses like graveyards.”

White people were looking at themselves and what their history has wrought, like a domestic animal having its face shoved into its own urine.”

Until I talked to her, I could only imagine Cha’s New York as a shadowy abstraction of a city, a Gotham of unlit steel and windswept empty boulevards.