When I wash the dishes at my grandma's house, the water is cold and the sponge is brown with age (or maybe it’s just sesame oil).
When I wash the dishes at my grandma's house, I scrape caked-on leftovers off old china dishes; China scrapes its old memories on me and I turn red in class when we talk about railroads and internment.
When I wash the dishes at my grandma's house, she stares at my knuckles and asks how I keep my fingers so slender.
I don’t know grandma, I was born with cuticle that folds under when I pick the skin beneath my nail, I was born with a youth that you will always envy and I will always run from. I was born a lucky little ray of sunshine, I was told I was radiant, I couldn’t make it to a new country carrying three daughters without Google maps, a mental breakdown and frequent flyer miles. Grandma, if anything, I should be asking how you know all you do. But instead, we’re staring at the veins on my hands that turn purple then gray when held under that cold water for too long. I don’t know what it means to be an immigrant, I can’t even go to the supermarket alone — I’ll have a panic attack in the toilet paper aisle because there are too many options and I’ll leave the store with a single one-ply roll just to escape the off chance that someone perceives me.
Grandma says putting milk on your skin twice a day will keep your face free of wrinkles, but no amount of moisturizing can keep arthritis away.
See, my hands stack two rows of seventeen green tiles in about twenty seconds — fewer if my brother is there and wants to make it a race (why is everything a race? why do we always have to be rushing?).
Swollen nodes on every joint means grandma’s wall takes twice as long and then a minute more, but she still beats us in the game almost every time.
See, I learned to play mahjong from my grandpa, so by that I mean I learned to call the dotted tiles “pizzas”, I learned to cry “aiyah” when I pull too many letter cards in a row, I learned to eat what I was fed.
I learned to play mahjong from my grandpa, so by that I mean I learned when I was young that it’s okay to cheat a little since we’ve been cheated all our lives.
I learned to play mahjong from my grandpa, so by that I mean I miss him any time I hear the sound of those porcelain tiles clinking together, of a down jacket rubbing against a leather chair, or of that one Chinese opera he always had on low volume in the background and — like most things — it faded into static but I know you know, silence is the loudest thing in the world and it comes when you least expect it. Or, silence is just silence. And it’s my thoughts that fill the space and make a noise I don’t want to hear.
Let’s chat!
Every time I come home from college, I am absolutely slapped upside the head with a wave of simultaneous familiarity and disorientation that can only be compared to that feeling when you exit a movie theater and you don’t know what time of day it is because everything is still dark and it smells almost potently of artificial butter and then you step outside and it is 2 p.m. and though selfishly you thought maybe time had stopped for you, really the clock just kept ticking and everything is different yet everything is the same.
Maybe this is amplified for me because, of course, I am terrified of movie theaters and, so, this means it is a feeling or experience I avoid. Now, I don’t avoid coming home (my family is too kind and my dog, apparently, too sad while I’m gone, and I am too lucky for anything to keep me from Seattle), but I certainly am tempted to run away from the strangeness that arises when I sit on the twin bed I’ve had since I was a child and wonder if anyone here besides my parents remembers I exist.
What does it mean that I have grown in some place other than here? How can a place change so much and so little? How have I done the same?
This week, we’re exploring this feeling of change, of examining ourselves and our surroundings, of asking about our families, and of pausing with that which was once unremarkable.
We are joined by the wonderful Troy Osaki, a poet, organizer, and attorney from my lovely hometown of Seattle, WA.
Check out one of his latest works — the essay “There’s the Overthrow and There’s the Rebuild” — here, and make sure to follow Troy on Instagram and Twitter because internet friends are cool, and internet artists are too.
Where did your love for writing come from? Were you encouraged to write when you were young? Does writing feel like an escape or a responsibility, or both, or neither?
cw: mentions of gun violence
Something about the pop-punk era of the early 2000’s filled my heart, made the air around me feel lighter, perhaps, as if I could levitate. Songs like Taking Back Sunday’s “You’re So Last Summer,” or Blink 182’s “Dude Ranch,” album made me want to tap into very teen angsty lyric writing. Then, in my sophomore year at Garfield High School in Seattle, WA, I was fortunate enough to have a spoken word unit in my English class. It was during this time I discovered poetry platforms like Def Jam Poetry and YouTube videos from poetry competitions like Brave New Voices and the National Poetry Slam. I remember watching certain poets on loop like Anis Mojgani, Sarah Kay, and Joshua Bennet while trying to mimic their cadence or writing style or whatever it was about them that made me unable to stop thinking about poetry. Through all of this, my love for writing deepened more and more. Later, toward the end of 2008, a classmate of mine was gunned down on campus. In that school year, four other young people were shot down throughout the city. It was around this time I began to learn poetry can be a tool to help make sense of the world around us, or at least to process what it is and potentially dream up what it can be. I’ve since learned that poetry, like all art, can shift culture and change people’s hearts and minds. I now write poetry in hopes of reimagining a world free of exploitation and oppression and to uplift the need to participate in making sure it becomes a reality.
I’m linking your piece “Another Poem in Which My Grandpa is Gone” because it resonated with me so deeply, and I think everyone should get to experience reading it and sitting with your words. Many of your poems touch implicitly and explicitly on family. One line that stood out to me in another of your poems, “Not My Barong from the Closed-Down Asian Mart on Lake City Way but Another One”, was this:
“I call her auntie, though
we’ve met once & aren’t related. I’d call her
auntie even if we never meet again.”
How has family — the families we are born into, the families we build for ourselves — impacted your writing and work?
Family has been, in many ways, a lantern that’s helped me shine light on what I mean to write about, or in another sense, has been a container, or vessel, in which to write about a certain thing. The stories I’ve learned about my family’s histories such as my grandma’s incarceration during World War II or my grandpa’s forced migration from the Philippines to the U.S., which I often write about, have been personal stories that I’ve done my best to connect to larger concepts and ideas such as anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and anti-feudalism, all of which I hope to continue writing more about. For example, over the years, I’ve come to learn that my grandpa left the Philippines toward the end of Japanese occupation for better opportunities promised in the U.S. where he then experienced severe workplace discrimination. Today, upwards of 6,000 Filipinos leave the Philippines every day to work overseas because of the promise for better opportunities elsewhere only to be exploited and harmed all the same, if not, in some cases, much worse. My intention of sharing about my family’s history is to humanize the experiences we know to be harmful such as war, occupation, and oppression while also linking and raising these personal experiences to larger struggles for freedom and liberation. My hope is to, in turn, help people make connections in their own lives and feel moved to organize against these systems that harm us all.
You also discuss writing as grasping onto the unremarkable, and I find this so affirming because I think sometimes being able to relish in these unremarkable things and find language for them is a sign of some sort of pause or security or at least a sign that, for a second, we can just exist without having to justify ourselves. Do you see any parallels or divides between writing and organizing? How have you brought those two things together in your life? Do you ever wish they could be separate?
When thinking about art and organizing I often come back to Ilena Saturay’s talk at the New World Summit in the Netherlands in 2016 where she explains her thoughts on the role of artists in struggles for liberation. What’s stuck with me since first hearing her speak is the idea that it’s not enough to write about those who are experiencing exploitation and oppression; artists must also directly participate in the work needed to achieve a more free and just world. Ilena shares, “If the people come to us and ask us––people we have been talking about all weekend long, people who we are supposed to represent––if they ask us right now, ‘What have you done for us, what have you done while we are being oppressed and exploited,’ and if my answer would just be, ‘Oh, I have painted about you, I have talked about you, I have made theater plays about you,’ if that is the only answer that we can give as artists, then I swear being an artist is the last thing I want to become.” She goes on to share, “We should not only represent the future, but we should build it, we should participate in making it a reality.” What Ilena offers is how I hope to navigate my own art and organizing, which is to make art that’s representative of the people who I seek to serve, in order to garner support for struggles happening in my homeland, while ensuring that the art itself doesn’t replace the organizing that needs to happen to achieve a new world.
Finally, what is a question you wish you could ask your mom, or someone else in your life?
What would you ask grandpa if he came back alive for a day?