Our Stories, Our Voices

by Amy Reed (ed)

  In our small, conservative valley, there were no marches. No overt demonstrations. But some friends and I figured out a way to make our voices heard—through silence. We refused to stand for the daily Pledge of Allegiance we were expected to participate in every morning. My homeroom overseer, who happened to be an ex-military shop teacher, was not amused and sent us to the principal’s office. Mr. Silva lectured us on the importance of respect for our country and its flag.

  I reminded him of those dead Kent State students and asked how, exactly, their corpses represented “liberty and justice for all.” He suggested protestors weren’t true Americans and reiterated his expectation that I would stand for the Pledge the next morning. I asked him if he was aware of this thing called the First Amendment, something I believed applied to everyone, even outspoken young people like myself. He told me he did not appreciate my attitude and warned that if I chose not to comply my name would be added to a “watch list.” Anti-war activism was considered unpatriotic.

  “Patriotism,” I insisted, “means holding your country to the highest standard. Killing innocent civilians, either here in the States or over there in the jungle, is pretty damn low.” Maybe I touched a nerve. He didn’t suspend me. But when I continued to sit for the Pledge, my name was added to his watch list. I have to admit taking pride in that.

  In addition to countless individual protests like mine, there were huge demonstrations, including one in 1967 where one hundred thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. Joining college students were members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Many were in wheelchairs, and watching them on television, throwing away the medals they’d earned, encouraged “regular folk” into the anti-war effort. Perhaps for the first time in this country’s history a majority of the American people stood together against the government’s foreign policy. In 1973, caving to a strong anti-war mandate, President Richard Nixon announced the effective end to US involvement in Southeast Asia. And I played a small but memorable role.

  As the war wound down, a new movement caught my interest. The proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would guarantee freedom from legal discrimination due to gender. The idea that women weren’t protected from bias in the workplace and elsewhere made no sense to me, but even today women aren’t assured the same pay as men doing the same job. One reason is because, even though the proposed Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Constitution passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate in 1972, it was not ratified by the required thirty-eight states. To this day, there is still nothing in the Constitution ensuring equal rights for women.

  But as women lobbied for ratification, I was swept along. Immersing myself in the history of American women’s struggles was eye-opening. From the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 through the suffrage movement that resulted in women finally earning the right to vote in 1920 (only white women, however; it took the Civil Rights Movement to enfranchise Black women and men), up to and including the ERA, the fight for gender egalitarianism has been an uphill battle. The more I learned, the more frustrated I became, and it sparked the torch of feminism I’ve carried throughout my life.

  As an interesting aside, the state of Nevada, which I’ve called home for thirty years, just voted to ratify the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. Though beyond the original time frame allowed for ratification, there may be some legal precedence to pass the ERA, even now, should enough states join the Silver State in supporting gender equality. So maybe the signs I carried forty-odd years ago will still matter.

  Over those decades, I’ve become a staunch advocate for many causes, chief among them LGBTQ rights. Yes, my oldest child happens to be gay, but the bigger reason is, from the time Bobby Kennedy spoke to my conscience until now, I have believed that equal rights for every single person in this country is not only promised by our Constitution, but vital to the health of our society.

  I’m a bleeding-heart liberal. I make no apologies for that. And what my heart bleeds for is a viable future for my grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and all the generations to come. The planet is in peril, and activism is more critical now than ever before.

  The 2016 election hit me hard because its outcome shattered my core belief in the political process, not to mention the progress this country seemed to have made in the decades immediately preceding it. The potential for human rights violations and environmental degradation is difficult to fathom. That so much of the country supported candidates determined to eliminate programs and agencies designed to protect the very elements required to sustain a decent quality of life on Planet Earth is simply beyond my ken. It hurts to consider how many things we fought for and gained when I was a teen are in jeopardy now.

  The good news is America has reawakened. Those of us determined to lobby for the health of our republic and its democratic principles have mobilized and embraced the principle of using our collective voice. In huge numbers, we are calling and e-mailing and tweeting our representatives in government, demanding to be heard. We are overflowing town hall meetings, picking up signs and marching in the streets, reminding this country that democracy must not become a commodity, sold to the highest bidder. Those in power aren’t invincible or greater than the will of We the People. We are joining together in protest, and that defines patriotism, because we’re fighting for the principles that have always made America great. This gives me hope for the future.

  That future is in my hands, and yours. I call on you to hoist the banner of activism. Find a cause (or two) that matters to you, whether it’s animal rights or LGBTQ rights, public lands or public schools, clean energy or clean water. Develop a real understanding of the stakes. Learn who your legislators are and how to open dialogues with them. State your concerns clearly and succinctly, and never forget that your representatives are supposed to work for you, regardless of political party affiliation.

  Most of all, as soon as you’re eligible, register to vote, and cherish that right. Vote! In every single election, including midterms and primaries, not to mention state and local contests, which can be decided by a handful of votes. Be sure you are registered and have in place any state-required ID. Take the time to research candidates and ballot measures. These will affect you, negatively or positively. The choice is yours, and the ballot is key. Never, ever believe your voice doesn’t matter. It is powerful and necessary to the survival of your values. And while you’re at it, encourage others to get out to the polls. Elections have been won or lost by very small margins, 2016 included. Had a few more people decided not to stay home, the outcome might have been very different.

  I stumbled into activism almost fifty years ago, and never left. Please join me. No matter how you arrive, accidentally or purposefully, hold fast to your ideals. Visualize the tomorrow you want to be part of. And never stop fighting for it.

  DREAMS DEFERRED AND OTHER EXPLOSIONS

  Ilene (I.W.) Gregorio

  I don’t remember exactly when I started hating my name, but I suspect it happened, like so many childhood traumas, on the school bus. It may have been the first time a kid called me “Ching-Chong Wong.” Or the time a girl I had never thought of as particularly mean felt compelled to tell me the old joke: “How does a Chinese person name their kid? By throwing forks down a stairway.” More likely, it was any of the thousand times someone made a pun about me going the “Wong way.”

  Even as a child, I understood that my name was not my identity, but it sure as heck was a prism through which people saw me.

  As a teenager, I called bullshit on Shakespeare’s famous quote: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” My name was not some meaningless signifier. It wasn’t a mere collection of letters. It was a brand, labeling me as an “other” in my otherwise Wonder Bread–white Central New York town.

  I learned, over the years, that my name brings with it certain expectations.

  First, there are the obvious physical expectations: the color of my hair, the shape of my eyes, my body type.
Then there are the expectations of what subjects I excel at in school, which ones I’m hopeless at, and whether I play an instrument. It brings with it assumptions about my work ethic, how I will interact with people, even my financial savvy.

  This isn’t to say that there weren’t ways the specific expectations of being Asian benefited me. I will never have an airline employee ask for my medical license when I raise my hand to answer a call for a doctor on a flight. I’ll never be denied a loan because of the color of my skin. I don’t think I’ve ever walked down a sidewalk and had a stranger cross the street to avoid me.

  Sometimes I don’t know if it’s better when I meet these expectations, or worse, because it makes me wonder how much choice I had in the paths I chose, in the person I’ve become. Have I grown into the shape of my name, the way a tree’s roots spread and become molded into the shape of the pot in which it sits?

  I graduated from college a walking cliché: an Ivy League–educated, former-violin-playing Asian-American student heading to medical school. One could say that I fulfilled the destiny of my name; my graduation cards should have said “Congratulations! You have met expectations!”

  This is not to say that I fit perfectly into the stereotype. In some ways I am incredibly lazy. I rarely practiced that previously mentioned violin of my own volition. I am at times careless with my money. I’m a horrible daughter who never has time to call her family. I love eating to the point where I have a bit of a muffin top, but I can barely cook. I suck at statistics, and my husband handles all the IT in our household.

  The writer in me would say that idiosyncrasies like these are what make me rounded, fully fleshed out, and human. My analytical side accepts this without question, even as my inner child hesitates. Because when the expectation is to fit perfectly into a mold, little defects can make you feel, well, defective.

  Food, for instance: I love it in a primal, uncontrollable way that is best exhibited at dim sum restaurants, where I’ve been known to lunge out of my seat to flag down a tray of pineapple custard buns. Yet my entire life, this source of joy has been tainted with guilt.

  Each year, when my mother comes to visit from Taiwan, one of the first things my husband and I do is take bets on how many minutes it will take for my mom to make a comment about how our weight has changed since the last time she saw us. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to her signature move—reaching out to grab and fondle the flab under my upper arm to get a sense of whether I’ve been exercising.

  The little things my mother would do to manage my body never made sense until the first time I went to China, when I was dismayed to note that I could only fit into “extra-large” clothing. There I was, literally not fitting into the pattern that was meant for me.

  My mom’s obsession with my weight made further sense in the context of the expectations placed upon the literal bodies of Asian women, like the time I went to get The Joy Luck Club at a video store and the checkout clerk said, smirking, “Good movie. Really attractive women.” It made sense the first time a friend warned me about a guy who had an eye on me because of his Asian fetish. “He totally has Yellow Fever,” she said, explaining that some guys like Asian women because they’re “exotic” and submissive. As I’ve gotten older and learned more about American military history in the Pacific, I’ve come to understand how these stereotypes came to pass (think Miss Saigon and Memoirs of a Geisha), and also how insidiously wrong they are. But when I was a teenager, all I could process was, “Oh, they’re kind of right.” After all, “student is a joy to teach” was the most common comment on my report card, followed closely by “should speak up more in class.” I was polite. I was quiet and deferential. I hated it when people were mad at me (still do) and did everything I could to appease and to avoid conflict.

  Even—especially—conflicts within myself.

  The thing is, I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. Growing up, books were my best friends, my refuge from the loneliness and subtle but omnipresent racism in my conservative town. I have always known that I wanted to be a friend to others through story.

  Problem was, Chinese girls weren’t writers. With one notable exception (Bette Bao Lord’s In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson), all of my favorite books growing up were written by white authors. Every. Single. One.

  Medicine, on the other hand, was a fully approved career choice, one pursued by my grandfather, my aunt, and two uncles (one on each side) before me. As was my MO, I tried to compromise. Even though I continued writing, I told myself that I could do science writing—that I could follow in the steps of the many physician writers in history (Chekhov! Michael Crichton! Richard Selzer!) to combine my passions. It was a good plan.

  The most insidious part of being a model minority is the contortion act, which is sometimes more evident to others than to yourself. When I was applying to medical school, one of my career counselors told me point-blank: “You want to make sure you’re not putting a square peg into a round hole.” To this day I’m not sure what tipped her off, unless it was my over-rehearsed justification for why I wanted to be a doctor (I wanted to help people, I loved working with people, insert romantic notion of medicine here ____).

  Looking back at myself, I can see how badly I was straining for an identity, but how scared I was to invent one that didn’t include medicine. I wanted so much to conform to expectations that I brainwashed myself.

  This is not to say that going to medical school was, in the end, a bad decision. I enjoy many aspects of medicine. I love most of my patients. Gainful employment and job security are good for mental health. But putting one’s dreams into a straitjacket? Not so much.

  Langston Hughes asked what happened about dreams deferred, and all of his answers have fit me at one point or another: Drying up like a raisin in the sun. Festering like a sore. Crusting and sugaring over. Sagging like a heavy load. Exploding.

  Explosions are by their nature sudden, violent things, but like all expenditures of energy, there’s work leading up to the big bang. There’s a pressure buildup, a storage of potential energy.

  In my life I’ve had sparks of rebellion against expectation, but they were almost always deeply internal. I read fantasy novels instead of the scientists’ biographies my family gave me, buying comic books with my birthday money and hiding them underneath my bed. My father would try to coax me into listening to his old LPs of classical music, but I ignored him and listened to mixtapes of Broadway musicals. Then, in possibly one of my most significant transgressions—at least in the eyes of a family that viewed athletic activity as a complete waste of time—I became a sports fan.

  Worse, I chose ice hockey, which is arguably the sport least likely to fit the sensibility of someone who’s grown up as the model minority. My introduction to hockey was the scene in Superfudge where Peter Hatcher’s friend talks about wanting to go to a game so he can see blood bounce on the ice, and of course the stereotype of the sport is that it’s a violent, even brutish sport played by large Canadians with anger-management issues.

  Which is maybe why a Highlights magazine article about a skinny kid named Wayne Gretzky using his brains to lead the league in scoring captured my imagination. While I was attracted at first with the idea that you could be both cerebral and athletic, I fell for the game for the same reason Sandy fell for Danny in Grease: because it was fast, because it was beautiful, and because it was dangerous.

  For most of high school, I admired the game from afar. I never went to games, not only because of cost, but because I was too embarrassed to tell my family where I was going. I never even flirted with the idea of playing myself. Ice time is expensive, for one; but the more honest reason was fear of ridicule.

  Let’s face it: if a short, skinny Asian girl with glasses thicker than the size of her pinkie walked into a hockey rink, you would probably think she was an intern for the local paper. Or maybe shadowing the team doctor. Even if I had had the guts to try out for my high school team, I would never have been
any good, what with the sum total of my proven athletic experience being the ability to run short distances at a moderately fast speed.

  This idea that a pursuit is valid only if you’re able to do it at a level high enough to impress college admission counselors is one of the most insidious pressures on model minority kids. Growing up, the fear of being mediocre prevented me from trying so many things I secretly wanted to do: acting, art, playing the guitar.

  There was no way I was going to play hockey under the eye of my family. Then, the summer after I graduated high school, Rollerblades happened. Then ice-skating and low-stakes club sports.

  It’s not an exaggeration to say that skating was the first time I ever flirted with losing control, the first time I embraced that sense of panic you feel when you’re one burst of acceleration away from slipping, when you’re a fraction of a millimeter removed from tumbling face-first into unforgiving sideboards.

  It turned out that I loved speed, that I got a thrill from the sharp crack of wood hitting wood whenever I fought with abandon for a three-inch piece of rubber and came out victorious with the puck. There is no hitting in women’s hockey, but there’s still a striking physicality, a struggle for possession, and a general lack of inhibition. There’s a fearlessness you have to have in playing hockey that allowed me to acknowledge—even welcome—my nasty side.

  If the perks of being a model minority include a general security against racial profiling, the downsides include a visceral aversion to rocking the boat. I went through most of my education terrified of doing anything to compromise that identity. Because if I wasn’t a good girl, what was I?