As a child, I picked up whatever distrust there was around Asians and animated my father’s absence with it. He often complained that I never took his side. Now, as an adult, I feel protective of him, which is why I was so moved when I read Sharma’s poem about her father.
never felt comfortable writing about personal racial trauma, because I wasn’t satisfied with the conventional forms in which racial trauma is framed. The confessional lyric didn’t seem right because my pain felt singled out, exceptional, operatic, when my life is more banal than that.
At some point, they expect you to get over it. But as suspicious as I am, I also hope that we can seize this opportunity and change American literature completely. Overhaul the tired ethnic narratives that have automated our identities; that have made our lives palatable to a white audience but removed them from our own lived realities—and
am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.
