Few of my friends in the Delta understood the power my parents had over me. “You’re like a little girl around them,” one roommate had admonished. “How can they tell you what to do? You’re an adult.” But one can never overestimate the extent to which many Asian parents make their disappointment unbearable. The caricatures in popular culture are untruthful mainly because they never go far enough. For my family, at least, there was the usual stuff, the yelling and tears, the shaming and guilt trips.
But all of that is a red herring. Maybe the secret of their effectiveness was what they declined to say. They thought nothing of emptying their savings for my lessons and my books. They did not hope for too much success in their own lives; ours were more important. They did not think to ask my brother and me to do chores—they believed studying was a full-time job. They didn’t read to me, because they were afraid I would adopt their accents. They cared so little for their own histories that they didn’t make me learn their native tongue. For them the price of immigration had always been that their children would discount them in these ways.
“You look down on us,” they’d said to me, with a stricken expression. This wasn’t the first time my parents had said it, but it was the first time I heard it. And so I could not suppress a reluctant, painful tenderness. So they didn’t know how to talk to me; so they didn’t know how to help me reason out loud what I wanted. So what? Big deal. Grow up. And maybe they knew something about me that I wouldn’t admit.
Once, Ms. Riley heard the kids make their derogatory Chinese noises at me and yelled at them: “Ms. Kuo is a minority just like us. Why you trying to hurt her? You hurt yourself.” The students got very quiet, ashamed. They’d turned their heads to examine my face and my features afresh. I could see them pondering our relationship. Not foreign, not Yao Ming’s relative: I might be somebody like them. How I loved Ms. Riley for saying this. How I loved that she was saying, We are like each other, you and me.
The yellow race, the Mongoloid race (Supreme Court), the obnoxious Chinese (Supreme Court again)—each term separated Asians from whites, amalgamating distinct cultures into a single deportable entity. Until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Chinese kids in Mississippi were prohibited from attending all-white schools on the grounds that they were “colored.” In Arkansas, introducing a formal ban in 1943, a state senator said, “I know none of you gentlemen think Negroes are as good as your children, and I don’t think any member of the yellow race is as good as my children or yours, either.”
During the war, nearly seventeen thousand Japanese Americans came to the Arkansas Delta a hundred miles south of Helena as prisoners. Rounded up mostly in California and put on a seven-day train ride across the country, they encountered abandoned and snake-infested land on which dirty, half-finished barracks had been built. In some areas, there was a watchtower but no running water. It did not matter that the majority of the newly incarcerated were born in the United States. The Japanese race is an enemy race, wrote the general who headed the Western Defense Command, and while many second-and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become “Americanized,” the racial strains are undiluted.
In the Delta, the Japanese Americans cut down trees, cleared the land, and planted crops. Some had farmed in California; others had been office workers who had to learn for the first time how to use an ax. Their work would increase the value of the land—previously worthless—seven-to fifteen-fold. Fearing that the Japanese would buy this land and stay after the war, the state legislature passed an act declaring no Japanese or a descendant of a Japanese shall ever purchase or hold title to any lands in the State of Arkansas.
Ms. Riley was telling the students we belonged in the same picture—the Delta’s history of white supremacy. Her words expressed the very reason I had come to the Delta: to show my solidarity. Yet now they seemed far-fetched. The struggles of those Asians in the Delta were no more mine than were the struggles of my students and of Ms. Riley. My ancestors were not from here. My grandparents hadn’t been interned during the war or prohibited from attending these schools. I had a very short and simple history in America: My parents had come from a country nobody had heard of and that I didn’t know much about. And so I had turned—it was becoming obvious now—to the black tradition as a surrogate, as a way to fill in the absence of my own history and claim an American past.
I kept driving. I pulled into the Lucky Strike casino and then pulled out. I went north and south and then north again. Along the highway there was a stand of pecan trees, mysterious crosses, fields that had gone fallow, and an old tree that stood in water.
“Here?” my father had said, swinging his arms to gesture at the place. This was not the America he and my mother had come for. They did not know it. In Helena, one immigrant group after another had disappeared: the Delta Jews, the Delta Lebanese, the Delta Chinese, all once significant parts of Helena, all gone. They were immigrants: This is what made them who they were. They moved. It was an oddly clear moment. How my parents saw the Delta was closer to how my students saw it, as a dead end, a place to escape.
In proclaiming our bond, Ms. Riley had prompted me to wonder where my loyalties did lie. My parents had been too modest. They hadn’t told me much about their histories because they thought there was nothing special about them, about their journey. And I thought, my heart breaking a little, that my error had been to take them at their word. They should be the first with whom I claimed solidarity, these fleshly, plodding, scolding beings who treated me as if I belonged to them. And perhaps I did. Perhaps I did have a duty to them.
As was often the case, the things my mother said made me recoil in part because they were true. My closest friends were almost all coupled. Almost daily I was down the street at Danny and Lucy’s house; they had two cats, and I was like their third, coming in and out when I pleased, dozing off on their couch. Often when I came to, there was chili on the stove and a blanket on me, and the two would be tiptoeing about, whispering softly so as to not wake me. After dinner Danny tried to teach me guitar as Lucy sang to the tunes we played. My roommates this year were also a couple, a Catholic and a Jew, who argued about whether, when they eventually had children, they should have a Christmas tree. Even the repetition of the argument was a glimpse of a domestic life that I wasn’t close to having.