I spoke late and was shy. My pursuits were solitary. I could, for instance, play the piano with great feeling—once, in a fit of zeal over a Chopin cadenza, I banged my head against the stand. Like my mother, I disliked indolence, and, in my moderately competitive public schools, this quality got me far. I enjoyed pleasing my parents and, for Christmas in the sixth grade, gift-wrapped my report card. I read copious numbers of books, though in retrospect it couldn’t be said I was particularly good at it. I liked moral absolutes and was poor at grasping parody. I read Don Quixote and thought he was a hero. I read Middlemarch and wanted to be Dorothea, married to a man of knowledge.
But other readings rewarded my earnestness. I felt, for instance, personally summoned when Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. I read Malcolm X, also from Michigan, whose mother had been committed to a mental hospital in my hometown of Kalamazoo. He warned black readers not to trust white liberals: I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind. He may stand with you through thin, but not thick. And I heard that same reprimand in James Baldwin, who said that liberals bought all the right books, have all the proper attitudes—but they have no real convictions. And when the chips are down and you expect them to deliver on what you thought they felt, they somehow are not there.
They somehow are not there. I took this allegation literally. Where should I put myself?
In suburban Michigan, in the quiet of my bedroom, these iconic readings of antiracist rhetoric cast a spell over me. They effected a clandestine evangelization of a kid primed to be a good disciple. It was not enough just to learn, just to read. Not enough to admire a black writer. Admiration was nothing. If your passions went unmatched by actions, you were just playing a role, demonstrating that you knew what to praise and what to reject. Education, for me, became laden with a meaning at once specific and spiritual. To be educated meant you read books and entertained ideas that made you feel uncomfortable. It meant looking in the mirror and asking, What have I done that has cost me anything? What authority have I earned to speak? What work have I put in? It meant collapsing your certainties and tearing down your self-fortifications. You should feel unprotected, unarmed, open to attack.
There was a problem, though: Baldwin, King, and Malcolm spoke only of black and white people, and I was neither. What had Asian Americans fought for, died for? What had we cared about? History textbooks and popular culture didn’t tell me. When an Asian-looking man appeared on television (a rare occurrence), my heart beat very fast. The question was never Will this be a joke? but rather What kind of joke will it be? If it turned out I was wrong and he was simply like any other minor character—no accent, no distinguishing characteristics, unmemorable—I felt satisfied and, even, grateful.
I found my role models in books. W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou—each of these people seemed as fearless to me as Asian Americans seemed afraid, as essential to American history as we were irrelevant. I went to Harvard for college and met activists for the first time; the ones I most wanted to emulate had parents who had fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the sixties and seventies. They had been at the March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King, Jr.; they had taken part in the Black Power Movement. I imagined households steeped in conversation. What was it like to inherit a history of passions and resentments? I wondered. Did it make you stronger? Did it embolden you? Was this why I was weak, sweet, obedient?
I steeled myself. I would start from scratch. I would root out like weeds the effects of my parents, the tendency to choose safe options, to get ahead, to feel secure. I would embrace irrational measures. In college I worked at a homeless shelter, where I slept overnight on Fridays and signed up for extra shifts precisely when I had papers due. I dropped pre-med and majored in social studies and gender studies. I edited a small magazine about race and class and sexuality. And when I met other Asian Americans, those bound for consultant and hedge-fund jobs where they would make six figures, my judgment was harsh. Silently, through my narrowed eyes, I told them, I know you, and there’s not too much to know.
As graduation approached, I wondered what I wanted to do. I considered activism; I admired activists the most. But I wasn’t good at it. I’d tried working at a feminist nonprofit, where I had to lobby congressional staffers, and discovered I had a tendency to apologize for intruding on their time. More broadly, I thought it was too difficult to change the minds of the powerfully self-interested. What I wanted to do was straightforward, immediate work in places that needed people. Then I met a recruiter from Teach for America, an Asian American woman who told me that schools in the Mississippi Delta, among the poorest places in the country, faced a drastic teacher shortage.
This was the first time anyone had described to me the state of the present-day Delta. This land of cotton and extreme poverty had served as the stomping grounds of the early Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Bobby Kennedy had toured the Delta as part of a war against poverty. Stokely Carmichael had coined the term Black Power there. The Delta was a place where heroic people had been maimed, shot, arrested, and killed for their belief in change. King himself was killed in Memphis, the Delta’s northernmost tip, while rallying for sanitation workers; James Meredith commenced a legendary solo walk across Mississippi but was shot by a sniper on his second day; and Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper, had been arrested and beaten for organizing people to vote.
Why hadn’t I heard about how people in the Delta lived now? I wondered. Was it because few progressives and members of the educated middle class—the disappointing liberals of Baldwin’s day—wanted to visit, much less live there? I couldn’t help but wonder if this place had vanished from the national consciousness when the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements ended. Was rural black poverty, unattached to white violence, too unglamorous to attract celebrated leaders willing to speak for its cause?