you have to write toward your discomfort. - Cathy Park Hong

A lot of us come from countries—if you’re South Asian or Southeast Asian—that have been colonized by Western powers. But that’s never talked about. It’s almost as if in immigrant stories we’re supposed to forget our past once our family comes over here. Or there is a kind of writing about the past, but it’s divorced from US foreign policy. It comes from immigrant parents as well. They say, “Oh, you’re here, it’s a rich land, and there are so many opportunities here, you should be grateful,” without actually acknowledging why we ended up here in the first place. I wanted to show how it was all interrelated.

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.

The Western is now a global fantasy. It’s hard to pin down what the myth means because the frontier is now so abstract. To dream of the frontier is to dream of progress. But there’s also the fantasy of the frontier as being lawless. There are no regulations that hamper the body; there is no superego in the frontier.