On Monday, May 6, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop honored Salman Rushdie with a lifetime achievement award. Early evening sunlight flooded the Varick Room at Tribeca Cinemas, casting a warm red glow upon a crowd that had gathered to celebrate the esteemed writer, his recent memoir, Joseph Anton, and the film adaptation of his most revered novel, Midnight’s Children.

“The atmosphere was one of revelry—grinning fans taking cellphone photos of themselves standing next to Rushdie,” wrote Rachel Riederer in Guernica magazine.

As the Wall Street Journal described the evening, Rushdie let down his hair. “It’s all sort of done with now, the book’s launched, the movie’s out,” he told them.

The celebration was a reminder not only of how his book has inspired several generations of novelists but also of how generous Rushdie has been to younger writers. “I have to say, it’s a little terrifying to be so influential,” Rushdie remarked after taking the stage alongside Amitava Kumar. “By which I mean,” he continued, “it’s really moving to have these wonderful writers come and share my work with all of you.”

The writers in question—Jonathan Safran Foer, Téa Obreht, and Zadie Smith—had, one by one, stepped up to the mic to pay tribute to Rushdie and his novels by reading passages from or inspired by his work.

Foer had planned to read from The Moor’s Last Sigh, but his copy had vanished from his bookshelf. A few hours before the event his wife reminded him that the novel, signed by Rushdie years ago, was one of the first books Foer had added to a library he created for his first son just after he was born. Taken off his son’s bookshelf, where it was sitting next to several hundred children’s books, the well-loved copy, with its dog-eared pages and pencil markings, was now in Foer’s hands as he read from its final pages.

Téa Obreht and Zadie Smith both shared a similar attachment and tenderness toward Rushdie’s work. Remarking on the lines from Joseph Anton she had chosen to recite that evening, Obreht told the audience, “I read this passage a couple of months ago and it hit me—it blew my brain. I started three or four emails trying to express my gratitude, and it never worked out.” The best way to offer her thanks, she felt, would be to share the passage as she stood before Rushdie.

Zadie Smith recalled reading Midnight’s Children at the age of 16 or 17—at the time it was transformational, she said. “It just seemed to me that Salman had done something to the English novel—he’d opened it up and made it possible for other people to exist within it. That’s the book I would have read from tonight,” but instead, at Rushdie’s request, Smith read from her debut novel, White Teeth. She had written a short passage in the book as a kind of tribute to Rushdie—“because Rushdie’s influence was not just stylistic. It was an enormous event, and when I thought of 1989 I remember arguing with kids in my class who had wanted to make a violent symbol out of something that I had found very beautiful.” The lines she read evoked that very memory, and refer to both Rushdie and the 1989 protests in the UK following the publication of The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie’s conversation with Amitava Kumar jumped from talk of his literary influences—Rushdie admired E.M. Forster, who taught at Cambridge while he was a student there, but he saw in Forster something he didn’t wish to emulate—to the idea of writing as an act of love: “If you don’t love the world you’re trying to create, you don’t do it every well. Or you have to really hate it. That works too.” In response to a question about what it means to be an immigrant writer, he called on young writers not to be “caged by origin”—insisting that they push back against the idea that third world writers can only write about where they come from.

On the subject of awards, Rushdie dropped in a bit of humor. Amitava Kumar made mention of one of Rushdie’s recent late-night talk show appearances where he remarked that when you’re given an award, you can’t just say, ok, send it over. You have to make an appearance. “That’s why I said it’s not really an award—it’s a bribe,” Rushdie said, referring to the AAWW’s lifetime achievement award he would receive later that evening. “I’m happy to be bribed. Thank you for the bribe.”

The Aerogram captured some of their favorite quotes from the evening, including Rushdie’s memory of Thomas Pynchon:

“I met Thomas Pynchon—I had to review his novel Vineland for the New York Times.
Pynchon has this habit of dropping little verses into his novel. There’s a verse that
goes, ‘Fuck you mister/Fuck your sister/Fuck your brother/Fuck your pop/ Hey, I’m
a cop.’ Anyway, so I quoted him.

“The New York Times went insane.

“They said, ‘This word has never appeared in the New York Times. You can’t do it.’ I
said, ‘How about if we go “f, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk?”’ They said ‘That won’t
work, because everyone will know what the word is.’ So this went all the way to the
top of the New York Times. I had to take it out—it was not allowed. I was not allowed
to quote Thomas Pynchon saying ‘fuck.’

“When I met Thomas Pynchon—he remembered that—and enjoyed it. He was rather
great. We had a long dinner together and I thought we were friends. And then he
never called again.”

As Rushdie continued to share stories of his run-ins with famous writers, many in the crowd, whether perched on the edge of their seats or leaning against the mahogany bar, whipped out their phones just in time to live-tweet some of his more memorable and candid lines. Check out our storify page for a play-by-play of the evening’s conversations.

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When, on February 14, 1989, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, sentencing the writer to death for “insulting” Islam with his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s first reaction, which he recalls in his recently published memoir Joseph Anton, was to run to the window, close his curtains, and lock his front door. The author went into hiding for the following nine years. In the 656-page memoir, written in the third person, Rushdie reveals an enormous amount of detail about how exactly he survived his years in exile. The sheer number of stories compelled us to dig up a few more. Here are a few things we learned about Rushdie’e life, from his early days before becoming a novelist to his latest, yet to be unveiled project.

On Monday, May 6, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Téa Obreht, and Amitava Kumar come together with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to honor Salman Rushdie with a lifetime achievement award. For tickets and more information, click here. 

1. Rushdie was once a champion of fresh cream cakes
In the 1970s, after one of his theater pals in the UK landed a gig writing ad copy for lucrative shampoo commercials and used the money to buy a sports car, Salman Rushdie was compelled to try his hand as a copywriter. In a speech made before the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, he remembers being asked during his first copywriting test to “imagine that you met a Martian who mysteriously spoke English and you had to explain to them in less than 100 words how to make toast.” He failed the test. Later, while working at the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, he coined the slogan for Fresh Cream Cakes: “Naughty, but Nice.” A couple others lines he’s responsible for include “That’ll do nicely” for American Express and “Irresistibubble” for the effervescent candy-bar Aero. Although his stint in advertising came a full decade before he became a full-time author, Rushdie managed to write his Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children on the job.

A mid-1980s TV ad for Fresh Cream Cakes, whose slogan Rushdie coined in the ’70s

2. He was off to see the wizard at an early age
When Rushdie was 9 or 10 years old, he was inspired to write a short story after watching the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. The story he crafted was about a boy in Bombay who climbs up a rainbow and has “fairy tale adventures.” In a 1992 New Yorker piece titled ‘Out of Kansas’ he writes that the song “‘Over the Rainbow’ is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where ‘the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.’ It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere.” He calls The Wizard of Oz his “very first literary influence.”

3. Rushdie jumped at the chance to play himself on the big screen
Well before he struck up a deal with Deepa Mehta to adapt Midnight’s Children to film, Rushdie had made his way onto the big screen a handful of times. He had a brief cameo in 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. His friend Helen Fielding, whose book was adapted into the British rom-com film, offered Rushdie the opportunity to play himself in the movie witnessing an awkward speech at the launch of a book titled Kafka’s Moterbike. He took the offer. A few years later, he played Helen Hunt’s gynecologist in the 2007 film Then She Found Me. Rushdie had been interested in acting for years—he was involved in theater during his college years and then in London on the Fringe before he switched to copywriting.

Spot Rushdie’s cameo performance in Bridget Jones’s Diary, during the book launch for Kafka’s Moterbike.

One of Rushdie’s journals from his complete archive
at Emory University | credit: Kay Hinton

4. His hard drive is now in the cloud
Rushdie’s complete archive is housed at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, where his private journals, notebooks, photographs, manuscripts, a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops—one of which Rushdie spilled diet coke on—and an external hard drive are all open to view by the public. It’s one of the first interactive “born-digital” archives in the US, in which many of the materials being preserved originated in digital format. After the fatwa, Rushdie began working exclusively on computers, and so everything from virtual Post-it notes to early drafts of novels are only available digitally. Viewers of the archive can even log-in to one of Rushdie’s computers and start editing a manuscript.

5. He’ll write you a book for your birthday—but only if you’re his son
The stories in Rushdie’s magical realist children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories were first imagined at the bedside of his eldest son Zafar in the late 1980s, while Rushdie was writing The Satanic Verses. Zafar, then nine, had suggested that his father write stories for children, and so he turned the tales featuring a boy named Haroun, Zafar’s middle name, into a book written for his son upon his 11th birthday, and published soon after the fatwa was declared. Twenty years later, Rushdie’s younger son, Milan, demanded a book. And so for Milan’s 13th birthday, Rushdie followed suit and wrote the sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a novel featuring a boy with Milan’s middle name: Luka and the Fire of Life.

6. Rushdie’s got his eye on writing for the small screen 
Rushdie is now writing scripts for a Showtime sci-fi television series called The Next People. He described it as a kind of “paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people.” When talking about the move to TV scriptwriting, he told reporters, “In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee… In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.”

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Annie Ling, a Canadian artist and documentary photographer, was born in Taipei and made New York her home more than four years ago when she moved to the city to pursue photography. Much of her recent work is concerned with people and place, and the ways in which we lose and search for community. In 2011, Ling captured in photographs the stories of residents at 81 Bowery, a Single Room Occupancy building in Manhattan’s Chinatown where rooms go from $100 to $250 a month. The tenants, mostly Chinese immigrant workers, had their lives upended when they were pushed out of their homes by the city in 2008. They fought hard to return, only to be faced with another vacate order this past March.

Ling is no stranger to displacement. Four years ago, her apartment in Chinatown was destroyed in a fire that killed two and injured 27 others. “I virtually became homeless,” she says. This March, when the case following the fire closed, Ling looked back on the photos she took the night she lost everything. “As an artist, I always go with what I feel,” Ling explains. “I burned the photos of the buildings to try to show them on fire. To push as far as I can visually to create images that tangibly show how much in danger this community is in. It’s such a precarious situation.”

An exhibit of her work on human trafficking in Eastern Europe opens on April 25 at the All Things Project space in New York City. The Museum of Chinese in America will host a solo exhibition of her work this fall.

Ashok Kondabolu recently caught up with Ling at her Clinton Hill apartment.

So, how did you get started doing photography? This is very obviously a corny question, but…
Oh man. How did I get started? A lot of my colleagues got their start very young, or were influenced by relatives or family. I had nothing like that. I never thought I would do photography.

I took this postcolonial literature class senior year of college and it completely seeded this direction for me. Because that course was all about perspective and how we view the Other and how we create these stereotypes. I realized something I studied—the material and the theories and what we were discussing there—clicked with what I was familiar with growing up. Which was moving all the time. Always getting exposed to different perspectives. And realizing that was something you need to nurture and that’s something you need to express and show.

For me, photography is a way of combining my love for creating visual content and telling stories, and also understanding my perspective—my constantly changing perspective—and how that works with other perspectives and how to look at things from other ways of seeing.

Why did you move here [to New York]?
I moved here to pursue photography. Really it started for me—this desire to do photography—about five years ago. Four or five years ago. I moved here and it was just a steep learning curve from there. I applied to a program at the International Center of Photography and I was really surprised to get in. Applying six months after the deadline was due, I got in and quit my job in two weeks, and basically school started. I was always drawn to New York but I never knew what would draw me there. I always thought it would maybe be drawing, painting, something of that sort.

So I know you were born in Taipei. Is there a significant Taiwanese population in Manhattan’s Chinatown?
I wouldn’t say a significant Taiwanese population. I would say more Chinese and mainland China, but my family in Taiwan, they really came from mainland China. It’s a little bit hard to distinguish. I guess there’s a little bit of a distance with some people that I meet. But most of the time, we get each other.

And probably in New York City, the distinctions mean much less.
I don’t know. Sometimes it has to do with connecting with where you’re from, but I think most of the time here it has to do with an actual physical connection. Like presence. If I’m meeting somebody and we’re from the same area, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to connect. For example, the people that I photograph and spend time with and build a relationship with… we don’t really have the same story, but we have an understanding of each other simply because of time we spent together and the level of trust and comfort we’ve built.

So I know you lived in a building that caught fire four years ago on James Street, that’s by the F, the East Broadway stop by the water?
I guess it’s called Chatham Square? It’s where a bunch of places meet. East Broadway, Mott Street, my street.

There’s that statue with the benches around it. And that gun store, right? There’s like a gun shop, I think, over there?
Was there? I don’t know. I was mostly just attracted to food vendors while I was there. [laughs]

And your building was completely Chinese? Primarily Chinese?
Mostly, but not all.

Is that the first building you lived in when you came here?
I looked at so many different places when I first came to New York and lo and behold I ended up in Chinatown of all places.

Oh, you had no intention of specifically moving to Chinatown?
No, not really. It wasn’t my prerogative, but I ended up in Chinatown.

You’re going to hear this again and again: I feel like with a lot of things in life, I don’t choose it. It chooses me. Like the work that I do. Even in hindsight, it seems really clear. That chose me. That building, that home. I ended up in that community, I guess, among the Chinese diaspora that I could relate to.

I wasn’t exactly thinking, “Oh, I’m going to move here and start documenting everybody.” My concern was, “Alright, this is gonna be home. I’m going to make it a home.” After four or five months I felt at home. That’s when the fire happened. And I was all of a sudden made homeless, and more than that, I saw all my neighbors and people that were very close to me lose everything.

So there was a fire. And your apartment burned down, I assume.
Yea, it was in the middle of the night. Typical of tenement buildings in Chinatown, there’s no fire alarms, there’s no sprinklers. It basically doesn’t meet a lot of regulations you have in typical buildings, so when we found out, there really wasn’t a moment to grab anything. We were running for our lives.

It’s surreal for me to even describe it. In my imagination, it doesn’t seem real to wake up choking on smoke, crawling out on your fire escape where people who are seniors are rushing up to the roof from the flames, carrying babies up and helping each other jump off to another roof before the windows exploded and everything caved in. It really doesn’t seem real that I lived through this. I was mostly horrified by just how quickly I could be uprooted. And I noticed everybody around me had no idea of what’s next. And everything you lose you can’t be compensated for.

After this happened… It’s a touchy subject for me because I ended up in a Supreme Court case.

Against the landlord?
Well, against the negligence. There was negligence. This fire happened, but the court case only came to a close last week. So it’s been an emotional time. It made me realize that you don’t really get justice legally. Because according to the legal system, you only get what you lost with monetary value. As an artist, I have lost priceless things. They don’t really… care. It doesn’t really have that much of a value in that sense.

So, I guess there’s some parallels to that eviction at 81 Bowery. How long did you spend going to 81 Bowery and talking to people living on the fourth floor?
I think it was a few years ago. When I was there I started by visiting some of the men that really welcomed me. I basically walked in one day and I said, “I’m looking for someone to talk to. I’m a photographer and just would like to get to understand, get to know you guys.”

Annie Ling

How was that initially? Cause it’s, like, tenuous legally. Did people react angrily to you being there? Suspiciously?
No, I was trying to be very respectful. If they didn’t want me there I wouldn’t have stayed of course. I had a connection with one of the older ones, and I would end up not taking pictures immediately but going to visit and watching Chinese operas with him. Just spending time.

It’s not that I just wanted photographs. I wanted a relationship with these guys because they reminded me of my father, who I don’t have a relationship with. These guys left their families to be breadwinners and they sacrificed the intimacy of being with family so that they could provide for them. When I heard about these guys, I just knew I had to meet them. Because I never got a chance to see how my father lived.

He worked abroad?
I never saw him. His life is mysterious to me, but yeah he worked abroad a lot.

When I went there, after a while, I explained myself. They understood. Some of the guys told me that I reminded them of their daughters who they hadn’t seen in a dozen years or so. So that’s, I think, an important thing to get across. There was that relationship first.

So the eviction came about because there was like a Poppy Harlow, CNN, semi-sensationalist story about the place. Which is to be expected for mainstream news outlets when they need something like this to spread to the rest of America which doesn’t even understand what it’s like to live in a city. And then someone from Arizona tipped the FDNY and they evicted the residents after that?
It was a vacate order, not an eviction. A lot of people think that this happened because of gentrification, that the landlord wanted them out. But in fact these guys had been evicted by the landlord years before and they were out for a year and they fought their way back and they won the trial.

This is different. This is a vacate order from the city. The city came in and gave them a few hours’ notice. But you know, that didn’t give a lot of time to people to make a backup plan. The doors were all knocked down.

The organization CAAAV [Coalition Against Asian American Violence] has done a tremendous job of advocating for these people, in the past and also now. So they believed that the CNN piece that was done in a very sensationalist way had set off this concern from someone in Arizona that the city doesn’t care about these people, so they have to be rescued. The day they were being vacated I showed up at the end. I showed up as soon as I found out. It turned out CNN was there the same day for a follow-up piece. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it.

No.
I felt very disappointed. It seemed a little naïve because they were asking these people who became dear friends of mine if they were relieved that this happened because they were leaving these unsafe conditions. They’re very aware that this isn’t an ideal way to leave, but they left their families and they have a community there, which is more than a lot of people can say in Chinatown that live isolated in tenement buildings. They’ve built a family for themselves. When this family they’ve built for themselves and this community that they’ve created is lost, they’re very much alone. More alone than they were at the Bowery.

A lot of them have been there with each other for over a dozen years. They support each other and come to each other for any concern. So, I’m disappointed because everyone is in limbo. It just really reminds me again of what happened to the people that lost the building in the fire four years ago. We’re in limbo. At the mercy of time and the city figuring out what to do.

Annie Ling

Is there some sort of temporary housing set up?
I believe people can apply for temporary housing if they can get everything together.

But it’s not just a quick fix. Let’s have a bed. Let’s find a new room and a new bed. A home isn’t just a place. A home is where you feel comfortable and you belong. It’s part of your identity and who you are. When you take that away, you do get disoriented. It’s hard to find your way when you get uprooted so suddenly.

Well, we’re in this triangle of those two neighborhoods that I was talking about earlier. So you’ve lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown your entire time in New York City?
After Chinatown, after the fire, I virtually became homeless myself for over a year. I moved—I lost track of the count—at least twenty times in a year. Just anywhere I could sleep to get through school. I was still committed to finishing what I started, but of course I had to take a leave of absence because I had to start from scratch and I didn’t have insurance and it’s very difficult to be here. [laughs]

Yeah. [laughs] Let’s move away from the extreme heaviness. How do photographers generally, or photojournalists, make a living? Is it just pitching assignments to places? Or taking assignments?
I can only speak from personal experience. I know this is not a desirable or lucrative profession. But really for me, I see it less as a career and more as an attitude. Photography brings me joy. It helps me understand—again we go back to perspectives—how to see things from other perspectives. And try to understand how I see the world. It’s very exciting. I think I could go on and on just how being able to see tangibly the way you set a distance between you and a certain subject or you and a person or you and a story—how close or how far you are—it can help you understand a lot about yourself.

It’s not just a tool that I use. Well, I guess, maybe it’s a tool. It teaches me a lot. It constantly teaches me a lot. So, for making a living, I hope that I can make a living doing great assignments and meeting all kinds of great people. But at the end of the day, I have to do what I have to do sometimes. Last year I took a job painting houses when I couldn’t pay my bills.

That actually sounds pretty awesome.
I would be covered in paint and I’d get a call from the New York Times saying like, “We’d like you to go and shoot this.” And I would drop my paintbrush and I would clean up and go and shoot. And this might be the hidden side of what many people see as “glory job.” I do what I do to get by. [laughs] Making the most of what I have.

So, I know you’ve done a lot of what I guess for lack of a better word I’d call social pieces. Pieces with social interest, angles. But you’re also a working photographer. I was looking through your website and you had photos of hip-hop artist El-P, and he’s smoking cigarettes or throwing a ball in the air with sunglasses on.
Tomato.

Is that what that was? I knew he probably didn’t own a red ball. He grows tomatoes?
Yeah.

Wow, he’s never mentioned that. I can’t imagine that man growing tomatoes.
Well, he’s got a sensitive side.

I never see him during the day is what it is. So, how is it, say, working—not that it’s necessarily heavy all the time—but doing those social interest pieces and having to, on the fly, take photos of a man throwing a tomato in the air? Cause it probably elicits different feelings in parts of your brain? Or do you find it’s a continuum?
I’ve been getting more assignments photographing environmental portraits.

An environmental portrait, like a dude hanging out? Is that what it is? [laughs]
Yeah. A portrait of a person in a context. That’s a really rough definition. I mean, for me, a person and a place are very interesting. There’s limitless possibilities, and I think that it would be very tough to be doing what I’m doing if you’re not interested in people. I find it very rewarding to meet these people. Just to have access to so many different kinds of lives and perspectives. It’s incredible to me. I’m always learning and I get to see what it’s like from their side. It’s never dull. For me to photograph, to pursue a personal project that’s lengthy and I get to go as deep as possible and then simultaneously do a portrait for Fader or New York Magazine, it’s all things that feed me as an artist.

I know you took some Sandy photos. Post-Sandy photos. Were you downtown during that period of time?
No, my editor wanted me to photograph Manhattan. But I was stuck in Brooklyn, so as a result a friend of mine and I decided to drive to South Brooklyn or South Queens, I guess. The Rockaways. I’ve always been interested in the Rockaways ever since I shot there a few years ago for a different publication. But I had visited Rockaway Beach and at one point got access to Breezy Point. I wanted to see what they were going through. I was very fortunate living in this triangle that was slightly above everything else. It really was night and day. Some people lost a lot and everything.

My internet went out.
My internet went out too. That was tragic, you know. Awful.

[laughs]
I really felt like I wanted to understand what other people were experiencing at the same time. I went to Breezy Point just after the bridge opened to the Rockaways. The next morning a lot of media arrived, but I was there before all the media arrived. It was really eerie. Everything was under water. And it was dark. I was just amazed by the people who were diligently working day and night to help each other. That’s an incredible thing to witness. How people come together when you see someone in need.

As a photographer, when you see something like that—a disaster or after a natural disaster—there must be so many visually interesting things. But you might want to exercise this restraint because you feel, maybe not exploitative, do you know what I mean? That feeling of wanting to capture everything but also having to hold back?
Yeah. I think you’re touching on a really important thing. I think photography is subjective, of course. But it is also very hard to lie with a photo. When you create a piece of work and you stand in a certain place and click a shutter at a certain time, where you stand is very obvious. If you’re very close to a person, if you’re catching them in a moment of vulnerability in a sensitive way, you have to know why you’re there. And that comes through. Your motivation comes through in the image that you create and put out there.

That’s the part that you have to consider too. What do I want people to think or see when they see this work? And of course, people can think whatever they want. But your job is as a communicator and you have to know what you want to communicate.

If we’re talking about journalism, the deeper you go and the more time you spend with a subject, the more arresting and profound images can be.

Finally, the plugs slash future work portion. What are you working on? What are your plans for the future?
Oh man, so much going on. I’ve created a lot of work, lots of projects and done research in the last couple of years. This year I’m really trying to put it out there.

Last year I spent two months in Eastern Europe with a friend and colleague looking at the problem of human trafficking. That was a very intense experience. It’s taken me a long time to go through that work and to edit. I’ll be showing this work to the public—the work that I created in Eastern Europe about trafficking—which is basically a collaboration with survivors of trafficking to photograph places that enable trafficking and their stories.

In the meantime, I’m also putting together an exhibit at the end of October with the Museum of Chinese in America. It will be the first solo exhibition of all the work I’ve done in Chinatown.

For more on 81 Bowery and Annie Ling’s photos of the building’s residents, check out The Tenement Life in Open City.

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It is projected that within three decades, the United States will have a “majority-minority” population. We asked four artists to consider this demographic shift, and show us their visions of the year 2050. Here is Oyama Enrico Isamu Letter, an abstract artist and painter who draws on the visual elements of graffiti culture.

While visiting a second-hand antique maps store in the Jinbōchō neighborhood of Tokyo, which is known for its used bookstores, I came upon a map made in Japan in 1937 that charted international air routes right before World War II. The web of airline networks had been printed over a map of the world, and seemed to suggest a new visual method of dividing land masses and bodies of water. Rather than emphasizing national boundaries, this map traced people’s movements across the planet.

In 30 years, racial and ethnic minorities in the United States will together comprise a majority of the population. What if, through such cultural and geopolitical shifts, the national boundaries and artificial geographies that arose in large part out of colonial interests were called into question? To visually interpret what a majority-minority in the United States might mean globally, I wanted to create a new world map from the one I had found, a new configuration of lands.

Taking the map, I cut it into small pieces along the complicated network of airline routes and arranged the pieces on graph paper, which became an ocean with a geometric grid. The new shape of the world that I formed is a geopolitical inversion of sorts: what was once a world of geometric land masses, defined by the lines of national boundaries and surrounded by variable oceans, transformed into one of variable lands with geometric oceans, where boundaries are determined by people’s movements.

The World Atlas 2050 #1, #2, #3, #4
268mm(h) x 190mm(w) (each)
Paper Collage on Graph Paper
2012

What does 2050 look like to other artists? To view the rest of the pieces from this series, click here:

An Xiao Mina

Jeff Ng

Jaret Vadera

The post Minority Rules: 2050, According to Oyama Enrico Isamu Letter appeared first on Asian American Writers' Workshop.

The clock struck two. Though the day was still, the sound seemed to swirl around somewhere high above me before reaching my ears.

When the echo died away, I suddenly noticed an odor in the air. It was sweet and persistent but not at all unpleasant. I took a deep breath and let myself be guided by the smell.

“Fern,” I murmured.

I was standing in front of a large, stone house. The heavy iron gate was half open. A massive oak cast a cool shadow. Without a moment’s hesitation, I went in. I walked toward the house, looking up at the windows, then passed around to the back on the west side. The smell was coming from there.

I found a beautiful and meticulously tended garden. Shrubs trimmed with amazing precision lined little green paths. A few blooms still clung to the climbing roses, and clear water flowed from a fountain at the center. Next to the fountain, a tiger lay sprawled on the ground, and next to the tiger crouched an old man.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Come see,” said the man, who was apparently not at all surprised to find me standing there.

“Is it dead?”

“No, not yet,” he said, waving for me to come closer.

As I approached the fountain, I felt a pleasant breeze. Small birds chirped, and it seemed as though the heat that covered the town had suddenly abated.

The tiger was enormous, stretched out against the curve of the stone basin. Its legs were limp, its mouth half open. Its breathing was weak and labored.

“Is it sick?” I asked.

“Yes, it won’t last long.” The old man held the animal’s paw as he knelt beside it, and he seemed so comfortable and confident that I felt no fear. He gestured again for me to approach. He was dressed very formally for a hot summer day, but he did not seem to be sweating at all. He wore an elegant jacket, a bowtie, and pearl cufflinks. His white hair was neatly combed.

I knelt beside him and found I couldn’t resist the urge to rest my hand on the tiger’s back. The smell I had thought was fern seemed to be coming from the animal.

I was struck by the warmth of his body. This was no stuffed beast or a figment of my imagination but a living creature. Its hot mass pulsed under my palm.

“It’s magnificent,” I whispered.

“Magnificent indeed,” the man said as he continued to caress the beast. Its black and yellow fur shined in the light filtering down through the trees. The beautiful stripes, the enormous size — everything about the animal was perfect. Even lying prostrate, it seemed to be coiled and ready to attack; the paws looked heavy. The jaw was powerful, and sharp fangs peeked out from its mouth. Every bit of the tiger seemed to have a purpose, to be ideally suited to the hunt.

“It is yours?” I asked.

“It is.” The old man nodded. A shudder ran through the animal’s belly and it groaned.

“Poor thing,” I said. I tried to concentrate my energy in the hand stroking the tiger’s back. The fur was very thick and soft and pleasant to the touch. The more I stroked it the more the scent of ferns filled the air.

“There now,” the man murmured. Then he turned toward me for the first time and smiled.

The tiger’s ears drooped and its tongue rolled from its mouth. It began to drool. With its last remaining strength, it pushed closer to the old man.

“There now,” the man repeated, wrapping his arms around the tiger’s neck and rubbing his cheek against its face.

The roses swayed in the hot breeze. Tiny insects danced above the lawn. Spray from the fountain misted down on us.

“I’m afraid I’m disturbing you,” I said, realizing that I was intruding on their last moments together.

“Why would you say that?” the old man said, a hint of reproach in his tone. “You must stay with us. We need you here.” Then he looked back at the tiger, his eyes full of pity.

The tiger’s breath grew fitful. Its throat rattled; its fangs clattered together. The tongue looked rough and dry. I continued to rub its back; it was all I could do.

The old man held his cheek against the animal’s head. The tiger’s eyes opened and sought his face. When it was satisfied that he was still nearby, the eyes shut again in relief.

Their bodies had become one. Cheek and jaw, torso and neck, paw and leg, bowtie and stripes — everything melted together into a single being. The tiger let out a roar, and as the echo died away so did the beating under my hand. The clicking of fangs stopped, and a final breath seeped from its lungs. Silence descended on us.

The old man continued to hold the animal in his arms. I rose as quietly as I could and left the garden.

Excerpted from REVENGE: ELEVEN DARK TALES by Yoko Ogawa. Reprinted by arrangement with Picador. Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.

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From his early days protesting against foot-binding to his short political career working for Sun Yat-sen to his later days advocating for economic justice, H. T. Tsiang aimed to use words to move people to action, paper bullets to change the direction of the wind. With The Hanging on Union Square, Tsiang put his oar into the conversation about what was wrong with the world during the 1930s. He wanted to transcend his identity as a “young Chinese poet” and become a major troublemaker, an idiosyncratic, hybrid version of Hamlet, Odysseus, Christ, and his own fictional creation, Mr. Nut. And he sought to achieve this purpose by imaginatively—and perhaps indiscriminately—borrowing techniques from a dizzying variety of genres. In so doing, Tsiang may have been following the principle of nalai zhuyi, or strategic appropriation from other writers, formulated by the influential Chinese author and literary theorist, Lu Xun. Lu argued that globalism and modernism compelled writers to abandon notions of generic purity; he thus encouraged writers to accomplish their artistic—and sometimes political—ends by freely appropriating from a variety of sources. Even Lu, however, may not have been able to predict the creative and disorienting ways that The Hanging on Union Square combines these forms. Small wonder then that every publisher Tsiang initially approached declined to take on The Hanging on Union Square. Putnam’s Sons, Minton, Balch, and Company could not imagine that the book would sell well enough to make “publication remunerative.” Little, Brown, and Company and Coward-McCann agreed. Covici-Friede suggested that he “re-write the story in straight-forward terms as a realistic novel.” Of course, H. T. Tsiang did not aim for remuneration or realism. Thanks to his own initiative, a few people read his book during his lifetime. Thanks to Kaya Press, the Trouble Maker’s masterwork is available again today.

– from the afterword by Floyd Cheung, editor of The Hanging on Union Square

XII: BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF AN AMBULANCE

“HEAVEN IS ABOVE,
HELL BELOW,
NOTHING IN POCKET,
WHERE TO GO?”

It was Mr. Nut poetizing.

One o’clock.

At the corner of Fourteenth Street and First Avenue, Mr. Nut saw a garbage-can standing in front of another cafeteria.

He stopped.

He looked in.

He put his right hand in.

To see if there was anything inside.

An old man came running towards him. He yelled: “Get away from here! This is my station. I’ve got a sick wife to feed. You’re a young fellow: why don’t you go to the Relief Building? You have the strength. They have to feed you! They are afraid that you will make trouble.”

The old man covered the garbage-can with his whole body to keep it from Mr. Nut. Picking! Eating! And murmuring!

Nut moved to the other side of the can.

“Don’t touch this can!” continued the old man. “This is my station!”

“What do you mean,” asked Nut, “your station?”

“You heard me! Can’t you understand English? I have been living by this can for three months now.”

Nut moved back a few steps. Still looking on.

The snow whitened the pavement.

And the melting snow washed away all the dirt from the old man’s bony hands. They were as pale and bloodless as wax.

While the old man kept on digging, a tin box of Drainpipe Solvent appeared, alongside of a piece of rotten apple-pie. The old man picked up the pie with joy, and was ready to swallow it.

Nut dashed forward and grabbed the old man’s hand. He dropped the pie on the ground.

“You bastard! You take the food from an old man’s mouth! You damned hero!”

“Now look here. This pie, with that white powder on, is poison! It can put your stomach and lungs out of commission. It will kill you!”

“Is that so?” said the disappointed old man. “Now you, young fellow, you have spoiled my opportunity. I’m sick. I’m tired. I’m a coward and can’t kill myself. I’ve prayed that some day I will die just in the way you tell me, and so get rid of my misery. Now you have delayed my voyage to Heaven.”

Nut was hungry.

Nut had to move.

He went back to Third Avenue and from Fourteenth Street he followed the Third Avenue Elevated towards downtown.

He reached Thirteenth Street.

A half-drunk and half-awake bum approached him and asked for a cigarette.

“Who the hell wants to work?” the fellow began talking. “I ain’t no sap. It’s snowing so I’ll have good business tomorrow. I’ll make lots of nickels and pennies! Who wants to work? The big shots do nothing but enjoy everything. They drink champagne, I drink wood alcohol! Poison. They are yachting! Me? Around Third Avenue! Tell me, ain’t that justice? For heaven’s sake, give me a cigarette!”

Nut had no cigarette to give.

He walked from Twelfth Street to Eleventh.

A middle-aged fellow with a Southern accent approached Nut and asked him if he could spare a penny so that he would have thirty-five cents with which to go to a cheap hotel on the Bowery. He was a farmer. He had come from the South to this city and tried to find a job here. And he hadn’t slept for two nights. He already had thirty-four cents.

Nut had no penny to spare.

Nut walked on from Eleventh Street to Tenth Street.

Another fellow came to him and asked him if he had a match.

Mr. Nut stopped. Searched.

In addition to a match, which Nut gave to the fellow, he felt something small, round and solid in the corner of his vestpocket.

Before using his eyes to see it, Nut prayed: “Let it not be a button. I have lots of buttons. Let it be a dime.”

If it were a dime, Nut would be able to have a bowl of soup together with a piece of butter, and two Big, Big Rolls!

For Heaven’s sake! It was a penny.

Nut went back a block.

He found the Southern fellow standing there, shivering.

‘‘I’ve just found a penny in my pocket. Take it and go to sleep.”

“Thanks a lot,” the fellow smiled gratefully.

“Don’t mention it. One penny will do me no good anyhow.”

“God bless J. P. Morgan,” said the Southern fellow, “last year he made a speech on the radio. This is real Block Aid!”

Snow was falling, heavier and heavier.

Snow was falling, faster and faster.

Nut followed the Third Avenue El again, walking back in the downtown direction.

He saw a woman about fifty who walked as if one of her legs were long and one short.

She called out to him:

“Say, whaddaya say?”

Nut had nothing to say.

At the corner of Ninth Street, he turned west to Fourth Avenue.

On his way he saw many people crowded in a hallway. At the place where the street was darker, he saw many people lying on the stone floors of a hallway. They were covered with newspapers and were sleeping.

Nut walked and walked.

He reached Washington Square and Fifth Avenue.

He saw a fellow rather well-dressed, lying on the sidewalk.

His body was stiff, the two legs straight, the two feet parted. The two hands coming from him overcoat sleeves had their palms upward. His face was half-covered with his hat. His mouth was open. The man wasn’t breathing. His body was very stiff.

“Complete, dignified funeral for $150, with ornamented casket.

“As inexpensive as required and as impressive as desired.”

Nut would like to know, Who, how, and why? A policeman stood nearby and smiled at him and said icily, “Starvation! Take a walk, it’s none of your business! Or I’ll hang you!”

For, if Nut remained before the arrival of an ambulance there wouldn’t be enough time for the cop to pick something out of the starved, unemployed man’s pocket.

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Easy Rider and recently deceased Dennis Hopper apparently had a collection of “Chinese” warrior prints that went up for bidding in One King Lane’s Estate Sale. Except that the warrior is not Chinese… or a warrior… That’s a woodblock print of a kabuki actor, very famously painted by Edo-era satirical artist Sharaku. Very famously, One King’s Lane. Good job.

via Chinese Warrior Jenny Wang Medina

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I have recently been thinking about the blurred race politics of early Twentieth Century activist Taraknath Das. Das was an anti-colonial Bengali organizer in British India, eventually fleeing arrest by British authorities by immigrating to America. After landing in New York in 1907, Das carried on the Indian Independence movement in exile and also married a white socialist named Mary Keatinge Morse, a co-founder of the NAACP. Morse’s marriage to Das had an unusual consequence: it revoked her citizenship. A law passed in 1922 voided citizenship for American women who married foreign men. As for Das himself, federal law had stated that only “white persons” and persons of African ancestry could be granted citizenship. Previously, attornies for Indian immigrants like Das had argued that Indians were of “Aryan descent” and therefore “whites” eligible for citizenship. But a 1923 Supreme Court decision (United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind) voided all citizenships granted to Indian migrants by declaring them non-white. It was not until 1946 that US immigration law finally allowed Indian-born migrants to become citizens without having to resort to redefinitions of race.

This means that prior to the 1923 ruling, Das had stayed in the United States by virtue of a presumed “white” identity (how actively he framed himself as such, if at all, is not clear). Given his particular history as an anti-Imperialist activist, why did Taraknath Das not protest an unjust citizenship law that had granted him temporary refuge as a “white” person? Was it something Das accepted for the expediency of having a safe organizing base against British colonialism? Was it only a banal clerical error?

Taraknath Das floated as a pale ghost at the edge of my mind during my first reading of Vivek Bald’s first book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. Published last month, the book attempts a new teleology of South Asian migration to America, with Bengalis, from today’s Bangladesh and India’s West Bengal, as a central part of the narrative. While Bald’s book does not feature Das, the movements of early South Asian migrants that he documents indicate a particular decision point. Did these early migrants accept misidentification for the sake of naturalization (like Das), or did they live a life that challenged and confounded color barriers?

The book’s most valuable intervention is in how it expands ideas of race, especially the relationship between Asian migrants and “blackness.” These migrants “horizontally assimilated,” in a process that Vijay Prashad described in Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting as new alliances of “recognition, solidarity, and safety by embracing others also oppressed…”. By conducting archival mapping of these early lives, Bald shows how early Bengali migrants shape-shifted into blackness. They lived with, and became part of, African American communities. They married Creole of Color, Puerto Rican, and African American women. They raised children who themselves straddled a line between communities of color.

An MIT professor and former musician and DJ, Vivek Bald has journeyed through the archives of American migration and yielded an alternate history of South Asian Americans’ relation to race. Bald demonstrates that some of the earliest South Asian migrants to America were Bengali Muslims who settled in the American South, Northeast, and industrial Midwest. Instead of a broken migration history that restarted after the United States opened immigration in 1965, South Asian migrants–naturalized and undocumented, in the shadows and in public–form a deeper, more continuous migration history since the nineteenth century. Bald uncovers not just a hidden chapter of American history, he also models a new way to imagine what it means to be Asian American in the United States.

Piecing together a lost history

The subject of Bengali Harlem is the early Bengali migrants who made lives in America, living within the country’s Black communities on the other side of the Jim Crow line. Bengali Harlem begins with a discussion of the dual track pursued in two immigration appeals, that of J.J. Singh and Mubarek Ali Khan. Both men emphasized the accomplishments of “leading” Indian Americans, while skirting around the significant proportion of Indian American farm and factory workers. Bald contrasts their cases with the more assertive approach taken by a Bengali migrant from New York, Ibrahim Choudry. In a 1946 immigration hearing, Choudry submitted a letter that read: “I talk for those of our men who, in factory and field, in all sections of American industry, work side by side with their fellow American workers… We have married here; our children have been born here.” Singh and Khan presented Asian migrants as a quietly striving community that would not cause friction—they advocated a proto-model minority vision. Choudry, by contrast, insisted that migration was not a gift but a right, earned by past contributions and possible future roles. It is Choudry’s argument—the idea that these migrants built America—that the book also explores through the life stories.

Abdul Rob Mollah (New Orleans, LA; St. Louis, MO;
French Lick, IN), U.S. National Archives

Bald subtitles his book “lost histories,” and his research notes give us clues as to why these stories remained obscured for so long. Many of these early migrants were illiterate, and for the most part they left few written records in America. For example, a letter is reproduced in the book from the U.S. National Archives, but it is from a migrant’s wife back in British India, asking him to return from America. Missing are his letters replying to her, which would help piece together his life in America.The book’s signal achievement is overcoming this paucity of archives to trace these missing stories. Bald employed a mode akin to an archeological dig, tracking down a Bengali name from an immigrant arrival document (or in some cases, an immigration detention log), and then finding that same name a few years later in a census record of a Southern or Eastern Seaboard city. Sometimes, the names appear again in logs for marriages, usually to Black and Creole women. The search is made more complex by the crazy-quilt of Anglicized spellings of Muslim names—names belonging to men who, before leaving their country, might not have needed to spell anything in English. “Ali” is one of the common names and is spelled “Ally,” “Alley,” and “Alli.” “Miah” becomes “Meah” in a Life magazine feature. “Mollah” becomes “Molar” in a New Orleans marriage certificate. Other unusual spellings include “Goffer” (Gaffar or Gofur), “Solomon” (Suleiman), “Seconder” (Sikander), “Caramath” (Keramat), “Abdeen” (Abedin), “Rub” (Rob or Rab), and “Rohfman” (Rahman).

Many of these men eventually integrated into historically black neighborhoods in Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, and the Harlem of the book’s title. Although many of the migrants were Muslim, most from East Bengal, their affiliations extended beyond their linguistic, regional and religious bonds and they married women who were Puerto Rican, African American and West Indian. They were not legible as South Asian migrants in the classic “ethnic enclave” manner, in which the immigrant community becomes its own niche community—a “Chinatown” or a “Little Bangladesh.” And when their biracial children married into local communities of color, the Asian migrant trail was further obscured. These migrants’ identity as Asian immigrants grew mixed with other, second generation stories. Bald, for example, includes the name “Frank Carey Osborn” on one of the lists of marriages in the book. I found myself puzzled by this incusion until I realized that Osborn had married Nofossu Ella Abdeen in 1914. Abdeen was herself the biracial child of a Bengali father (Jainal Abdeen) and a Creole mother (Florence Perez), who married in 1893. Bengali Harlem maintains a delicate balancing act, combining marriage certificates, rare newspaper reports (with headlines such as “Slogans of Islam to mingle with Christmas Carolings”), oral recollections from surviving children and grandchildren, reconstruction and detective work.

Between “Hindoo” and “Negro”

Because legal migration was difficult, the early migrants arrived via many circuitous processes. These migration chains offer insights into the relationship between the dying British Empire and the newly surging United States. Changes to the Indian economy under the British caused mass dislocations. These displaced men moved first to the colonial hubs of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and then finally abroad. Meanwhile, British ships needed ever more low-wage Indian seamen or lascars, as they transitioned to steam power in the late nineteenth century. As British ships fanned out all over the world, many Indian seamen jumped ship to leave their indenture-like conditions. These men engaged in what Bald calls a “complex calculus” of ship-jumping. They left the ship in places where there were both strong networks of other ship-jumpers and receptive local economies. Many of the seamen left their ships at Eastern ports, such as New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and made their way to factories in Detroit, Bethlehem, and Lackawanna.

Philadelphia Inquirer, December 25, 1903.

What race were these Asian migrants? Other Americans often understood them as some variation of “Oriental.” Whether jumping ship or coming as small traders, many Bengali migrants adopted a profession that added to a particular racial identification. Many became merchants who capitalized on fin de siècle America’s obsession with the “exotic East,” which was itself an emulation of Europe’s “sophisticated” classes’ Orientalist obsessions. Here, Bald tracks a merchant network through the U.S. South called the chikondar network, linked to a delicate handicraft work known as chikon. The book teases out several ironies at play here. Many Bengali small traders had to leave British India when England began to import cheap fabrics, collapsing the domestic textile and hand weaving industries. Yet now similar products could be sold in America to feed an increasing hunger for the “sophistication” associated with “eastern” goods, whether in the home (“shawls and table cloths”) or the brothel (“afghan spreads, [and] oriental, deep-pile rugs”). Forced to play into orientalist expectations, these Bengali Muslim men acted out a particular archetype of the exotic “Hindoo” (an archaic way of referring to people from the subcontinent). The migrants may have possessed an element of knowing self-satire as well. Bald quotes one irritable reporter musing that the Indian peddlers must be “laughing in their sleeves… as they are loading us up with their ridiculous rugs.”

And yet these Asian immigrants inhabited a nether zone and confused the forces of segregation, which did not know how to classify “in-between” people. Bengali migrant’s skin tones were classified by every shade: “Mulatto” and “White” in a 1900 census; “dark,” “copper,” and “ruddy” in a 1910 passport application processing; “Black,” “Oriental,” “Turkish” or “Malaysian” during the draft registration of the first World War. This shape-shifting sometimes went both ways. Some African Americans began to pretend to be “Hindoo” and cross the lines of segregation. Thus, a black man named Joseph Downing played a spiritualist named “Joveddah de Rajah” in the 1900s. Another African American man, the Reverend Jesse Routte, traveled in the deep south without being accosted, because he had taken to wearing a velveteen robe and a turban. Activist Mary Church Terrell tells a similar story, in her book A Colored Woman in a White World, of an African American who travels with an exposition through Charleston as a “Hindu Fakir.”

We can consider these moments accomplishing a double-masquerade. Muslim Asian men played the “Hindoo” peddler, and were then impersonated in turn by African Americans. The story of a man named Bahadour Ali offers an interesting reversal of these stories. The son of a Bengali father and an African-American mother, Bahadour embraced blackness as his primary identity, taking on the name Bardu Ali and performing in the 1920s black vaudeville circuit. Bald’s central research throughout the book is concerned with how Bengali migrants interacted with blackness and the largely black communities that became their home and family, as well as white America. Regarding the latter space, for a limited time, being oriental “exotics” allowed these Asian peddlers to travel more freely within lynching-era America. Consider by contrast that wistful moment when Dubois considers his old hometown, “Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow Car.”

Shape shifting did not always work of course. Bald tells the story of a man named Abdul Fara, beaten by a World War I veteran for daring to sit in the “white” section of a segregated streetcar. In New Orleans, Anglo-Americans mounted a counterattack against newly empowered people of color. They segregated the city by force, flattening the heterogeneous population into a binary of black and white zones. In this volatile racial order, Asian men were categorized as “so dark as to be taken easily for Negroes” in a 1900 newspaper story about Asians in New York sailors’ quarters. The same newspaper described them as “peacable and orderly up to a certain point and then they lose all self-control and generally resort to the knife.” In other words, these Asian migrants were now considered both “inscrutable” Asians and “criminal” African Americans.

Unlike Bhagat Singh Thind, the man who argued to the Supreme Court that he was white, these Asian immigrants did not automatically identify with “whiteness.” Instead, as racial lines hardened, Asian migrants married into and lived alongside African-American families and effectively became “black.” First, some of these migrants became radicalized after experiencing anti-black racism and witnessing black anti-racist organizing, as Bald shows through the biography of activist Dada Amir Haider Khan. Second, many also became racialized through the new black nationalism of Islam. One thinks, for example, of the Ahmadiyya mission (discussed in Richard Brent Turner’s Islam in the African-American Experience), the missionary group from India that converted many African Americans to Islam—long before the rise of the NOI. Third, the black press reciprocated these bonds of warmth and sympathetically presented the struggles of Asian seamen and migrants. In contrast to the xenophobic New Orleans paper mentioned above, the Baltimore Afro-American wrote in 1925: “East Indian Sailors Strike for Grub.” Finally, Bengali men developed a reputation for being “good husbands” among some African American and Latina women. These women of color formed the crucial stabilizing element in Bald’s narrative, providing homes, boarding houses, support, and partnership to men building new lives in uncertain times and a hostile environment.

In contemporary migrant narratives, we have lost these overlapping stories between immigrants and slave descendants, in favor of the flattening narratives of “Asians in America.” Bengali Harlem destabilizes the assimilationist model minority myth, and Bald’s work is the first of many necessary steps toward constructing a new history.

A coda and a memory

Roston Ally (Atlantic City, NJ; New Orleans,
LA), U.S. National Archives

Vivek Bald ends his book with a thoughtful coda focused on the playwright Alaudin Ullah, whose father Habib was a beginning point for Bald’s research. Alaudin has explored his family’s stories for his one-man show Dishwasher Dreams and the play Halal Brothers. For many years, he has been searching for a dimly remembered family photograph. It is a photograph of Ibrahim Choudry, the same Bengali man we discussed at the start of this essay, standing with Malcolm X, surrounded by African American and South Asian Muslims. By now, the photograph has acquired a mythical status, one possible missing link that establishes Bengali migrants standing at a crucial juncture of Black American history. Alaudin is still hoping to find that photograph one day.

The story reminds me of a photograph and a memory I have of Vivek Bald himself. It is a photograph I took of Bald, about to go onstage to perform as an opening act for the drum and bass artist Roni Size at Central Park. That mega-concert in 2000 marked a high point for Mutiny, an Asian underground music event that Bald had cofounded with DJ Rekha in 1990s New York. When Mutiny first began, South Asian events happened mainly at the energized margins of the city. Mutiny helped move all that to the center. By bringing British Asian bands to New York—including groups with Bangladeshi members such as Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal, and Joi—Mutiny shook up the model minority ethos through deeply politicized musical events. In this way we encountered a generation of British Asians, influenced by thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, who identified as “Black British” in solidarity with Britain’s other communities of color. In a New York where South Asians were starting to enter anti-racist coalitions, such as the Amadou Diallo campaign, the concept of Black Asians created an important space for solidarity work.

In the last two decades, the city’s South Asian community has changed significantly. Bolstered by a new wave of immigration, South Asian migrants gained the scale of numbers to encourage organizations to form along national South Asian lines (say, “Indian” or “Pakistani”), rather than cross-racial ones. Bangladeshis were the fastest growing migrant group in New York for the ten years after 2001 and these numbers have allowed the Bangladeshi community to become a nationalist one. Bangladeshi-Americans now have a low level of interracial marriage— an ironic contrast with their predecessors, who married into and lived with other communties of color. In addition, an increasing Indo-centrism, twinned with the triumphalist “India Shining” bug, crowds out recognition of South Asians who are not Indian—like Sri Lankan, Nepalese, Burmese, and other migrant groups. Without cross-racial solidarity, Asian migrants may cut themselves off from the possibility of generative, progressive alliances with other racial justice movements.

Nowadays, you can sense a palpable desire to highlight white-collar South Asian success, sidelining the working class population that was the bulk of post-‘80s migration. Vijay Prashad warned about exactly these tendencies, when he responded to Dubois’s famous question “How does it feel to be a problem?” by asking South Asian Americans: “How does it feel to be a solution?” Prashad argued, in The Karma of Brown Folk, that by embracing the model minority myth in their own self-presentation, Asian Americans allowed themselves to be pitted against African Americans. In this narrative, Asians could be the exceptional minority, the one that purportedly disproved racism in America simply by “working hard.” Of course, the position of South Asians in America has gone through new realignments and reversals as a racially profiled population after 9/11, but triumphalist celebrations of “South Asian” identity can still unmoor us from longer span, shared histories.

Bald quotes poet Edouard Glissant at the beginning of the book. I finished the book thinking of another set of Glissant’s words: “We are not prompted solely by the defining of our identities but by their relation to everything possible as well– the mutual mutations generated in this interplay of relations.” In other words, many possible futures lie ahead. That day in Central Park in 2000, I stood in the audience watching Vivek Bald perform, spinning new records on the turntables. It was an exciting day, but I also wondered if mainstream visibility would end up diluting a progressive, pan-race political moment. As we have seen in the past, the seduction of mainstream “acceptance” always subtly demands that we leave something, or someone, behind. Bengali Harlem helps to imagine possibile other paths out of the cul de sac of narrowly defined race lines and lives. The stories of South Asian migrants who integrated into historically black neighborhoods of Treme, Black Bottom, West Baltimore, and Harlem speaks to other possibilities of Afro-Asian solidarity that still wait to be shaped.

____
Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America is available from Harvard University Press.

Bald and Ullah are collaborating on a documentary film entitled In Search of Bengali Harlem.

Ullah will be performing his one-man show, “Dishwasher Dreams” Feb 15-17. He is also raising funds for a longer run in New York City.

On April 6: A special event at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture co-sponsored by AAWW and the afro-latin@ forum celebrating the release of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America.

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Desire is the root of all suffering, said the Buddha as he sat beneath the Bodhi tree surrounded by his disciples. As one of those disciples, I am bound by my refuge in this truth. But how does one free oneself of desire when possessing a physical body means satisfying even its most basic needs. The flesh, along with the mind that thrives within it, is subject to hunger, thirst, the biological fact of sexual lust: the lips made ruby and bright against the twilight of a grey and desolate world, the skin rendered soft enough for the hand, despite its propensity for total and irrefutable destruction, to find solace as the warmth of another’s pulsing fills its clutch. The impossible language of two mouths lifted brim to brim. Is all this to keep us from loneliness? The Greeks claimed that we are only searching for our missing half, that somewhere, among the rubble of a lifetime, is a fellow refugee, waiting for redemptive union. Perhaps fueling that search is the very fear of isolation, the possibility to be filled not with another life, but its absence.

(tamoteru6)

When I was asked to guest-edit a feature of Asian American poets on desire and the erotic, I knew the collection had to reflect the complex diversities of Asian American lives themselves. Fortunately, the poets showcased here made that task an easy one. Not only do these poems exhibit the myriad ways Asian American writers respond to the erotic, they also contribute innovative and startling conceits to the well-trodden trope of desire itself. And yet, one cannot read the lines “The snake was a quieter fellow. He came in the fall evenings / through the long grass, his steps barely parting the blades” in Jee Leong Koh’s opening poem without confronting the outsider’s gaze—the body that loves, listens and dreams from the margins. In David Mura’s “Unsent E-mail Number 5,” the speaker negotiates desire through various yet constant states of departure: “I’ve / left the howling of dogs, Christ on the cross, / shoppers in downtown Hiroshima….Sometimes I wish / I wasn’t Oriental.” How quickly the question of desire grows complicated! The poem stylistically and thematically enacts the truth that, for so many of us who speak from the margins, venerating psychical bodies inevitability transgresses toward the longing for cultural acceptance.

Like the rich and intricate diasporas from which these poets write, the erotic—regardless of how searing or subtle—cannot be explored without the threat of danger. As in Joseph Legaspi’s piece, where the speaker literally faces the dichotomy between a son’s filial piety and the carnal, taboo infatuation with his father’s manhood: “How free it looked, / powerful, shaped like a bullet, and instead of taking life, / it gave life. I petted it. My father…” This collection reminds us that to write as an Asian American is to be political. In these poems, the question of sex and how the body politic engages sex is posed without apologies: “he pushed his tongue / into my mouth,” confesses the speaker in Cathy Che’s poem, while “I sat / in my Catholic skirt…” These poems not only interrogate the erotic from the sidelines of the American mainstream, they straddle and tenaciously ride the border of convention itself. They are only a fraction of new and exciting interpretations of this theme, but through their earnest, visceral, and sometimes desperate investigations of love, lust and hunger, they evince a rich narration of how desire, in all its beauties and risks, changes us—as Americans. Because “beauty,” as Rilke wrote, “is the beginning of terror”—and, as evidenced here, terror is the beginning of answers. As such, like the lover waiting for us in the darkened room, these poets leave nothing unturned.

—Ocean Vuong

Brooklyn, NY (February 4, 2013)

1. Eve’s Fault – Jee Leong Koh
2. [The boss has a band of people around her the way] – Victoria Chang
3. The Circumcision – Joseph O. Legaspi
4. V Unsent E-mail, No. 5 – David Mura
5. IN THE STREETS… – Lee Ann Roripaugh
6. THE BRIDEGROOM – Timothy Liu
7. Story – Cathy Linh Che

(Hieronymus Bosch)

1.

Eve’s Fault

Eve, whose fault was only too much love
Aemilia Lanyer, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: Eve’s Apology”

Though she has left the garden, she does not stop loving them.

God won her when he whipped out from his planetary sleeve
a bouquet of light. They watched the parade of animals pass.
He told her the joke about the Archaeopteryx, and she noted
the feathers and the lethal claws, a poem, the first of its kind.
On a beach raised from the ocean with a shout, he entered her
and she realized, in rolling waves, that love joins and separates.

The snake was a quieter fellow. He came in the fall evenings
through the long grass, his steps barely parting the blades.
Each time he showed her a different path. As they wandered,
they talked about the beauty of the light striking the birch,
the odd behavior of the ants, the fairest way to split an apple. 
When Adam appeared, the serpent gave her up to happiness.

For happy was she when she met Adam under the tree of life,
still is, and Adam is still Adam, inarticulate, a terrible speller, 
his body precariously balanced on his feet, his mind made up
that she is the first woman and he the first man. He needed 
her and so scratched down and believed the story of the rib.
She needed Adam’s need, so different from God and the snake,

and that was when she discovered herself outside the garden.

(first published in tongues of the ocean)

Jee Leong Koh is the author of four books of poems, including Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press) and The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press). He lives in New York City and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter.

The post Straddling Convention: The Erotic in Asian American Poetry appeared first on Asian American Writers' Workshop.

Gung Hei Fat Choi everyone. We hope you all had a wonderful Lunar New Year; and congratulations to all those guitarists that won a Grammy last night.

Speaking of lunar grammys let’s watch five-time Grammy winner Céline Dion wish you a happy new year.

In Mandarin…

Chilean authorities are exhuming the body of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda on suspicion he did not in fact die of a heart attack but that then newly instated Pinochet’s secret agents actually poisoned him.

Speaking of radical verse, ponder the fairer sex with Lisa L. Moore’s tribute to and examination of movement poetry and franchising the feminist divide with poetry.

First feminist theory, then lesbian sex, then poetry. As my friend put it, “That was it.”

Or are you not a fan of womynz? Neither are these guys.

And let’s never forget Valentine’s Day. Ever. (NSFPussies)

The post Monday Clicks: Lunar New Year, Celine Dion and Other Forms of “Poetry” appeared first on Asian American Writers' Workshop.