answering a feeling of urgency

what is the most urgent, fruitful, and challenging intellectual work I can take on as a writer?

Vishvarupa, the three-headed son of the craftsman god Tvashta

Dear attentive reader,

As you hopefully know by now I like to make meaning from my feelings. The problem is a feeling is not a discrete, internal phenomenon. I don’t really experience singular feelings, it’s rare if I do. I most commonly experience swirls of feelings. And to be clear, to me a feeling is different from an emotion. If a colleague critiques my designs harshly, I might feel a little sad. If my husband forgets to put the wet laundry in the dryer and now it smells rank, I might feel frustrated. My emotions are fairly standard. They can be fickle and unpredictable, which makes them somewhat interesting, but my emotions are less informative to me than a feeling. I don’t always trust my emotions, as they are at the mercy of my hormones, hunger, thirst, sleep, and exercise. What I do trust are my feelings which require decoding and develop over time.

My feelings are not, for example, sad, happy, elated, despairing, or emboldened. My feelings require several sentences to communicate and they could have nothing to do with emotion. I might feel that artificial intelligence will be a net negative for society. That it will reduce social intelligence and intellectual curiosity and give people more excuses to not exert their brains. I think it’s rare that interactions with an LLM are stimulating in the way a classroom discussion stimulates the senses and the mind. So, while I cannot prove to you that this will be the result of the proliferation of consumer AI products, I trust my feeling, or intuition if you will, and I hope to continue unraveling, articulating, critiquing, and expanding on the feeling.

So now let me get to the feeling considered in this essay. At the tip of the feeling is a sense of urgency. What is the most urgent, fruitful, and challenging intellectual work I can take on as a writer? Not too long ago this question must have been answered by many a White American author be it William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, John Updike, Harper Lee, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ken Kesey, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, or Edith Wharton. They responded to that feeling of urgency in their own ways and thus created the American canon, a body of literary works known for their influence and artistic excellence. In their own way, whether conscious or subconscious, these artists wrote about what was urgent, challenging, and fruitful for their people. Their art represented and shaped their people.

So, a layer deeper into my feeling of urgency is curiosity, hesitancy, determination, and a sense of duty regarding writing for my people, just as African-American and Chicano literature addresses the experiences, language, culture, history, struggles, triumphs, woes, and ways of their people. Within this category are endless questions to answer about the past, the painful present, and a hopeful future. While I find it easy and natural to write about the past and the present, writing about the future is conflicting. I don’t always feel optimistic and writing about the future is an optimistic act, but ultimately I know that cynicism is a privilege and, in fact, it is my obligation to remain optimistic. If not me, then who?

If I am to write honestly about who South Asian Americans are and the political decisions that shaped our circumstances, our simple stories will raise tough and uncomfortable questions about American mythology, empire, and Western hegemony. The way I see it, if my literary work, which could be categorized as Asian-American literature because of the place from which I write, effectively surfaces, strengthens, and travels through Asianness, it will inevitably reject consumerism, hyper-capitalism, colonialism, and rugged individualism thus agitating the American status quo. So then the question becomes, is there tolerance for this intellectual tradition in modern America?

The federal government would say no. Many powerful people in American society would say no, but I believe there is space for it, and that it is fruitless to try and slow down the pace of knowledge production.

At this particular time in the country there is a failed attempt to control the course of history itself. To stem the flow of immigrant populations and the cultural changes they will bring. But the mythic center simply will not hold. We are already in that new cultural and intellectual territory that the older generations, and those who think like them, fear.

Funnily enough, those who fear diversity and inclusion, in their own words “woke-ism”, are the ones to have understood it best. These are political projects trickled down from rigorous intellectual disciplines such as ethnic studies, critical race theory, and feminist-gender studies. Indeed the students who are exposed to these schools of thought are also being convinced of a certain set of progressive values, but of course I have no problem with that because I share those values and believe, ultimately, if more people espoused them, the world would be a much better place.

What the far-right and the far-left gets wrong, however, is that America is antithetical to these values. For the far-right, they would label any critique of American empire as anti-American. I profoundly disagree with that, having been accused of anti-Americanness myself all the while believing I am some of the best America has to offer. The far-left nowadays might go so far as to cheer for the end of America. Which is, again, nothing close to my view. I believe that Asian-American, African-American, Native American, Chicano, feminist, and queer literature will save America from its own fascism. And all this is not to say that I want less White American literature. The urgency I feel is a desire for more from the rest of us. Every book we write, research we publish, or film we produce makes a crack in MAGAism and its broader White nationalist project.

living walking distance from the ICE building

The best dirty Martini’s in North Beach can be found at Lillie Coit’s. It’s a bar with delicious, hot, crinkled French fries served with whipped, garlic aioli. It is also a place for locals to relax. You might stop by and see North Beach Supervisor Danny Sauter or former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, or maybe a lovable elderly neighbor who has all the gossip on who owns which properties in the city, whose daughter bought a diamond necklace because she got a raise at work, or which family secretly flips properties but pretends to live in different, expensive San Francisco neighborhoods.

My husband and I were enjoying a slow evening at Lillie Coit’s on a Sunday. Slow because the owner was down a guy.

Ice and a shrug was all we got.

If you exit Lille Coit’s and turn right, walk towards Columbus Avenue, walk past the Stinking Rose restaurant, past Vallejo Street until you reach Broadway then turn left onto Broadway and walk all the way down to Sansome and turn right on Sansome, right in between Ralph Lauren and the very chic Greek dining spot Kokkari Estiatorio is the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. When I first moved to the neighborhood I did wonder why so many Indians, Hispanic-looking people, and other non-white groups stood there morning after morning. What was this place? But mostly I paid them no mind. Mostly that building and those people blended into the background of my life.

On June 6th I started following the news about LA ICE raids. I read about grandparents, parents, and children feeling afraid to leave their homes. Afraid to attend graduation ceremonies. I read statement after statement from Secretary Kristi Noem as she insisted on describing undocumented immigrants as “illegal aliens”. As she peppered each sentence with references to dangerous criminals. I see what you’re doing Kristi. We all do. So where do I put my sickening, regurgitated rage? Social media platforms want me to pour my rage into their feeds and assume my work is done. My rage will merge with yours, his, and hers and they will profit but those Hispanic LA communities continue to suffer. So I am learning how to metabolize my rage. How to express it with skill and beauty. For rage to become the impetus for tactics. For rage to become something useful to someone besides just me. For rage to become memory, memory to become knowledge, and knowledge to become a tool.

A few days after anti-ICE protests in LA, like fireworks popping in chain reaction, protests popped across the Bay Area. My sister’s neighbors in Oakland walked around with signs. My friend living in the Mission sent me videos of people en masse taking to the street. I went to City Hall myself to attend a demonstration where activist leaders condemned the sinister kidnappings. Those who voted for deportation must have watched their feeds, looking for signs of MS-13 being shipped back to where they came from, but instead we all watched dishwashers, bartenders, chefs, guys working at flower shops and clothing wholesalers, construction workers, food servers, and kitchen hands get rounded up.

At the foothills of my home a massive protest took place outside the ICE building. As I write this essay, the concrete building stands erect, but should you walk up and examine it closely, you’ll notice the smallest of cracks have been made.

Deportations are a means to a political end, but no amount of deportations will make us a stronger people. In fact, they devastate any chance we have to live up to our ideals and become our better selves. In every day American life no one is walking around asking you what language you speak, what food you eat, who you pray to, or what your values are. It’s rare should it happen. When and if there is any policing, it is micro and so we call those interactions micro-aggressions. So, the final bit of urgency I feel in all this is regarding every day American life. Yes I have a lot of writing to produce, but it’s possible I have even more in-person conversations to have, community to build, relationships to cultivate, gentleness and softness to inculcate, and a uniquely American open-mindedness to propagate, bit-by-bit.