Transpacific Anxieties

This is a mourning piece for Asian America. The history of Asian America is a complex one, sometimes the model minority and sometimes the technocratic subject to be feared, always foreign, and always living in perpetual uncertainty. We were promised that this “land of opportunity” would
wash away the pain that drove us from our homelands but
there is a different kind of violence here.

Tanned hands stack one on top of the other in a grotesque fashion. The hands and fingers are poised in motion as an allusion to the movement of Asian America — a diasporic peoples — and the hands are severed, just as we are cut off from our heritage and our homeland. The poppy flowers are a nod to the devastating encounter of China with the true face of the Imperialist West — the Opium Wars.

The poppy is also a metaphor for orientalist conceptions of Asian America. Like the poppy, we are an exotic, poisonous crop. Like the poppy, we are Red (Communists, red guards, and geisha girls).

fill in the blank:

______ your sadness.

1. 洗掉

2. 吃

3. murder

4. all of the above

洗掉

吃

murder

all of the above

I cannot circle the right answer if
you do not know what it means.

the lines of my palm are a polynomial function
and an old man told me you will never escape your oscillating body

even if the oceans are drained.