Acceptance Speech for APEX for Youth Inspiration Award

Nations will rise and fall as they have done in our species. The Romes and the empires will come and go. But the only nation that I truly believe in, the only nation that will be here long before any country that we understand, is the imagination. It is the one that I have absolute allegiance to. And it's the only one, it's the only nation on this planet that will remain unstoppable. 

To the young Asian American makers and dreamers, I want to say this to you: You don't have anything to prove. We are already proud of you. That even if you do nothing, make nothing, surviving itself is a creative act. That if you can survive, and you can survive together, then you have innovated. That by surviving itself, you have won and deserved the breath that you take. 

Ocean Vuong 

From Nothing Personal

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

James Baldwin 

On Identity

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desrt, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

James Baldwin

I Cannot Say I Did Not

I asked, with everything I did not
have, to be born. And nowhere in any
of it was there meaning, there was only the asking
for being, and then the being, the turn
taken. I want to say that love
is the meaning, but I think that love may be
the means, what we ask with. 

Sharon Olds

Just Kids

It was our first and last show together. My work with my band and crew in the seventies would take me far from Robert and our universe. And as I toured the world I had time to reflect that Robert and I never traveled together. We never saw beyond New York save in books and never sat in an airplane holding each other's hand to ascend into a new sky and descend onto a new earth. 

Yet Robert and I had explored the frontier of our work and created space for each other. When I walked on the stages of the world without him I would close my eyes and picture him taking off his jacket, entering with me the infinite land of a thousand dances. 

Patti Smith (on Robert Mapplethorpe)

Just Kids

Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up. 

Patti Smith

New Face

I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.
To examine the dark mysteries
of the blood
with headless heed and
swirl,
to know the rush of feelings
swift and flowing
as water.
The source appears to be
some inexhaustible
spring
within our twin and triple
selves;
the new face I turn up
to you
no one else on earth
has ever
seen. 

Alice Walker

True Love

In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex — surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it, I cannot see beyond it.

Sharon Olds

Once

Would you even believe
when it finally happens

how easy it is to feel
without any proof

that love may be, could be, actually is
longer than time.

Alex Dimitrov

Getting into Bed on a December Night

When I slip beneath the quilt and fold into
her warmth, I think we are like the pages
of a love letter written thirty years ago
that some aging god still reads each day
and then tucks back into its envelope.

Ellen Bass

Morning Love Poem

Dreamt last night I fed you, unknowingly,
something you were allergic to.

And you were gone, like that.

You don't have even a single allergy,
but still. The dream cracked. Cars nose-dived

off snow banks into side streets. Sometimes
dreams slip poison, making the living

dead then alive again, twirling
in an unfamiliar room.

It's hard to say I need you enough.

Today I did. Walked into your morning
shower fully clothed. All the moments

we stop ourselves just because we might
feel embarrassed or impractical, or get wet. 

Tara Skurtu

XYZ

The cross the fork the zigzag—a few straight lines
For pain, quandary and evasion, the last of signs.

Robert Pinsky

Waking up from the American Dream

I love my parents. I know I love them. But what I feel for them daily is a mixture of terror, panic, obligation, sorrow, anger, pity, and a shame so hot that I need to lie face down, in my underwear, on very cold sheets. Many Americans have vulnerable parents, and strive to succeed in order to save them. I hold those people in the highest regard. But the undocumented face a unique burden, due to scorn and a lack of support from the government. Because our parents made a choice—the choice to migrate—few people pity them, or wonder whether restitution should be made for decades of exploitation. That choice, the original sin, is why our parents were thrown out of paradise. They were tempted by curiosity and hunger, by fleshly desires...

My version of the American Dream is seeing them age with dignity, being able to help them retire, and keeping them from being pushed onto train tracks in a random hate crime. For us, gratitude and guilt feel almost identical. Love is difficult to separate from self-erasure. All we can give one another is ourselves.

 Scholars often write about the harm that's done when children become caretakers, but they're reluctant to do so when it comes to immigrants. For us, they say, this situation is cultural. Because we grow up in tight-knit families. Because we respect our elders. In fact, it's just the means of living that's available to us. It's a survival mechanism, a mutual-aid society at the family level. There is culture, an then there is adaptation to precarity and surveillance. If we are lost in the promised land, perhaps it's because the ground has never quite seemed solid beneath our feet. 

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 

Excerpt from "Bad Dream," published in The New Yorker

A Small Needful Fact

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Ross Gay

How We Are Saved

Gathered at the side of my father's bed, his body still
warm to the touch, his eyes darkening like those of a fish
laid high on the river bank, the sun slipping through
the half-closed blinds into the cream-colored room—
we have come to dress him one last time.

To bend his arms, not for prayer, but to slide the sleeves
of the clean white shirt over, to pull each limb through—
pants, socks, shoes—till the body is clothed, readied at last
to meet whatever fiery light will embrace it first. The kiln,
the grave, love's small white cloud that arrives just before rain.

No, this is just a body. Clay and water. Hallow. What we shed
in the white room over words of prayer. What we weave of memory,
grace for grace, this already faded circle of thought and longing.
Oh, this body—grown more wind than flesh, even as the air leaves
his lungs not to return, there is a knocking at the door, something dark
and hopeful rising to my lips, the strains of a very old song. 

Neil Aitken

Q&A w/ Ocean

Q: How do you make sure your metaphors have real depth?

A: The reason why I emphasize the malleability of simile's impact is that, although syntax and diction can aid a metaphor towards its more luminous embodiment, the ultimate key to its success is you, the observer.

YOU have to look deeply and find lasting relationships between things in a disparate world.

In this sense, the practice of metaphor is also, I believe, the practice of compassion. How do I study a thing so that I might add to its life by introducing it to something else?

At its best, the metaphor is what we, as a species, have always done, at OUR best: which is to point at something or someone so different from us, so far from our origins and say, "yes, there IS a bond between us. And if I work long enough, hard enough, I can prove it to you—with this thing called language, this thing that weighs nothing but means everything to me.

Q: How do you avoid loneliness in a small town/ ecosystem?

A: I grew up in small towns in New England so this feels closest to home to me. I prefer small places because they demand/ are conducive to depth in how you negotiate their spaces. Seeing the same things over and over again trains the mind to discern for slightest changes, growths, transformations. Same goes with people. I never get bored with people, even seeing the same faces again and again. 

Ocean Vuong

Gesture

It is a gesture I do
that grew
out of my mother
in me.

I am trying to remember
what she
was afraid to say
all those

years, fingers folded
against her mouth,
head turned away. 

Beverly Dahlen

Interior Chinatown

The truth is, she's a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they're into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn about all the things they are and about all the things they will never be. 

Charles Yu

Looking for a Place to Land

I been circling
The side of my hands
Reserves are running low and I'm looking for a place to land
'Cause far too young I learned to fly
So I should know now as a man
How to come back down now
I'm looking for a place to land now

I've crossed oceans
Fought freezing rain and blowing sand
I've crossed lines and roads and wondering rivers
Just looking for a place to land
Now I've climbed the heights most weren't meant to understand now
I'm flying low
And I'm looking for a place to land
'Cause these once proud engines
They choke up now and then
Now, now I'm starting to lose my faith
But still looking for a place to land

Justin Townes Earle, rest in peace.

On Minor Feelings

Watching [Richard] Pryor, I realized that I was still writing to that institution. It’s a hard habit to kick. I’ve been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please has become ingrained into my consciousness. Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people.

I didn’t know how to escape it.

In Pryor, I saw someone channel what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. A now-classic book that explores minor feelings is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. After hearing a racist remark, the speaker asks herself, What did you say? She saw what she saw, she heard what she heard, but after her reality has been belittled so many times, she begins to doubt her very own senses. Such disfiguring of senses engenders the minor feelings of paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy.

Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination. Unlike the organizing principles of a bildungsroman, minor feelings are not generated from major change but from lack of change, in particular, structural racial and economic change. Rather than using racial trauma as a dramatic stage for individual growth, the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place. It’s playing tennis “while black” and dining out “while black.” It’s hearing the same verdict when testimony after testimony has been given. After every print run of Citizen, Rankine adds another name of a black citizen murdered by a cop to an already long list of names at the end of the book. This act acknowledges both remembrance and the fact that change is not happening fast enough.

My term “minor feelings” is deeply indebted to the theorist Sianne Ngai, who wrote extensively on the affective qualities of ugly feelings, negative emotions—like envy, irritation, and boredom—symptomatic of today’s late-capitalist gig economy. Like ugly feelings, minor feelings are “non-cathartic states of emotion” with “a remarkable capacity for duration.”

Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, “Things are so much better,” while you think, Things are the same. You are told, “Asian Americans are so successful,” while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria. A 2017 study found that the ideology of America as a fair meritocracy led to more self-doubt and behavioral problems among low-income black and brown sixth graders because, as one teacher said, “they blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality.

 Cathy Park Hong