Emily

Discussing emotional works in English class is always touching, but it is infinitely more heart wrenching when the subject matter is your own culture and experiences, and you are its sole representative.

So far in my junior year English class, we have read several texts—expository narrations of native boarding schools in the United States and Canada, Toni Morrison’s profound novel of a slave girl’s journey, etc.—but two have stuck with me. Our Missing Hearts by Celine Ng and “The Eve of the Spirit Festival” by Lan Samantha Chang. These moving stories struck a chord deep within me, all too familiar.

Within the Asian American prejudice in Our Missing Hearts, I saw my parents during the coronavirus pandemic, isolated from their family back in China and simultaneously antagonized in their new country. Ng’s work also depicted harrowing acts of Asian xenophobia, within which I saw again the headlines of 2020. In “The Eve of the Spirit Festival,” I was caught off guard just how similar the story was to my own life: the tense family dynamic, the guilt of thriving in a new country when your parents left everything, down to the main character’s name. Everything was the same. Chang’s work highlighted an aspect of first-generation immigrants that often goes unrecognized. The hurt of seeing a parent lonely in America. Oftentimes I think about the many support systems my parents had back in China. Their friends and family, their culture, even just speaking their language. Just as often I must think about how they left all that comfort. For me. My dad tells stories of him starving in the countryside, and I used to laugh it off as a dramatic classic “dad lore” moment. But then I saw how he never, ever wastes food. Chang and Ng capture the nuances of the Asian American experience in excruciating detail, beautifully. But when it is time to discuss in my English class, I am met with remarks of my peers saying they “didn’t really get it” or “couldn’t understand why it was such a big deal.” By just being a member of the Asian community, I am burdened with the gift of understanding. Now I am responsible for the defending of the works to my unaware peers, trying and trying to explain why it moved me to tears.

Sometimes, though, it feels in vain. Maybe they truly just cannot understand, after all they were never given any information on the culture. Time and time again from the Bhagavad Gita to Sunjata, I find that English classes are insufficient in providing us an adequate backstory, necessary context, in order to appropriately discuss. No fruitful discussion can ever grow from an untaught class.