A Thousand Words
*sigh* The same place where I saw this poster now has this poster up.
It’s a poster of an East Asian-looking person wearing what looks like a surgical mask and sterile gloves (an allusion to SARS? I don’t know.). Someone defaced the poster by writing “ChinK” and “Fag” and drawing an arrow between the word “Fag” and the person’s head. There are two Chinese characters on the poster and it’s unclear as to whether they were part of the original piece or added in response to the graffiti. If anyone knows what the characters mean, please let me know and I’ll edit this post.
[ETA] Thanks to OD in the comments and SYW, the characters mean “Air” and are probably a reference to air pollution and Yellow Sand. That would also explain the face mask. [/ETA]
It just makes me sad and angry, y’know? I love street art. I love how creative it can be, how it interacts with landscapes and whimsy to raise questions about public vs. private property, transience, and anonymity. And where someone put up this poster, someone else saw it as a canvas for expressing hatred.
Someone is so full of racism and homophobia, is so steeped in it as part of the garden variety background noise in their head, that when they saw a poster of someone who looked East Asian, they thought, “Chink.” It wasn’t enough to merely think it, though, they had to express their hatred by scrawling it out for everyone to see, a reminder to me and to every other stereotypically chinky-looking person that we are not welcome, that we will be judged by our presumed ethnicity, by the color of our hair and the shape of our eyes, and found wanting.
The graffiti reminds me of every time people have yelled at me, “Go back where you came from!” or played the “Where are you really from?” guessing game or opened a conversation with, “Are you Chinese?” or run around pulling slanty eyes while yelling, “Ching chong ching chong!” *
Racism isn’t just a joke. The questions, the insults, the taunts add up over a lifetime and the sum is a great big get back on the boat and go home, Chink, because you’re not welcome here.
Now for the “fag.” The poster looks androgynous to me, neither particularly feminine nor particularly masculine–it doesn’t have markers that meet stereotypical depictions of masculine or feminine presentation. Yet, it’s still got “fag” scrawled across it. So either “fag” is just a generic insult, because being gay means that you’re worth less than a straight person (or just worthless, full stop), or the vandalizer read the poster’s subject as male and the use of “fag” to deface the poster is tied to the racist, misogynistic, and homophobic stereotype of East Asian men being effeminate and therefore gay, because gay men are practically like women and that makes them worthless.
As a queer, chinky-looking woman, I say, “Fuck off.” I’m not leaving and I’ll never sit down and shut up.
*“Go back where you came from!” You mean California, you idiot
“Where are you really from?” I’m from America. Yeah, America. California. San Francisco. THE UNITED FUCKING STATES. No, really, I was born and raised in the U.S., and if I had to call any place else home, it would be Italy, so if you want to ask what ethnicity I am, that’s not the same question. Don’t assume that I’m “really” from somewhere else.
“Are you Chinese?” No, I’m not, and that’s not the way to start the conversation if you want to hit on me, jerk.
Frivolity
I’ve been busy ever since … since sometime before the election. Actually, it became more intense after the election, because I’ve been volunteering with some of the GLBTQI rights efforts that have been going on since Prop. 8 passed. So, since off- and on- line stuff is eating up my life and upping my stress levels and blood pressure, I’m going to mostly be posting amusing and lighthearted stuff here. For nuanced, informed social commentary, I suggest you look elsewhere.
This is what my schedule looks like:
week one: volunteer volunteer volunteer
week two: collapse into burned out state, retreat from online world, and read food books as escapist pseudo-vacation
week three: volunteer volunteer volunteer
week four: contemplate giving up the volunteer thing in state of burnout and wonder, “I put grad school off for this?”
etc. Also add “neglect friends, family, letters, cooking, laundry, regular showering, blogosphere, flist, and renewing library books” to weeks where I volunteer rather than hide in my flat with the French Laundry cookbooks and Ruhlman’s entire oeuvre.
Of the good: I’m going to see Lang Lang with the symphony tomorrow night, and the Adler Fellow Gala Concert on Saturday.
Of the bad: No one is coming to the Adler concert with me. Someone was supposed to come and bailed for Tahoe. >:O
Of the worse: Having increasingly difficult time not telling some other volunteers to boil their heads with root vegetables and fuck off with their “I think someone should do XYZ” comments, which are inevitably followed up with someone else saying, “That’s a great idea, can you organize that?” and the original speaker staring at their shoes, being silent, and then saying, “Well, it’s very difficult and so I think someone [else] should do XYZ.”
So, just in case y’all have been wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been buried in either activist work or in reading The French Laundry Cookbook concurrently with The French Laundry At Home.
Being An Ostrich
I’ve been out of the loop the past few days, since work blew up last week and I went to the ‘burbs for the long weekend. I even spent most of Saturday far, far away from internet access and had lunch at a cliffside restaurant south of Point Lobos where there was no cell phone reception. It was blissful.
It turns out that I missed quite a bit while I had my head buried in the sand, and quite frankly, I don’t have much to say about it all. I’m fucking tired of these campaigns that have been running since shortly after the midterm elections in 2006, I’m tired of all the posturing by both candidates’ supporters, I’m tired of the goddamned mainstream media in the U.S. and how they play such an important role in turning the presidential election into a popularity contest run according to their own beliefs and petty narratives, I’m goddamned tired of feeling helpless, angry, and hopeless about the state of the nation. I hate that when I take a weekend away, I don’t want to come back because the thought of ignoring everything and focusing on books, music, and cooking is extremely seductive. I hate that it’s unusual to find someone in real life who thinks the way I do about politics, feminism, sexism, racism, homophobia, poverty, and other social issues and that I’m continually surprised and bloody impressed when anyone expresses opinions and a level of considered thought that seem positively marvelous because for once, I’m not disappointed.
I need to step back, shake the water off, and take a good, hard look at some personal and political things right now before diving back into being politics, rage, and feminism 24/7.
