so i'm holed up in my room writing an essay about "the diasporic identity" and the sun is out and no one else is home so i'd thought i'd make some human contact, by, what else, asserting my presence on the internet! okay, so below are my footnotes. the essay itself is i guess about the shifting nature of the diasporic identity and how that relates to the shiftiness of text, the politics of the literary form, bla bla bla, it's boring, you don't care. the footnotes are where the action's at. thinking about this essay got me to thinking about myself, and actually articulating experiences i've had as an immigrant - experiences that i usually keep silent because i'm a good New Critic and we all know it's bad form to talk about oneself and we all know what happens to "ethnic" writers who talk about their "ethnicities," god forbid, you'll be shelved in the minority writing section and that's the end of that. anyway, in the essay the footnotes are my intrusions and objections and additions to the main text, and the plan is for the footnotes to colonize the text entirely, at the end. but i think more importantly, writing these has helped me think about what or who or how i am, and i swear, i have tried not to be facile.

1. This is a story, and an identity, that should not be told here.
There are words that frustrate me, whether in spelling, pronunciation, or signification: yacht, colonel, fundamental. Then there are words that frustrate me in all of the above categories; words that taunt me in their opacity. Lo bok, foong cheng, gum jum. Chinese words translated, but in a perverse form of translation that, rather than attempting to unhook the signified and reattach it to a new signifier, converts sound pattern to sound pattern, signifier to signifier. I look at them and I feel the signified fluttering further and further away out of my reach. I manipulate the sounds in my mouth. Long o, or short o? Hard c, or soft c? Expectant faces await my explanation. I should know this. Real Chinese characters are a different matter: they’ve long become foreign to me. Shrouded in mist. This I should know. I can still speak it, can’t I? But the English letters obscure. They grow and grow in size until they are gigantic obstacles, monoliths preventing my way to meaning. Stonehenge, marking the passage of the sun.

2. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. Once you’ve broken this perfectly polished shell of impersonality, once you’ve blurted out that something inappropriate – it’s hard to return to the cool calm of irony. Another mistake:
We’re sitting in the car. Silence, or the radio tuned to Top 40. The endless parking lots of suburbia flash by, grey after grey after grey, punctuated by the stabs of color signs. We pass by a blue and yellow one, and my mother says, We should go to I-K-E-A this weekend. She says the Swedish word like an acronym, each letter slow, solo. My sister and I snicker, press our foreheads against the car’s cool windows, make no embarrassed correction.
English is my camouflage. Just like Fred Wah’s “colourlessness” gives him the privilege of the cloak of invisibility, my command of the Queen’s English (the Academic’s English) allows me to be “not the target, but the gun” (138). I was young enough to escape the damning brand. Assuming the mantle of neutrality, I can speak without accent, without misstep. My voice blends in quite well thank you very much.

3. My mouth tasted of something foul that morning. Squeamish, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. He got into the subway car, sat beside me. Wearing a coat in a faded powder green, cut for a woman. Purple pants, red sweater, unbuttoned coat in -20c weather, no scarf or hat or mitts. His black hair, shaggy and matted and waxy. Mouth hanging open, two angled front teeth protruding. An unzippered backpack, remnant of Sydney 2000. Maybe 14, tall for his age, tall for a Chinese boy. I shrunk from him. Why sit next to me? I found him repulsive in all respects: his poverty, his dull stare. Obviously a mainlander, from China, not Hong Kong. (The British taught the Chinese in Hong Kong well – not a remnant of Communism to be found.) I hated him, a child of the Chinatown of Spadina and Dundas: all grime and dead fish and rotting cabbages, its tottering railway workers and laundromat owners, its stubborn refusal to move uptown to shiny glass boxes and pink stucco condominiums. Its homeless begging for pennies, bowing and rocking and bowing and scraping for a penny, the old man out on his morning stroll unwilling to drop it for an ounce of humiliation less. Go, go, go, I think, go to the highways and the driveways. Forget your gilded red Gate of Divine Destiny; it will do you no good. Run for the motorized wrought-iron gates. Go on, get out, go.

4. Mostly, it’s invention. When you don’t know why you feel so far away what you’re told is yours – your language, your mother, your neighbour – you have to fake your way back and fake your way through and fake your way forward. And what is the ultimate fakery, but writing? To quote Italo Calvino: “There is no certitude outside falsification.” And you see, in your own uncertain inventions, that those revered slabs of stone are but shards of plywood and scraps of linoleum, and the journey of the sun, a dream.