We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang

no cars coming or going, so the two crossed into the middle of Canfield Drive to the median line—Dorian walking in front, Mike right behind. Mike was carrying half the cigarillos in each hand.
    They picked up their conversation where it had left off. Dorian had a girl, a job, an apartment. How had he transformed himself? Mike wanted to know. How had he gotten himself on track?
    “I knew he wasn’t someone like me, I know he didn’t grow up where I grew up from, where there was a bunch of violent gangs and violent stuff occurring all the time. I knew that much about [him] because I read from his demeanor he didn’t come up that way,” Dorian said. “I’m telling him about my life story and how I come up from a bunch of tragedies.” 56
    What had been left unsaid? What else could he have told Mike? Questions were for the living, questions that could never be answered, but could never stop being asked.
    Lives were complicated. The smallest things could trip you up. Those who could least afford it paid the most. Things could escalate in a heartbeat. The biggest mystery was how to turn it down without bowing down. And a life, in all its singularity and strangeness, was always worth the lifting, the telling, and the protecting, and never only for its fragility.
    A couple-few cars passed them heading toward West Florissant. It was a Saturday in August, approaching high noon. They were almost home. A white Chevy Tahoe SUV marked “Ferguson Police” was just beyond the bend.

 
    THE IN-BETWEENS
    ON ASIAN AMERICANNESS
    You went to college on the continent to become Asian American.
    There were, as Jonathan Okamura once famously put it, no Asian Americans in Hawai’i. There were “Locals,” there were Native Hawaiians, and there were haoles . Locals were the mostly nonwhite, often mixed-race sons and daughters who, during the early twentieth century, had forged a political and cultural identity oppositional to haole oligarchic rule. In that way, Native Hawaiians were always Locals. Locals weren’t all Hawaiian. Some haoles were Locals. And if one had to ask, one wasn’t a Local.
    You were a Local. And by the time you were growing up in the spotless suburbs of east Honolulu, the haoles your age, especially the ones not descended from missionaries or politicians or profiteers, could call you “gook” and “chink” all they wanted, and it wasn’t going to bother you. The words had no force, at least not in the way they might have to your parents or grandparents or great-grandparents. That was why haole kids had to push you around—to try to get you to pay attention.
    You learned what it meant to be Asian American in Berkeley, California, where suddenly, significantly, you were a minority for the first time. When you rode home on your bike past the hippies in People’s Park, they told you to go back where you came from. On a Saturday night, frat boys swarmed you and your Chinese American friend, got in your face, ping-ponged the both of you around their circle while simultaneously shouting, “Get off our corner” and “We love you little guys.” You went with the homies to the Cineplex to see Brandon Lee kick ass in Rapid Fire , only to have an easy evening end with white guys in a pickup truck hollering, “Fuck off you fuckin’ chinks.” You went days and weeks feeling like you had never been seen. You were conspicuous and invisible at the same time.
    This was hardly the kind of bullwhip-and-machete, chafed-hands-and-stooped-back racism your ancestors survived. You were not even sure you could call it racism. Maybe it had just been drugs or drunkenness or testosterone or you weren’t raising your hand high enough. But still, your body was registering a kind of a system shock. You drank, got high, talked louder and with more false certainty, overcompensated.
    When your maoli forebears landed in the islands there had been no others. And when your Chinese forebears landed in the islands, the Kingdom of Hawai’i