Jay Caspian Kang - The Loneliest Americans

During the first days of the Trump administration, when my attention was split between the endless scroll of news on my phone and my infant daughter, who was born five days before the inauguration, I often found myself staring at her eyes, still puffy and swollen from the birth canal. My wife is half Brooklyn Jew, half Newport WASP, and throughout her pregnancy I had assumed that our child would look more like her than me. There was no reason for this outside of a troublesome hope, I guess. When our daughter was born with a full head of dark hair and almond-shaped eyes, the nurses all commented on how much she looked like her father, which, I admit, felt like a surprise. While my wife slept at night, I would stand over our daughters bassinet and compare her face at one week to photos of myself at that delicate, lumpen age. I worried about what it meant to have an Asian-looking baby in America as opposed to one who could either pass or, at the very least, walk around with the confidence of some of the half-Asian kids I had mettall, beautiful, with strange names and a hard edge to their intelligence. In those fragile moments, I hoped she could hide from whatever Trump had planned for us.

The neuroses quickly passedfor better or worse, my talent for cultivating creeping doubts is only surpassed by an even greater talent for chopping them right above the root. The worries were replaced by the normalizing chores of young fatherhood. But sometimes during her naps, I would play the Goldberg Variations on the speakers in our living room and try to imagine the contours of her life to come.

My daughter spent the first two years of her life in a prewar apartment building with dusty sconces and cracked marble steps in the lobby. The hallways had terrible light because the windows, which once overlooked the courtyard, had been glazed over with a paint that in a less enlightened time might have been called flesh tone. These cosmetic problems would improve as more people like us moved in; the shared spaces would begin to look like the buildings gut-renovated apartments, with their soapstone countertops picked out at Scavolini, recessed light fixtures, the Sub-Zero refrigerators bought as an investment for the inevitable sale four to six years down the road.

At the time, it seemed like the other markers of her upper-middle-class lifegrape leaves from Sahadis, the Japanese pagodas of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, weekends at her grandparents home in Newportwould keep pace with the changes in the building. If she enrolled at Saint Anns or Dalton or P.S. 321 in nearby Park Slope, she would be part of the fastest-growing demographic in New York Citys wealthiest schools, half Asian and half white.

In December 1979, my mother flew back to Korea to give birth to me because she assumed her stay in America would be temporary. Today, my parents live on a farm that sits on five flat acres on an island off the coast of Puget Sound. Two of the acres have been planted with springy, waist-high lavender bushes that bloom in early April and are cut back down at the end of the summer and burned. There are ten rows of grapes, a greenhouse filled with squash and herbs, two orderly rows of wild garlic, an overgrown patch of buckwheat, and an assortment of potatoes and onions. Bald eagles circle over the grounds and, every once in a while, they swoop down with buzzing wings to pick off one of the thousands of rabbits that make their home in the blackberry bramble. I met my wife at the farm. She and her best friend had come to pick lavender to sell at a farmers market, and I made my best effort to help them out.

A couple of houses down the road, theres a retreat for women writers. Every summer, the new class of fellows stops by the farm to pick lavender for the cabins. Gloria Steinem used to come each year and got to know my mother. When Steinem gave a speech at the University of Washington a few years back, she acknowledged my mother in the crowd and told everyone that she was happy that her good friend had come to see her.

All these, I suppose, are the fruits of brute assimilation.

I dont find my familys narrative to be particularly sympathetic, but you might disagree. For your sake, then, lets construct a happy way to tell the story before we get into the mudslinging and betrayals. The starting point could be anywhere, really. You could start with the birth of my mother during General Douglas MacArthurs liberation of Seoul, with all the bombs exploding and some line like On the day my mother was born, the skies over the 38th parallel lit up red. Or you could start with the moment when my parents stepped off a plane at LAX with the requisite two suitcases. Or, if you wanted to trim a bit, you could start in the Rindge Towers, where we spent our first year in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those three brick slabs rising up over Fresh Pond are pitch-perfect markers of poverty for someone like me, because they are familiar to anyone who went to school around Bostonthe same people who review your books, edit your articles, and cut your checks.

From there, you could construct the following story of a family on the way up.

Act I: We start in that housing project in Cambridge. Some details of our poverty paired with an anecdote about a friendship with a Black kid down the hall. We end with me coming to some nascent realization about race.