Love and Silence in Asian America
If the world responds to our silence and not to our love, then it teaches us that silence is a condition of our development.
Aiiieeeee!
No-No BoyAiiieeeee!
Aiiieeeee!
racist love
This Bridge Called My Back, Aiiieeeee!
me,
expectation
expectation
Aiiieeeee!gives
why
Symposium
You were taught to be the quiet one if you wanted a place
You chose the stereotype because it gave you an identity
Ugly FeelingsSingle White Female
Single White Female
envied
How can I allow myself to be changed (to become silent) for a world that will never love me back?
Because I could never be accepted for who I was instead of what I looked like, I desired even more to be accepted.
Woman, Native, Other
Matthew Salesses is the author of The Sense of Wonder, national bestseller Craft in the Real World, the 2021 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, and two other novels. Adopted from Korea, he has written about adoption, race, and Asian American masculinity in The Best American Essays 2020, NPR’s Code Switch, the New York Times blog Motherlode, and The Guardian, among other media outlets. BuzzFeed has named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. He lives in New York City, where he is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
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