Roadtrip

A week before Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to be a Supreme Court Justice, cementing a 6-3 conservative majority with the potential of overturning most landmark decisions protecting queer and female reproductive rights, my roommate and I drive aimlessly around St. Louis in her tiny, two-doored, baby blue Mini Cooper. A spontaneous drive to get ice cream around midnight ends up being a roadtrip with no destination, two-and-a-half hours of wasting time and gasoline to live out the American teenage movie dream we never got to have. 

“Watch us just accidentally end up in Chicago,” I tell her, yelling over the rap music she aux-corded into her speakers. The deep bass booming from the stereo shakes the ceiling of the car as well as the pit of my sternum. It wakes up the butterflies living behind there, sending a fluttering feeling out into my extremities. 

It is fifty degrees outside and the windows are down. I reach my hands out into the world to touch the autumn wind. Its needles prickle my skin and brush underneath the cuffs of my jacket. Dakotah, having grown up enough to be proud of her melanin, raps like no one else. In the dark, her raised fist is invisible. But with each white street light we pass I see a sliver of her face, her shoulders, and her smile. 

We drive around Forest Park, swinging by the Art Museum, Zoo, and golf course. The headlights of her tiny car don't reach far, but they’re bright enough to illuminate the curve of the road, spark of the signs, and silhouettes of scurrying animals. Relishing the stillness of night time, we forget about the homework we need to do, the tomorrow we need to live, and the future that supersedes the now. 

The present is a gift, so I turn the seat warmer on and raise my arms up some more, while Dakotah skips all of Kendrick Lamar’s song to get to her BROCKHAMPTON playlist. I tell myself over and over again that I have never wanted anything as much as I want this. 

***

Sometimes, I wonder if my happiness is some sort of rebellion, or if my story can be a source of inspiration. Maybe it is, if I tell it the right way. My biggest hope is that just by existing, I can be an activist: that people will see my Asian, my woman, my bisexual, my lesbian and think to themselves, damn, I wonder why she’s still here. And, I like to think that by seeing how much energy and strength it takes me to stay instead of give up, they’ll realize it’s important to make my life easier. It’s up to them for me to continue being here. 

My roommate Dakotah is an English major, and that is simultaneously everything she is and all that she surpasses. The only thing she writes about is being alive, and being afraid of being alive - wanting to live, but hating the hardships of living. Occasionally, when I’m painting canvases or gluing down paper collages, she sits beside me in the dining room and reads her essays out loud. She has that kind of voice, a voice fit for a cappella as well as poetry. A voice fit for activism, as well as art. 

In my bedroom, I have a stack of her chapbooks piled up on my desk and a copy of her life story folded neatly in the back of my mind. Each new chapter of her memoir is scavenged from the nonsense conversations during every road trip. In the end, while our physical displacement from the apartment may be zero, every new heart-to-heart takes us a little further in our understanding of each other’s vast innerworlds.

My favorite thing about Dakotah is how she knows humanity like the back of her hand. She knows exactly what the world likes to read and cry over: struggle. Or rather, how people come out of  struggle, even though, in a story like that, most of it is about struggling anyway.

Here’s a metaphor: The bigger the boulder, the more satisfying it is when the main character finally rolls it over the hill. 

People like to read about resilience and growing up Black in America. Dakotah knows all about that. Being Black means she constantly struggles, constantly tries to roll that stupid boulder she’s never asked for over the stupid hill she’s never climbed before. But it’s precisely because she is constantly surviving this kind of strife that she has inevitably, irrevocably trained herself to be a great writer. 

I’m not saying her struggles are worth it. I’m just saying that it’s because she’s been hurt before that she can describe suffering so well. 

In this way, the two of us are the same. 

I don’t think many people in the world can understand the conversations between she and I, the way we justify self-care by denying the reality of time. We get ice cream at midnight by denying the existence of calories, but then again, that’s just how we operate: She can tell me that Black lives matter and I don’t ask her to explain more. I can tell her I love God and  women, and she wouldn’t deny me that either. 

And that’s what it’s like to survive in a society designed to hurt you: you have to find a safe haven somewhere. I just happened to find mine between the arms of a small, Black girl who is just as hurt as I am. 

Both of us were born holding a pocket-sized cardboard cut-out of the American dream. We both felt privileged about it until we realized, somewhere around the age of five or six, that you can’t build jack shit out of cardboard in a world where everything is built out of marble. It’s even worse when, at age eleven and twelve, you realize that people who were born with marble exist. And apart from the color of their skin, the thing between their legs, and the kind of people they love, they really aren’t that much different from you. 

***

Two days before Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to be a Supreme Court Justice, cementing a 6-3 conservative majority with the potential of overturning most landmark decisions protecting queer and female reproductive rights, I go on a date with a boy. A cute boy, one year older than me. A pre-med biology major with Chinese parents, the kind of boy my parents always wanted me to marry. 

Except I’m only twenty, and I am the one who texts him first. You know, since we haven’t seen each other in two years. We have to catch up at some point, right? 

Right. 

Technically, it is not a date, but technically, he didn’t have to dress up, either. He didn’t have to put on a plaid green button-down and stark white shoes, but he did. I didn’t have to come in the only purple sweater I own, but I did. 

Walking slowly and bumping shoulders, we accidentally get lunch, accidentally sit across from each other at an outdoor picnic table, and accidentally talk about his study abroad and newfound love for modern dance. In return, I accidentally tell him about my new social anxiety diagnosis and my plans for graduate school. Afterwards, he accidentally walks me back to my apartment. 

What I don’t tell him about is the bisexuality, or the strong, strong preference for women: how none of the boys I kiss in my sleep have faces, and how none of the boys I marry in my dreams have bodies. I skirt our topics away from this, from the way I’ve always loved girls but I’ve also always loved him, the kind of boy I could bring home to my parents even if the idea of marrying and having sex with him feels surreal. 

“Sex is why men exist,” says Dakotah when I come home from my not-date. We are on our way to go apple picking, driving along a highway in rural Illinois. Once again, the windows are down, the road is vast, and rap music plays from the stereo.

I send her a grimace through the rearview mirror, and she laughs. She knows I hate it when boys take off their shirts. I’ve cringed through enough white people movies for her to tease me about it. 

Funny enough, both of us are virgins. Neither of us have gotten a first kiss, either. But this kind of conversation happens over and over between us. We talk about love all the time, as if we know for sure that at some point it will come, and at some point, it will be wonderful. 

In the same way she believes in fate, I’m still saving all of my firsts for the one special girl who is going to rock my small, small world. 

***

My father once told my mother that if any of my brothers turned out gay, he would be disgusted with himself. Later on, my mother complains that he’s being stupid, that her children should get to love who they want to love, but she also breathes a sigh of relief when I deny that I’m a lesbian. 

And I’m not. Or at least, I haven’t decided. 

“Hen hao,” she said. By that she means, good, “I don’t want you to go to hell.” 

Standing unsteady by the sink in the kitchen, I roll my fists into the edge of my shirt.

Once, during another midnight road trip after a Starbucks run, Dakotah tells me about her mother, the way she single-handedly raised her siblings, went to college, and started her own business. She is the kind of mother who knows about spreadsheets, numbers, and PowerPoint plans. But she is also the kind of mother who cries about gay children getting kicked out of their homes or trans children taking their own lives. 

I go speechless for several seconds when I hear that. I think about her wearing a free hugs sign at a Baltimore pride parade. If I were brave enough to go to a pride parade, I would open my arms for every single parent willing to love me like that. 

I wish my mother had this kind of awareness, or my father knew the true consequences of his words. Little do they know, one of their sons is gay, and one of their daughters, their only daughter, likes girls. 

Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I fantasize about dating one of my brothers’ friends and having my brother date one of mine, so we can bring them home for Chinese New Year and have the boys stay in one room, the girls stay in the other. Other times, before I fall asleep, I look at the emptiness of my ring finger and burst into tears. Because no matter how much I want to go to New York City and get a PhD on reading books, I also want to marry a pretty girl and move to a Canadian suburb. I want to have a dog and a white picket fence. I want to live in a country where I can be confident and beautiful and raise my babies gender-neutral. 

I want to fly my mother to my Canadian house every Christmas and have her watch the kids while I take my wife out dancing in all her sequin dress glory. I want my father to have another daughter because I know, deep down, he has always wanted another little princess, another baby girl, one who would draw him birthday cards but also ask him about China, the revolution, and the family his father, my grandfather, left behind in his search for freedom. 

Would this, any of this, be too much to ask? These are the questions that I stay up wondering, but I always fall asleep before I reach a conclusion. 

***

Three hours before Amy Coney Barrett gets confirmed to be a Supreme Court Justice, cementing a 6-3 conservative majority with the potential of overturning most landmark decisions protecting queer and female reproductive rights, Dakotah sends me six messages in a row when I am watching a virtual, Korean literature lecture from my painting studio. Slumped in a paint-covered chair, I blink slowly at the white ceiling while the computer on my desk spills out murmurs. On the wall, I have written: I am made of flesh, blood, and spirit. 

Strength, is what that means. 

I raise an eyebrow, just one, when I gleam from the murmuring on my laptop that that is all North Koreans write about: resilience, or rather, struggle. The more painful the struggle, the better. It makes great propaganda. 

While the immediate idea of worshipping any political leader is strange to me, the bandages on my heart understand that, to some extent. The reassurance of having something to believe in, when all you’ve experienced is loss. Fifty years of colonization, two brutal wars, and decades of foreign occupation can do that. Pain like that, it doesn’t go away, it doesn’t get left forgotten. It can’t, and it shouldn’t. 

So, years after, the phantom pain still shows its scars in the next generation that has never seen the guns but still hears the bullets. The phantom pain, despite everything, still haunts. 

In 1953, North Korea didn’t succumb to communism and South Korea didn’t fall  into authoritarianism. The end of the Korean War was nothing but an unglorified stalemate and the new countries were nothing but inseparable descriptions of identical peoples. And while these people—just like all people—are drawn to reading about struggle, I don’t think they enjoy it. Struggle, I mean. I don’t think anyone enjoys it, or wants it, or deliberately chooses it. People are drawn to brokenness, I know, but this is different. 

I don’t think anyone wakes up one day and decides, I want to be gay from now on. I want to be Black from now on. I want to live in a country that hates me from now on. 

Instead, I think people more often fall asleep, panicking and praying, I wish someone would love me. I wish someone would save me. I wish I could get out of this country, where nobody wants me. 

I don’t think any North Korean person in 1953 expected their country to turn out the way it did: full of famine, full of disillusion. At the time, they simply clung to whatever they thought was best. Because by the end of so much bloodshed, anyone would have run out of tears. Anyone would have wanted more than what they lacked. 

At the time, they probably saw the Soviet posters, the brilliant redness of the flag, and thought about the sunsets on rice paddies before the Japanese invaded, the cicadas on persimmon trees before Americans arrived, and the nature poetry written in classical Chinese before Hangul was ever invented. I think they took one look at Kim Il-Sung, and decided he was the next best thing because they couldn’t fathom the idea of another heartbreak, another war, another scar to add onto all of the existing ones. 

And that propensity to disregard the future in order to save the now is the only reason I can believe anyone would ever deliberately choose Amy Coney Barret, or worse, Donald Trump. Joseph Stalin. Pol Pot. Adolf Hitler. It has to be because of pain. 

Because every time a Black girl asks for love, they carve a scar into their arm and blame Dakotah and her mother for their blood. Every time an Asian lesbian asks to marry, they gouge out their eyes and blame my brother and I for their blindness. Every time a cardboard holder raises their voice, the owners of the marble, who could use their gold keys to either grant freedom or shackle more people, decide to scratch themselves with the pointy edge and claim that this, this mind-numbing discomfort they feel, is oppression. 

Except they’ve never had a cardboard dream before, and they never will. 

***

The hour after Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to be a Supreme Court Justice, cementing a 6-3 conservative majority with the potential of overturning most landmark decisions made starting in the 1950s, I put my face in my hands. I forget how to breathe. The surface of my skull goes numb as the butterflies behind my sternum die. I think about the ring not on my finger, the boy I am not in love with, and the Canadian citizenship I have never had. 

Dakotah sits across from me at the dining table. She doesn’t say anything, and that’s how I know she doesn’t know what to do. 

“Can I,” she says, eventually, “What can I do for you?” 

My own words sound far away. “A hug would be great.” 

She gets up from her seat and walks around the table, cicles her melanated arms around me, presses my face onto her shoulder. 

She doesn’t say anything else. 

-Jade J. Wong

Jade J. Wong is a college student who reads as much as she draws. Her life goal is to read and write about books, perhaps illustrate a few as well. A proud feminist and fierce advocate for Asian-American representation, she hopes that her work will amplify minority voices and help make a difference in this world.