* Previous posts in this series: Kenji C. Liu - Craig Santos Perez
I write to you from Milwaukee, Midwest city, most segregated city in the United States. What it means to write and be in conversation with Asian Pacific Islander American poetry here (a mutated broken-city text, a choral rendering of the many iterations of bodies within this space) feels very different from the Southern California desert where I lived right before moving here or in Massachusetts where I grew up.
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[Notes to self, locations to map:
Grand Avenue: Lee Chung's where Wah Lee had complained of theft in fall of 1885, police detectives found little white girl hiding underneath bed]
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These last few months in Milwaukee, I have been making poems about the 1889 anti-Chinese riots in Milwaukee. Admittedly, I was looking for traces of this community beyond the Pacific Produce Market or the American Chinese restaurants scattered throughout the city. There is a correlation between this singular event and x's on the map all along the West coast.
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[Third Street: Chen Quen where the laundryman at 203 Third Street had 2 names, Superintendent Whitehead scouring Business District for Chinese laundries and saw at residence and business an adult white woman who was wife of “Jim Young”]
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The global body of coolie follows me. Wherever I go, I look for evidences and I try to write about this body. A body next to, laid down beside, amongst, tied to other flesh. A body which points to the ambitions, needs, limits of United States empire. Whatever I write must be relational, must investigate and teach itself the histories and stories and traditions and struggles of other peoples and communities. This is not one body. This body does not exist without other bodies. In-between motion, in-between oceans, in-between mountain blasts, in-between body and body. If I a body of artifact, if I a body of future, if I redevelop cartilage, bone, will you excavate.
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[Fifth Street: Hah Ding's laundry where Clara Kitzkow and other girls “visited”]
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The evidences regarding an episode of Milwaukee's “forgotten” history, the 1889 anti-Chinese riots. Two middle-aged Chinese men – Hah Ding and Sim Yip Ya – arrested for allegedly taking sexual liberties with white and underaged women. In the census, in the Milwaukee city directory, I ethnically profile by name. I cannot find any like-minded photographs.
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[Fourth Street: Ring Shane's laundry (@ State) where windows smashed + Sam Yip Ya's laundry where Clara Kitzkow and other girls “visited”]
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Today, at a racial justice gathering for people of color to work through internalized racism, I was startled to see three other APIAs present and to find myself inadvertently in an APIA caucus during a breakout group. The color we are assigned doesn't even register on Milwaukee's segregation map. At lunch, I ask the others who grew up here what it was like. Tightknit or singular.
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[Chestnut Street: Joseph Caspari's saloon where effigy of lynched figures + 618 Chestnut where men smashed windows of Chinese laundry @ 1pm >> 2 Chinese escaped up Winnebago Street]
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In her influential essay, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” Erica Hunt outlines the projects of dominant languages, wedded to common sense, which serve to anesthetize us, contain us and encode that containment within our bodies. The struggle and challenge of writing which reconstructs “our recovered histories … filled with tales of the wounded,” histories which, according to Hunt, “have been omitted, replaced and substituted.”
And yet to investigate history, to difficult attempt history, to reconstruct history, to re-configure, to struggling with/against the “nostalgia for a lost culture or a sense of unity”
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[Jefferson where laundryman described how didn't dare to leave laundry during worst of riot (@ Huron)]
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What I don't want to forget: despite { }, there is pleasure here. The body is evidence.
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. A Kundiman and Lambda Fellow, she is part of Macondo, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Theatrical Jazz writing communities. She has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, and Boston. Currently, Ching-In plays flute with Milwaukee Molotov Marchers as part of union organizing and direct action efforts. www.chinginchen.com
