There You Are Again
JENNIFER LY
Ten years ago: at my first UCLA frat party—my first time being a little drunk. A boy I kind of knew pressed two drinks into my hands and I took a few hesitant sips, but that was enough—I was holding my friend’s hand at some point, navigating the winding steps of the Beta frat house, trying to find a bathroom. I stumbled. She stumbled with me. She was always a good friend, and I remember laughing, pressing a hand against her head after she bumped it against the wall. She was a lot taller than me, I had to reach up pretty far; I’m 5’0”, and she was so close to 6’0” that I’m willing to just round up.
A nearby voice says, loud enough that I can hear him over the Pitbull song blasting, “That’s weird they’re friends. White girls don’t like Asian girls.”
I don’t hear anyone asking him to clarify, I might’ve missed it, my fault, but he goes on, confidently, “Because they steal all the white guys. Asian girls are all sluts, man. They want it so bad.”
The rest of the night fades in and out like normal, bits and pieces come back and I’m unsure which moments belong to which frat parties, but that moment in the stairwell remains. I remember that night. I remember my outfit. Whenever I hear that Pitbull song--tonight, give me everything tonight, for all we all know, we might not get tomorrow--I am thrown so viciously back into that frat house that I almost feel drunk, suddenly underwater, disoriented, judged, my sex drive predetermined by someone I have never even known.
I asked my friend about it. If she heard it. If I heard him correctly. She didn’t know what I was talking about.
A nearby voice says, loud enough that I can hear him over the Pitbull song blasting, “That’s weird they’re friends. White girls don’t like Asian girls.”
I don’t hear anyone asking him to clarify, I might’ve missed it, my fault, but he goes on, confidently, “Because they steal all the white guys. Asian girls are all sluts, man. They want it so bad.”
The rest of the night fades in and out like normal, bits and pieces come back and I’m unsure which moments belong to which frat parties, but that moment in the stairwell remains. I remember that night. I remember my outfit. Whenever I hear that Pitbull song--tonight, give me everything tonight, for all we all know, we might not get tomorrow--I am thrown so viciously back into that frat house that I almost feel drunk, suddenly underwater, disoriented, judged, my sex drive predetermined by someone I have never even known.
I asked my friend about it. If she heard it. If I heard him correctly. She didn’t know what I was talking about.
On March 16, 2021, a white man shoots eight people dead in a series of mass shootings at three spas in Atlanta, Georgia. Six of them were Asian women. The others were a white woman and a white man. He says he was motivated by his sexual addiction. He wanted to eliminate the temptation. Those are his words. He gets to tell his side of the story while eight people are dead. He gets to stand in front of people with badges and law degrees and explain why he did what he did, and people listened, wrote it down, and blasted it all over my screens—all three that I cannot escape in this quarantine: the TV screen I look at to escape the laptop screen at the end of the day, the laptop I use to work from home all day to escape the monotony of the same day over and over again, the phone screen I use to escape the other two damn screens in my life—and forced me to read it. As if I don’t already know his motivations. As if I want to remember, for the rest of my life, that officials would not characterize this as a hate crime even as he said, I’m going to kill all Asians, out loud and into this world, even amidst a record rise of violent anti-Asian sentiment in the entire country. As if I had to look any of these things up, like it hasn’t been burned into my brain by an onslaught of my peers retweeting and reposting and sharing and signal boosting, news outlets reporting over and over again while repeating that this is possibly not a hate crime, the man himself says it was not racially motivated, you see, and as if it was any surprise, to anyone, that he managed to kill eight people and still was taken into custody, while people of color die at the violent hands of white supremacists and police officers and this country. As if I would forget.
If I could purposely forget, I have a list ready. Embarrassing moments that make me stay wide awake at night, wondering why 16-year-old me thought that was a good idea or why 27-year-old me thought that was an appropriate reaction. People that loved me and still hurt me. People that I’ve loved and hurt and the times when I didn’t apologize and the times I did but it wasn’t good enough. Videos of violence that autoplay. Gut-wrenching not guilty verdicts. The three million deaths this year alone. My grandmother dying of coronavirus, alone, and no one around her spoke Vietnamese well enough to comfort her for us. The stupid shit that politicians say and do, willfully evil. The words AROMATHERAPY SPA, black and red stark against white.
If I could purposely forget, I have a list ready. Embarrassing moments that make me stay wide awake at night, wondering why 16-year-old me thought that was a good idea or why 27-year-old me thought that was an appropriate reaction. People that loved me and still hurt me. People that I’ve loved and hurt and the times when I didn’t apologize and the times I did but it wasn’t good enough. Videos of violence that autoplay. Gut-wrenching not guilty verdicts. The three million deaths this year alone. My grandmother dying of coronavirus, alone, and no one around her spoke Vietnamese well enough to comfort her for us. The stupid shit that politicians say and do, willfully evil. The words AROMATHERAPY SPA, black and red stark against white.
A few years ago: a man, on a second date, a foot and a half taller than me:
I only date short girls. Short Asian girls are the best.
Can I choke you?
I saw it online, I think it’d be fun to--
I only date short girls. Short Asian girls are the best.
Can I choke you?
I saw it online, I think it’d be fun to--
My mother’s refugee story comes to me in parts over the years, uneven and jagged, bits and pieces over dinner and during long car rides: we left Vietnam as a family on a boat; my mother was holding my sister’s baby, and I was throwing up over the side of the boat, it is a waste to give you water if you cannot keep it down, my mother said, you might as well die here; endless darkness and the terrifying, terrifying thundering of the ocean and water everywhere, suffocating, remember when you took me on that cruise and I got scared; you know that I never learned how to swim; one of my sisters is still alone in Vietnam, we have to send her some money, do you have any money from school that we can send to her? we landed in Thailand, we turned down asylum offers from Australia and France because the States were better, everyone knew that, America is rich; in the camps, I slept with my head where my feet should’ve been, covered my face with a sheet and folded my feet into a dark-colored shirt to masquerade as my hair in the night, covered in sand and dirt so that I could feel if men were trying to grab at my ankles, my legs, to force them apart; of course you should scream if someone touches you, but not too loud: what if the help is worse than what is already there? what if no help even comes? you must learn to survive on your own; stop crying, good girls don’t cry, good girls never waste time crying; if I died today, what would you do? you have to be prepared, at any time, to take care of yourself; if you’re not, I raised you wrong. if you can’t, I raised you weak.
Growing up, my mother would place herself between me and men in grocery stores, in restaurants; move chairs and shopping carts and mountains to situate herself as a barrier. She would bring extra jackets wherever we went and cover me in them, tell me not to wear shorts, not allow me to wear tank tops even when California was on fire. When I came home and walked in on a robbery at 19, my sister called my parents for me. I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth. They were three hours into a four-hour drive to Vegas and my sister said to pull over. I don’t want you to panic when I tell you what happened. My mother asked immediately how did they hurt her?
Like she’d been waiting.
Growing up, my mother would place herself between me and men in grocery stores, in restaurants; move chairs and shopping carts and mountains to situate herself as a barrier. She would bring extra jackets wherever we went and cover me in them, tell me not to wear shorts, not allow me to wear tank tops even when California was on fire. When I came home and walked in on a robbery at 19, my sister called my parents for me. I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth. They were three hours into a four-hour drive to Vegas and my sister said to pull over. I don’t want you to panic when I tell you what happened. My mother asked immediately how did they hurt her?
Like she’d been waiting.
March 2021: a police chief, on live television:
Yesterday was a really bad day for him,
and this is what he did.
Yesterday was a really bad day for him,
and this is what he did.
I’ve been thinking a lot about rivers.
I read somewhere once that floods are rivers expressing their memories—going back to where they ran before we came along and moved mountains, built highways, irrigated and damned. In the never-ending cycle, water holds this need to return to where it knows it belongs, that it holds so much history it cannot be contained—it has to overflow. It has to topple man-made cities, flood homes, destroy—
My mother is terrified of water and made sure I knew how to swim.
A few years ago, we bought her a swimming kick board, something to slide beneath her chest and hold her up in the water while her feet learned to paddle. We would go to the gym as a family of four, and my father and I would swim laps as my sister lifted weights, as my mother taught herself, slowly, how to float, how to move, that the water would displace around her just enough to hold her up. I would watch her cup the water in her hands, push them back down into the pool, over and over again, until her skin was wrinkled not with age but with resilience.
“Are you still scared?” I ask her, “Of water?”
She can swim without the kick board now. She is still scared of putting her face in the water, and I don’t think I could ever convince her to go out into the ocean with me, and I know when I used to take her to the beach, to a lake, camping, she never put her head down on the sand, never leant back and rested. She watched for me each time. I’ve stopped swimming in open water. Her fear is palpable.
“Of course,” she said. “The water will always be stronger than me. Even if I’ve been swimming for years. Humans can only be so strong.”
I read somewhere once that floods are rivers expressing their memories—going back to where they ran before we came along and moved mountains, built highways, irrigated and damned. In the never-ending cycle, water holds this need to return to where it knows it belongs, that it holds so much history it cannot be contained—it has to overflow. It has to topple man-made cities, flood homes, destroy—
My mother is terrified of water and made sure I knew how to swim.
A few years ago, we bought her a swimming kick board, something to slide beneath her chest and hold her up in the water while her feet learned to paddle. We would go to the gym as a family of four, and my father and I would swim laps as my sister lifted weights, as my mother taught herself, slowly, how to float, how to move, that the water would displace around her just enough to hold her up. I would watch her cup the water in her hands, push them back down into the pool, over and over again, until her skin was wrinkled not with age but with resilience.
“Are you still scared?” I ask her, “Of water?”
She can swim without the kick board now. She is still scared of putting her face in the water, and I don’t think I could ever convince her to go out into the ocean with me, and I know when I used to take her to the beach, to a lake, camping, she never put her head down on the sand, never leant back and rested. She watched for me each time. I’ve stopped swimming in open water. Her fear is palpable.
“Of course,” she said. “The water will always be stronger than me. Even if I’ve been swimming for years. Humans can only be so strong.”
In college: two guys, at a pre-law seminar:
You don’t like Asian girls?
They’re so demure.
Yeah they’re kinda ugly, but they’ll do anything you tell them to.
You don’t like Asian girls?
They’re so demure.
Yeah they’re kinda ugly, but they’ll do anything you tell them to.
The water swells.
My mother’s fear is my fear is your fear is all of our fears, and the river is overflowing. You knew my mother, her mother. You know me. Lately, I’ve been thinking of every time I let a man press his hand around my neck, every time I’ve held a man’s hand to my neck and asked for it. Are you sure they say, and I nod, already breathless. Please. What was I begging for?
I don’t remember. Snippets of conversations last in my mind, but I can’t remember my thought process or how I felt. It’s blank. I project onto it each time, a different narrative.
Rivers carry memory. I feel like I’m constantly stepping into one, water rushing around my ankles, knees, hips. My fear of men feels like an inheritance. A decades-long line of violence against Asian women, colonized, brutalized, and I can’t refuse. I’m here. My sister is here. My cousins, my friends, acquaintances, sorority sisters, strangers.
My muscle memory has always been better than my actual memory. Maybe each time my brain blanks it is a survival instinct kicking in. The water moves around me, I am lifted, I am trying my hardest to swim, keep my head above the water, live, live, you can’t leave this space. This water will follow you wherever you go, whatever you do, whoever you love. This history will affect your future. It bleeds, like a wound, like an overflowing and sobbing river.
My mother’s fear is my fear is your fear is all of our fears, and the river is overflowing. You knew my mother, her mother. You know me. Lately, I’ve been thinking of every time I let a man press his hand around my neck, every time I’ve held a man’s hand to my neck and asked for it. Are you sure they say, and I nod, already breathless. Please. What was I begging for?
I don’t remember. Snippets of conversations last in my mind, but I can’t remember my thought process or how I felt. It’s blank. I project onto it each time, a different narrative.
Rivers carry memory. I feel like I’m constantly stepping into one, water rushing around my ankles, knees, hips. My fear of men feels like an inheritance. A decades-long line of violence against Asian women, colonized, brutalized, and I can’t refuse. I’m here. My sister is here. My cousins, my friends, acquaintances, sorority sisters, strangers.
My muscle memory has always been better than my actual memory. Maybe each time my brain blanks it is a survival instinct kicking in. The water moves around me, I am lifted, I am trying my hardest to swim, keep my head above the water, live, live, you can’t leave this space. This water will follow you wherever you go, whatever you do, whoever you love. This history will affect your future. It bleeds, like a wound, like an overflowing and sobbing river.
March 2021: my mother, when I beg her to not work at the nail salon for now, for my own sanity and for her safety:
Don’t be stupid.
Until when?
When are we ever safe?
Don’t be stupid.
Until when?
When are we ever safe?
![]() jennifer ly is a vietnamese-american writer living in los angeles. you can often find her at the beach, stuck in traffic, or at jently.net.
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THE AUTHOR ON MUSCLE MEMORY
The theme of MUSCLE MEMORY guided me to write this piece on what feels like an unspoken inheritance from my mother and her mother before her: strength and fear, resilience and trauma, all mixed together. & ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE KALEIDOSCOPED To be kaleidoscoped is to be remade. |