00:00:06.390 - 00:00:24.310

Very, very fortunate to have Doctor Joe Xu. Doctor Xu is assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. They have a phd in English with an emphasis in rhetoric and competition from Pennsylvania State University

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in the Great State of Pennsylvania, as well as a master in fine art and creative writing from also Penn State. But they are a rice graduate from Houston Texas. Doctor Su uh Xu has written a

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book entitled Constellation Home Trans and Queer asian-american Rhetorics published by Columbus Ohio, which was the winner of the 2023 Innovations in Community Writing book Award from the conference on community writing and the 2023 diamond anniversary book award

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from the National Communications Association. Doctor Xu has written many, many peer reviewed journals and book chapters. Too many to name the story of their le the lecture today is called storytelling as for relational. So

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I offer to you my friends, Doctor Joe Xu , welcome to the campus, try to turn this on. Oh, there we go. OK. So thank you for the welcome. Thank you for

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being here. Thank you to Dean Amer uh for giving up your lecture and your your lunch hour to spend time with me. Um And thank you also to the staff that make this sort of event possible

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. Um I'm gonna begin with what I jokingly refer to as my super villain origin story. Uh It , it goes back kind of through that journey that the dean went through. I, I went to

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graduate school to be a creative writer. I swore up and down. I would never become an academic and I learned never to make predictions about my future . Um But I was in school to get my

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degree in creative writing. I was gonna be a fiction writer. I was gonna write novels. Uh And at the end of the program, OK. Good. All right. Excellent. OK. So

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at the end of my M fa you have a thesis reading, you go, you read pieces of the thesis that you've written um laboriously in your graduate student Cave for two years. Uh And I was

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reading from my novel, which was about a queer Taiwanese American protagonist. And at the end of the thesis reading, one of the faculty members raised their hand and he asked, why did you choose to

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tell this story as fiction and not as nonfiction? The abed assumption of that question is that there is only a single story of queer Taiwanese Americans and that this had to be autobiographical. And that was the

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only way, the reason I've written it that way , which is, of course not a question that is asked of any of the white students who wrote stories about white protagonists um in this program where I

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was the only person of color in my entire class of uh M FA students. And so that moment and the experience of the M FA program sort of concretize for me, a sort of meditation on the

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fact that we're never actually just telling a story, right? Um Every story we tell is heard within this bigger ecology of stories they're heard in the context of other stories that you've learned throughout your life.

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And it's going to build on that on this archive that you continue to develop about stories that you have about people, particularly people who don't look and think like you. So how you're hearing my story in

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this room is also about my body in this room . It's about what you see in my body about what stories you've heard or not heard about bodies that look like mine. Um And I guess that's the

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theme of today's talk. So I'm gonna grab the cooker, hopefully, no feedback from like OK, so when I was growing up in the 19 nineties , uh there was a story that we got in

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our classes uh which was we had the civil rights movement and then racism is over. We solved it . Woohoo. Uh We're taught that racism is a thing of the past that slavery is an abhorrent distant

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memory and that we all start with a clean slate . Now, another version of this story, another way to account for these same events is that we're only a few decades past legalized segregation. So maybe

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should I get rid of the lab mic? Is it making things difficult? We're good. All right . OK. So in front of you is an image. It's a timeline. Uh The bulk of

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the timeline is in red uh when American slavery was technically active. Um And you might see this image circulating in different places. The point of the image , the rhetorical thrust is that the vast majority of

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us history was built on slavery and the little tiny green section is just the tiny bit we have post segregation. So that's a different story than we are past racism, right? But even this image is

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also in a way deceptive, it creates a clean break. Um after quote unquote segregation, when in reality, segregation is the thing that persists in many ways big and small. So this is from the

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Brookings Institute uh which found that uh what is this ? This is that even as metropolitan areas diversify, white Americans still in live in mostly white neighborhoods, a phenomenon you can also see all over Austin.

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And this is from the survey from Public Religion Research Institute and which found that the average white American has 90% white friends and 75% of white people have entirely white social networks. So we can and we should

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think about this problem structurally. Um If we think about how we share resources and opportunities with and care with those in our social networks, then this sort of relationship segregation is one way that we continue to

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hoard wealth within one social group. We also can and should think about this rhetorically when people do not encounter and they do not develop relationships outside their immediate circles. They are far more likely to believe stereotypes

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about those who are different from them. What Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins calls controlling images. So he also can and should talk about this rhetoric when people do not count on an event last they do not

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relationships outside. Why do you think attacks on trans people are happening right now? And there are many reasons for this. But part of the answer is that the vast majority of us Americans do not have

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trans people in their intimate circles according to this study . Uh also by the P er R I, 11% of us Americans say they have a close friend or family member who is transgender. And that includes

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the the 1% of people who actually are transgender within that, that 11%. Um So in the absence of these relationships of actually knowing people who inhabit these categories, as you know, full three dimensional humans

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, we rely on the stories that we do know , we rely on the movies, we see the books that fill our classrooms and news coverage which in recent years has positioned trans existence as a problem that

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is up for debate. So let me offer one more example. Uh This is a slide I use often in my disability writers class. So one in four us Americans uh adults live with a disability but

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disabled representation is very, very far behind. So this is a sampling of the number of disabled villains and classic stories. Captain Hook from Peter from Batman . Should I just switch to the podium? Is

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that, is that better? Ok, let's do that. Ok. Can you hear me? Excellent . Ok. So we have our villains even if you've never seen these movies. So if you were

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completely unfamiliar with these storylines, you could probably look at these images and guess that they're villains because we've come to associate certain traits with villainy. So imagine you grow up in this world where every story you

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hear about a certain type of person is about them as evil, violent and erratic. Then as an adult, you are in a, in a confrontation with such a person whom you've only ever known as

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a two dimensional monster. Every image you've seen of someone who looks like them has taught you to fear them. You have a gun at your hip, you are one hair trigger away from ending someone's life

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up to half of the people killed by police in the United States are disabled. So unfortunately, the solution is not just as easy as pouring more stories into the world as, as important as that step

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is. So, uh this is a history in which universities in particular are uh incredibly complicit according to Howard Wyant and others. Uh by 1945 a combination of social and political forces pushed over racism underground.

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It wasn't over, it was just better hidden in this moment. There were growing conversations about racial equality , global anti colonial movements and pressure from the Soviet Union, which used the United States appalling race relations

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to challenge its post war dominance. In other words , if the United States wanted to maintain and justify its global position, it needed a new story for race relations. So the reforms that did happen didn't

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take responsibility for the material conditions of ongoing inequity. Instead, they blamed racial prejudice on inadequate knowledge. We just didn't know. And throughout this period and especially um after the civil rights area era, the

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university became a crucial place for managing minoritized difference. And literary studies was a technology for producing and transmitting anti racist knowledge. So instead of redistributing wealth and resources and opportunities, universities certified new generations of white

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Americans who could be moral heroes by learning about racial others. So we didn't actually have to change anything . We just taught the white people how to say the right words. And now we're, we're,

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we've cured racism again. It's good um by consuming and reproducing the language of anti-racism white affluent students could position themselves as white saviors who continue to dominate cultural and political conversations, but also life is messy.

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So that's the, that's the part of the history where universities are part of the cover up but also transformative pushes for res resource redistribution. And policy reform also emerged from or have had a significant presence in

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higher education. For example, women of color, feminism and black arts and black power movements. The Third world student strikes at San Francisco State and Berkeley launched ethnic studies programs that were designed to serve the

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needs and interests of marginalized communities on a more personal level. I was a queer kid who ran into the classroom when I had nowhere to go. Ethnic studies, gender studies and disability studies gave me vocabularies

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for understanding my experiences that didn't make me an aberration or a monster. They gave me theories for reclaiming the monster as a source of empowerment. They gave me histories to which I belonged and futures that I

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could imagine and pursue. And that's the thing for me about story that they, they not only tell us what was and what is they tell us what's possible. So as a child, when I tried

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to picture myself as an adult, I envisioned nothing like I, I just couldn't imagine it. I had no models for what adulthood would look like for a queer and trans Asian American. So uh this

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is the book, mostly I use this slide so I can show off the photo of my dog who is objectively the cutest dog. Um So, uh this is my book which came out last year.

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Uh I wound up writing a book that began with the question, what does trans and queer Asian American community look like? Uh I grew up in Arizona and Phoenix, which is a wonderful diversity that I

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love. It's not exactly Asian American centric. Um Every Asian American space I was in was very heteronormative . Every queer space I was in was very white . Um So it felt very much like I just

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didn't really belong in either of these sort of identity categories. Um And in terms of trans and queer Asian Americans where a group of people with no shared language, no shared homeland. Asian American actually is

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a political identity formed in the United States amid the Third World student strikes that I was talking about. It's a political identity and it is a distinctly American phenomenon despite the fact that we often think of Asian

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Americans as always belonging to a foreign land. So this book uh both examines and models how marginalized communities use personal narrative for cultural and political transformation. I'm looking at how LGBT Q and disabled Asian Americans use

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personal narrative to intervene in harmful assumptions and to better understand our relationships with and our responsibilities toward one another . I'm looking, I'm also looking at how these stories re inscribe Asian American experiences into the histories of

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us colonialism and imperialism, anti blackness, hetero normativity and ableism. The story of Asian American racialization is foundational to these social scripts. And I don't really have time to go into this now. But one

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of the driving questions of this too was what does it mean to be a migrant onto stolen land? What does it mean to be to inhabit the racial category that, that is weaponized against other racial minorities

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? Like what is, how do you take responsibility for that thing? Um So the term that I use for this sort of writing uh is homing, which comes from my favorite language, fact uh in

00:14:03.560 - 00:14:15.520

Mandarin, which is my first language. The word for a writer is Soia. And if you split it apart into its constituent parts means to make and JIA means home or family. So to be a

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writer is to make a home to make a place where you belong. Homing uh is then the word I'm using for a strategic and deliberate form of storytelling that stitches personal experience into a broader social fabric.

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It positions us in relation to others and ask what we owe people and communities whose lives collided with ours . And particularly for queer Asian Americans who are denied a homeland, who are always told to go back

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where we came from. I'm considering how we use stories to identify and revise cultural commonplaces, uh which is also known in rhetorical theory as topoi don't worry , there's not a quiz. Um So commonplaces are

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notoriously fuzzy concepts that have shared meaning but whose meaning are always in negotiation and in flux. So for example, in the United States, we might agree that freedom is a commonplace value but whose freedom,

00:15:03.970 - 00:15:18.570

freedom to do what and freedom from what or whom these things are often in contestation, does someone's freedom to go mask free, supersede an immune, compromised person's freedom to enjoy public spaces. So in the

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book, I'm looking at three commonplaces in Asian American identity formation, love, resilience and ancestry. All these concepts. And I can talk more about this in Q and A if anyone's actually interested. Um

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these concepts plays central roles in the dominant definition of Asian American identity. Um Just as a quick example , there are certain forms and shapes and relationships that we associate with love that is sanctioned and love that

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is not. Um So resilience too actually is often thought of as an individual toughness and the bootstraps is that is so often attached to uh Asian American identity . And ancestry is largely defined as lineage determined by

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heterosexual couplings and their descendants is a very, you know, linear formation of what we think of as ancestry traditionally. Um But LGBT Q and disabled Asian Americans also have long histories of reimagining these concepts.

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So I'm looking at how we remake these ideas into common ground in the absence of actual shared homeland. So in the time I have left, uh I'm gonna share a passage from the book, uh which

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again is, is trying to model that form of storytelling that is intentionally a form of, of relational . Um In the fourth chapter, I am uh using my personal experience uh to connect back with the

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stories of queer and trans Asian Americans that sort of fill the earlier chapters where I'm doing more traditional analysis . Um And part of that is me accounting for the fact that as researchers, we're also embodied people

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who are coming into these spaces, who are affected by them, who in turn affect the spaces that we enter. And what does it mean to do that? What does it mean to do that with

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care when you're entering spaces that are traditionally exploited by E S institutions? And part of that is me accounting for the. So as researchers, we're also about these people who are coming from, comes from

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the section where I'm thinking through love and I'm storing my own experience back through the earlier accounts that we hear from other people. And uh this quote uh which you probably you might not be able to read

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, but I will read to you uh is from Alice Ha who is a groundbreaking lesbian Asian American scholar . She's talking about how she never formally came out to her mom, but instead she sent a copy

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of her dissertation and her book, both of which focus on queer Asian Americans. Um And she's, she's talking about how the traditional coming out story is very western and it actually doesn't map to her relationship

00:17:45.360 - 00:17:56.810

with her parents. Um And how instead of having any actual conversation about it, her mom puts these , these books, her book and her dissertation on the family altar, which is a gesture that has

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so much more meaning than any sort of traditional coming out narrative that we have. And so what she says is my mom's acceptance of me is not about her going to a meeting. It's not about her

00:18:06.650 - 00:18:15.080

going to a march. It's not about her having to tell people. She has a queer daughter. It's that she put my books up beside my dad and my grandmother and it's about her family heritage.

00:18:15.270 - 00:18:23.530

It's about letting my ancestors know this is what you should know about your daughter having the altar, which she totally believes in. That's gonna mean something that is where I can understand that she loves me,

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that she has unconditional love for me, even if she doesn't believe in gay marriage. You know what I can live with that contradiction. And so this is uh where I start speaking, I guess in

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conversation with Alice, unlike Alice Ha, I'm not the first member of my family to earn a phd . I came in second behind my father. I never know where to begin the stories of my parents

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. So perhaps I'll start here in the dingy apartment behind Arizona State University where my parents built a home from a graduate student, Stipend in the sunless kitchen . My mother made epicurean meals from Ramen and Bok

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Choy. Here she once baked egg tarts from scratch for my entire kindergarten class. She called them Egg Towers, which is a literal translation of their Chinese name. Unlike me, my father did not become

00:19:07.400 - 00:19:18.980

an academic. He was discouraged from doing so because of his accent, they presumed American students would never understand him. I do not remember my parents' accent as particularly thick, but I do remember having to

00:19:18.990 - 00:19:30.360

translate for them in restaurants and in doctor's offices. I remember thinking even then that this had less to do with how they spoke than with how people listened . Instead of teaching. My dad found a stable

00:19:30.370 - 00:19:38.980

job as an engineer, he kept that position for his entire career, earning a steady state salary. While my mother went back to school, while I decided I would not become a doctor or a lawyer

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while I called home from college to tell them, I wanted to tell stories for a living. I want to tell you about the three of us discovering the American Southwest, going hiking in Sedona and horseback

00:19:49.550 - 00:19:59.670

riding in Payson. I want to tell you about the seven hour drives we took just to visit Ellie's Chinatown and about the nostalgia that filled my parents' voices when they told me about Taiwanese bakeries and night markets

00:19:59.680 - 00:20:07.990

and their brothers and sisters and parents, all of whom still live on the island. I want to tell you about my mother's culinary genius and the Asian American fusion, the first chorizo fried rice and its

00:20:08.090 - 00:20:17.940

keeping turnovers. I want you to see me running out to meet my dad in the evenings when he biked home from his classes at A S U. I want you to see us, me riding on

00:20:17.950 - 00:20:27.590

his handlebars. Both of us spinning circles in a parking lot watching the desert sky burn to dusk. Any story I tell will only be a partial truth . So I want to start with these shards of

00:20:27.600 - 00:20:40.210

memory. See my father building the first piece of furniture for my bedroom, a sturdy wooden shelf that will first hold knockoff Lincoln logs and stuffed animals and eventually fantasy novels and S A T workbooks. See

00:20:40.220 - 00:20:48.660

my mother emptying her purse for quarters so that she could win me a stubby stuffed alligator that I sleep beside for years. See us move to the suburbs , grill steaks in the backyard and then stir fry

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. Leftover sirloin with broccoli and eggplant. See us laugh and cry and hurt and learn to till this arid soil. See, this is where I begin with love and its many imperfections. Next quote is

00:21:02.230 - 00:21:11.820

still from Alice Hamm who says I grew up in a very old world, old school immigrant family were telling their Children I love you. It's just not done as I recall it, the aching heart of

00:21:11.830 - 00:21:22.780

every conflict I had with my parents was family, the unsteady earth on which we found little common ground . At first, we fought about typical things or what I imagined as typical. The tone I took

00:21:22.790 - 00:21:32.340

the tidiness of my room. Over time, these arguments became frighted with everything we could not say. The fights about the dress I would not wear were also about the gender comportment. We could not name

00:21:32.690 - 00:21:41.880

the relentless enfor enforcement of girlish norms was also about the world that would punish me for gender eligibility. My outrage was about my body being taken from me the way I forgot how to stand, how to

00:21:41.890 - 00:21:51.890

hold my limbs. When vested for a role I could not play. We were fighting about how my parents had dreamt for me a life easier than theirs and about the dreams I could feel but not yet

00:21:51.900 - 00:22:03.320

name without words for our longings or fears. My parents and I lashed out in the coarse vocabularies we had. I don't know if there's a way to write these scenes without the specters of migrant and queer

00:22:03.330 - 00:22:14.120

cliches, intergenerational conflict, cultural dissonance, the clumsiness of words that could not fill the shape of our wounds. If you're gonna see me in a pattern , try to see the whole of it. See

00:22:14.130 - 00:22:22.000

that only half of trans folks have all of their immediate family members in their lives, that only those who co that of those who come out to their families. Nearly half experience a form of rejection,

00:22:22.190 - 00:22:36.960

including refusal of their gender identity, attempted conversion therapy and or expulsion from their family home. See that 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBT Q. See the crushing disproportionality of homelessness and poverty among people of

00:22:36.970 - 00:22:48.220

color and disabled folks see their structured neglect and abuse in educational employment and health care settings. See this richest country in the world where my parents staked their dreams, abandoning those who do not play by its

00:22:48.230 - 00:23:00.530

rules. No one in Taiwan was like that. My mom said years after I came out to her , after we started talking around queerness though not about it. I assume she was mistaken. Queers are

00:23:00.540 - 00:23:11.240

everywhere. I wanted to tell her that neither she nor my father had friends or family who felt safe enough to come out to them. Another version of this story though is that I was the first person

00:23:11.250 - 00:23:25.390

in their lives with enough security and comfort to try on and discard sexual and gender identities my parents were born into and raised entirely in a country governed by martial law under this regime which taught Confucian family values

00:23:25.400 - 00:23:38.740

as the foundation of moral education, homosexuals and gender transgressors could be and were arrested for violating the violating the natural order or good Mors. Public discourse made very little mention of homosexuality and many Taiwanese physicians compressing

00:23:38.750 - 00:23:52.370

ableism and homophobia viewed same sex attraction as mental illness produced by trouble. A adolescents. This was the definition my mother gave me when I was a child . The only explanation I had for the first stirrings

00:23:52.380 - 00:24:04.420

of a desire I could not name. I should emphasize that too in the US, even decades and oceans removed from my parents' upbringing. I also did not know any openly LGBT Q people until age 16

00:24:06.350 - 00:24:14.950

. A friend asked me over the phone before confessing that he too was gay. As far as we knew we were the only, we were the first queer people one another had met in person. We

00:24:14.960 - 00:24:23.140

were both only Children of Asian migrants trying to reconcile what we knew about ourselves with the security our parents had wanted for us. We spent night, we spent a night whispering our t truth over the phone

00:24:23.150 - 00:24:36.710

trying on new w trying on new words like new wardrobes, practicing names for who we were and could become before that night. The only story of a real life queer person I had known was that of

00:24:36.720 - 00:24:48.050

Matthew Shepherd news anchors recounted his slow merciless death as the camera panned over the fence rails where he had spent his last conscious hours. The dizzy dry that turned inside me was perhaps one of the first confirmations

00:24:48.060 - 00:25:00.530

of what I was. This wasn't just a story about a distant tragedy but a referendum on what I was something punishable by unthinkable violence. I wonder whether stories like this were also my mother's first introduction to

00:25:00.540 - 00:25:14.950

queer news. I wonder what I would do to shield my child from that possibility. How do I explain anti assimilation to someone who gave up her homeland for the promise of my belonging? We aren't absolved

00:25:14.960 - 00:25:27.260

of our choices. But can we view our choices in context? Can we acknowledge that the choices too are bound by constellations of precarity and privilege? So I'm skipping a big section where uh I go to

00:25:27.270 - 00:25:41.290

grad school. I also follow Alice Han's narrative uh and her church trajectory where I find this bridge called My Back, which is a anthology of women of color feminism. It's also Alice's Inro into Asian American

00:25:41.300 - 00:25:51.430

studies and mine as well. Um The book did the same thing for me where it's one of the few texts still tokenized in academic spaces. Uh But it gave me a window into alternative forms of scholarship

00:25:51.440 - 00:26:03.590

, alternative forms of knowledge and what that could mean and what it could do. So the quote from Shri Mara is I had disowned my the language I knew best ignored the words and rhythms that were closest

00:26:03.600 - 00:26:17.550

to me. There's a version of my story that is about how my traditionalist parents needed to shed their old world values, to love their queer child. This story presumes Western progressivism will liberate backward Eastern countries

00:26:18.150 - 00:26:30.970

. It is a story I believed as I packed 18 years of unreflective anger into my college suitcase, fleeing 1800 miles across appropriately scorched earth because white people were my guide into queerness. I mistook gender diversity

00:26:30.980 - 00:26:42.060

as a Western invention. I wonder if my parents did as well before graduate school, my first encounters with queer world had been through whites stream media, lesbian identity was defined by Ellen degeneres and the cast

00:26:42.070 - 00:26:53.190

of the L word. Even when I discovered queerness as a field of study, it was an intellectual terrain mapped by Judith Butler and Michelle Foucault. I learned definitions of feminism and queerness that would never accommodate

00:26:53.200 - 00:27:04.860

my experiences of gender or sexuality. And when I could not fit their words to the contours of my story, I assumed it was my fault. This is Gloria Anzaldua who writes, find the voice that

00:27:04.870 - 00:27:15.300

lies buried under you, dig it up, do not fake it. Try to sell it for a hand clap or your name in print. Let me try this story again. Let me place it in

00:27:15.310 - 00:27:26.870

constellation. My mother's parents grew up in the Taiwanese underclass governed by Japanese Empire. My mom's father, the youngest son of a poor family missed out on early education when he was drafted to work in a

00:27:26.880 - 00:27:37.140

child labor camp in Japan. Well, my my mother was born into better economic fortune. She was also denied an education. Uh while my mother's mother was born into better economic fortune, she was also

00:27:37.150 - 00:27:48.390

denied an education by her traditional family who believed women should tend to the home. This my mother has often said was one of my grandmother's great regrets in Mandarin. They are considered Benin, which means this

00:27:48.400 - 00:28:00.670

province, people uh whose family lineage is rooted in Taiwan. For as long as anyone can recall this term masks, complex histories of enmity, alliances, betrayal, and miscegenation that has shaped centuries of Han

00:28:00.680 - 00:28:15.930

Chinese movement onto Austronesian land. Over the centuries, Hans settlers included merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, farmers , laborers and still others. Solidarity and identifications were at times drawn along ethnic lines but also along familial

00:28:15.940 - 00:28:30.800

or interpersonal intimacies, class solidarity or places of origin . Each new political regime reshuffled the relationships among Holo , Haka and Austronesians, which also had many subgroups with high rates of intermarriage and colonial taxonomies that did

00:28:30.810 - 00:28:41.880

not account from its households. Families might have identified as Han or as Aborigine depending on which label was available to them. And whether it carried more freedoms at the time to expedite indigenous assimilation and erasure.

00:28:41.890 - 00:28:56.290

Japanese and K M T policies also eliminated the classification of aboriginal altogether. So my family's particular place in these events, along with much of Taiwanese history is difficult to discern with formal accounts, actively rewritten by

00:28:56.300 - 00:29:08.290

a succession of colonial regimes. Taiwan's diplomatic isolation amid the neo colonial tactics of us, China power relations too has left it ignored by many English language historians and cultural critics, which is the only language I

00:29:08.300 - 00:29:19.980

am equipped to study these histories in in contrast to my mother's side, my father's pathway to Taiwan is much easier to pin down. My dad is the youngest son of an army officer for the K M

00:29:19.990 - 00:29:33.340

T. Uh He and his brothers were their families , first generation born in Taiwan after the Nationalist Party retreated to the island and seized political power, simultaneously , refugees, exiles and colonizers in Taiwan. These

00:29:33.350 - 00:29:44.600

people are called Weiss or outside province. People to distinguish those who arrived with the K M T after 1949 and with the uneven privileges they were afforded under martial law. What my mom said of it was

00:29:44.610 - 00:29:56.360

just our families did not support us being together. I filled in the blanks by listening for deeper histories by mapping the chronology of our bloodlines onto narratives. I read in translation after my parents met though several

00:29:56.370 - 00:30:07.050

of my mom's sisters also married across political lines and most of my father's family have now withdrawn their support of the party. Despite its overwhelming influence on their childhoods, my parents and aunts and uncles joined Taiwan's

00:30:07.060 - 00:30:21.130

long and convoluted history, a venture mixing of seemingly irreconcilable people who grew up on the same land and saw their futures aligned the simultaneous mundanity and rapidity of this shift. O me, a few generations of

00:30:21.140 - 00:30:33.340

Children grew up alongside one another, learning one another's languages and falling in and out of love with one another. They established affective ties that would necessitate new social and political configurations. So uh the first K

00:30:33.350 - 00:30:45.800

M T president uh Lee Teng Hui, uh the first K T president born in Taiwan, he himself grew up under Japanese colonialism and led efforts to eliminate the laws that his own party used to suspend democratic

00:30:45.810 - 00:30:56.130

functions. His campaigns enabled the first democratic election on the island after he was re elected to become the first president chosen by popular vote. His successor was then the first president of the Democrat Democratic Progressive Party

00:30:56.190 - 00:31:08.120

, effectively ending the CMT s 55 years of continuous control and ushering in Taiwan's first peaceful, peaceful transition of power. So it was really striking to me that the first president born on the island and therefore

00:31:08.130 - 00:31:19.870

to grow up under these conditions grew up alongside the people that were being ruled under martial law was also the first one to change the regime into the first democratic one in Taiwan. So these events are shot

00:31:19.880 - 00:31:34.380

through with bitter contestations with lingering controversies and partisan divisions . But I can't also help but see the force of intimacy in the island's rapid transformation. If love is a plot that we give to desire Taiwan's recent

00:31:34.390 - 00:31:48.190

political transformations are stories made by new attachments and the worlds they need to flourish no matter how I how much I research whatever I write about Taiwanese history and politics will be from a remove. I have to

00:31:48.200 - 00:31:57.450

read the reports in translation or very slowly with my clumsy second grade literacy. I have to compare news accounts, critical analyses and social media posts with the stories. My family gives me undoubtedly shaded by their

00:31:57.460 - 00:32:09.980

own political affiliations and personal histories. My father's father fought and waged war for the regime that conquered my mother's homeland, which was already conquered, already colonized and already didn't belong to her or our people.

00:32:09.990 - 00:32:19.610

Though, her ancestors had been on the island for too long and with too much external violence in a research to know where else they belong. My bloodlines have moved too far, too quickly for me to

00:32:19.620 - 00:32:30.450

tell you where I am really from. I do not have an argument or a conclusion to draw from this. I am telling these stories to map some other means of belonging to forge a place in the

00:32:30.460 - 00:32:45.820

world that is not just a passive recipient of violent histories. I am trying to find connection, if not healing and harm that can't be undone. So I'm jumping ahead a bit to the conclusion. Uh

00:32:45.830 - 00:32:55.230

So we have some time for Q and A. Hopefully, I wrote this book, I was finishing it up in 2020. Uh And I'd just written this book about Asian American experience about anti Asian sentiment

00:32:55.240 - 00:33:07.490

about contagion and illness. Uh And then 2020 happened and I did not have time to write an entirely different book. So, so mostly the conclusion is where I'm, I'm reflecting on the sort of new

00:33:07.500 - 00:33:23.210

developments and, and thinking through what maybe the preceding chapters might say about these, about this world. We currently still live in a MI COVID-19. As many have pointed out COVID-19 only exacerbated precarity already pervasive

00:33:23.220 - 00:33:38.180

throughout us life pain is an accelerant. The virus moves through existing currents of power, taking advantage of those rendered vulnerable by structures of labor and care. Latinx workers overrepresented in agricultural and service industries experience a

00:33:38.190 - 00:33:53.590

disproportionate rate of infection. Black Americans long neglected and often actively harmed by medical professions were subjected to the highest rates of COVID-19 fatalities. Native American reservations whose funding and protective equipment were withheld or delayed by us

00:33:53.600 - 00:34:10.230

. Bur bureaucratic measures had insufficient resources to stem viral outbreaks. Conditions suspected to exacerbate COVID-19 system symptoms, for example, diabetes and cardiovascular disease are all more prevalent among Black indigenous and Latinx populations because of structure

00:34:10.240 - 00:34:24.830

disenfranchisement. Meanwhile, an uneasy public directed its fear toward those deemed perpetual threats to the nation. And rates of anti Asian violence continue to soar. All this devastation follows a familiar pattern in US history.

00:34:25.570 - 00:34:42.630

The harms attributed to COVID-19 are not new but an escalation of the nation's pre-existing conditions. The US in particular has found the limits of its commonplaces. The ideology behind the US s stratospheric rise in global capitalism

00:34:42.640 - 00:34:55.520

also established an ethos of glorified individualism and social fragmentation that made it especially vulnerable to a virus indifferent to national and social boundaries. As COVID-19 ruptured the presumptive truth of our mythological borders. It also demonstrates that

00:34:55.530 - 00:35:08.250

these particular orientations to nation, home and family are actually inhospitable to any form of life. These definitions were driven by logics of consumption, bleeding earth, sea and sky of resources so that experts have long

00:35:08.260 - 00:35:24.080

been warning of zoonotic outbreaks. The same extractive greed renders humans similarly expendable. Prompting the eugenesis logics undergirding us federal responses to COVID-19. This is a continuation of a story that begins with indigenous dispossession and continues

00:35:24.090 - 00:35:37.450

with the importation of enslaved Africans and Asian indentured laborers . This is a story that readers throughout this book that have traced through the denial of Hawaiian sovereignty, the betrayal of Marshall Islanders, the instantiation of white

00:35:37.460 - 00:35:53.170

gender performances among communities of color and myriad other narratives and structures that render trans disabled queer and other deviant lives. As disposable history has shown that the US nation state actually depends on these abuses at times adapted

00:35:53.180 - 00:36:07.850

under new guises and names but inevitable in a political economy that prioritizes profit over any form of life. While the pandemic is frequently assessed as a failure of the US health care system or sometimes more expansively as

00:36:07.860 - 00:36:20.490

a health based phenomenon that exploited racial gender and class based divisions. I also see this period as a rupture in the US s increasingly narrow definitions of home , I mean home in all its iterations home as

00:36:20.500 - 00:36:30.790

in the fiction of a bounded or justifiable homeland home as in J as in the fantasy of a nuclear uh uh of a self-sustaining nuclear family home as in from the Oxford English dictionary, a place where a

00:36:30.800 - 00:36:43.700

person or animal dwells as in property, as in the plots we carve from the earth. The virus's rapid spread revealed the porosity of so many presumed borders , social truths that do not hold when they fail

00:36:43.710 - 00:36:55.740

to account for the material lived realities. If Homing enables us to link personal injuries to their contextual causes , then perhaps it might also trace the anguish of a wounded planet to our individual and collective misdeeds.

00:36:57.570 - 00:37:04.230

Perhaps it might also build for my collective des desires a more stable foundation for living and I'll stop there