At first, they will be happy to see you. But it’s the kind of happiness that stains their eyes with greed, the kind you recognize in stores as they linger over a lacquer cabinet or a bronze bowl.

Over tea, a woman will ask you how many retreats you’ve been on. When you say none, she will start recommending some. Everyone nearby will chime in with their favorites, as if they were comparing hotels. You realize, based on their details of dry saunas and forested walking paths and afternoon yoga, that they are more expensive than hotels.

If your name is Japanese, they will exclaim ‘hai!’ and add ‘san.’ They’ll give a little wink and tell you that the Japanese have real manners, a real civilization, unlike the others. They will bow extra deeply to you.

Over tea, a man will tell you, though you didn’t ask, how often he meditates, and for how long. He will ask how long you meditate and smile when it’s not as much. “Don’t worry, you’ll get there,” he’ll say, though you weren’t worried.

If you tell him how you grew up going to Buddhist summer camp, that two of your closest friends went there and you can still sing the songs you learned, that it was a place of belonging and freedom you needed outside the home, he might blink and say, “So, you grew up culturally Buddhist.”

Then the happiness in his eyes will glaze to fear, as if your presence could only mean you were there to take something from him, something he took from you.

If your name is Chinese, they will ask you what it means. “That’s so beautiful,” they will say, then forget your name.

Over tea, they will swap stories about going to temples in Asia: how the men and women sit separately. How they spotted a monk holding a cell phone. How the temple-goers were more interested in the lunch than the dharma talk. The point of these stories, you gather, is that Buddhism there is decaying, and only they, the people sipping tea, can save it.

If you say it’s more complicated and, for example, your grandmother’s temple sheltered orphans during the War, they will bluster, “Oh yes, of course,” like you had missed their point.

Another man will ask you write a few Buddhist concepts on a white board before his dharma talk, words from your language: 心, perhaps, or दुःख. He will approach you as if this were an honor—for you. You cannot give the talk; you are not ready. But this man has been studying Buddhism for over ten years, and has a certificate, even a special robe.

He’s so convinced this is an honor that you start to believe it, too—that he knows more than you ever could, because unlike you, he can see your culture from the outside, what’s worth keeping and what has to be discarded, what’s real and what’s cultural.

Plus, he’s so wise, the others tell you. You feel embarrassed on his behalf, and don’t ask how someone so wise could lack this basic literacy: heart, suffering.

Then again, if the Buddha himself walked in the door, he wouldn’t be qualified to teach, either. He doesn’t have the certificate and his English isn’t good enough.

When you tell someone how your parents lit incense before photos of your ancestors, how they laid out oranges and rice and tea for those ancestors to eat in a realm where, unlike this one, they won’t go hungry, she will say, “I didn’t realize Buddhism could be so superstitious.”

If your name comes from Sanskrit, they will tell you what it means, as if you didn’t know. They will tell you about their two weeks at an ashram. They may even show you their tattoo of your name, as if you were bonded before you met, as if they already owned a piece of you.

They will hang a photo of the temple’s Founder, they will bow to it and offer incense, they will pore over his books and essays. Some days you are the only person in the entire place who looks like the Founder in that photo, the only person who looks like the Buddha. But no one pores over your words; in fact, few people listen to you at all, because unlike the Founder you are not a master, not authentic. You are not dead.

They will ask you why that other student is so angry, then tell you to assure that student they belong here. If you do this, they will promote you, maybe even give you a certificate one day, because unlike that other student, you create harmony.

When you bring any of these experiences to a teacher, with her robe and certificate, she might say this is a practice opportunity, for you—a chance for you to grow your compassion, your patience. Didn’t the Buddha, after all, talk about letting go of expectations?

Or she might apologize, and say she is So, so, sorry, and her sorriness will fill the room until you are no longer being helped, but the one helping her not feel so sorry, so ashamed.

If you show anger about this, anger about anything, it will only prove your lack of enlightenment. Real Buddhists, they tell you, don’t get angry. Real Buddhists don’t feel at all.

Real Buddhists, they know, go on seven-day retreats. Real Buddhists have dropped all that cultural baggage. Real Buddhists have a certificate. Real Buddhists look like them, not like you.

A couple years ago, I wrote a short story that serves as a corollary to the essay above: “The Racial Melancholic’s Guide to Zen.” That character makes peace with his community despite these issues. I feel that both are needed: the conflict that arises from truth, and acceptance of a community’s limits.

More Writing and Updates

• I covered the Day of Remembering Our Interdependence, a lovely and difficult one-day pilgrimage that took place in New York on July 12, for Tricycle Magazine. Writing about it helped me articulate the difference between protest and peace walk, and how both are needed.

• I owe much of how I understand NYC Chinatown to CAAAV, which organizes working class Asian immigrants and youth to resist gentrification. If you’re in the area, please consider attending or donating to their 40th Gala on October 15.

• The incredible musical The Potluck, which I wrote about in my last post, was extended until August 9 and you can still get tickets.

• I returned from a week with the wonderful community of the 4th annual Roots and Refuge: An Asian American Buddhist Writing Retreat. I’m still putting into words how much creative energy and joy I received, but for now, here’s a happy photo (I am, as usual, standing in the back):

  

Flyer for the anti-Klan Rally in Greensboro, NC that ended in a massacre

My understanding of America has always been shaped by an event that changed my family’s life: on November 3, 1979, the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis murdered five of my parents’ friends.

They killed these five young organizers for bringing workers together across racial lines, for daring to challenge the KKK directly in a rally. The murders were caught on video in broad daylight, but the killers were all acquitted in two criminal trials. The Greensboro Police had known the Klan’s intentions, and left the scene just before they began shooting.

The problem was that some of those organizers were communists. For many in North Carolina, communists were as bad as Klansmen. My parents, uncle, and aunt spent the next decade seeking justice for the families of the Five, trying to change the narrative of what happened.

Last week, just before America’s 250^th birthday, I went with my family to see a musical about this story: The Potluck by César James Alvarez. Like me, Alvarez is of the second generation, born to friends of the Greensboro Five. César’s names come from two killed that day: César Cauce and James Waller.

Reader, believe me when I say this musical about a terrible murder had me laughing nonstop for the first ten minutes. The musical opens with the character “César” wearing hot pink shoes and sighing over a MacBook as they grapple with the weight of honoring these five martyrs.

Instead of writing, they procrastinate by singing about all the Nazis in musicals, and calling their parents, who are more interested in talking about weekend plans than Greensboro. The humor offers an embrace: this show will be intense, but just like in life, there will be joy, too.

César finds, in the course of the musical, that the best way—the only way—to honor the Five is to reconcile their own truths: coming into their queerness, facing their fear of failure, finding a way to make art under capitalism. It is César’s expansive imagination, their exploration of faith, that opens a way. César builds an altar to the five, a portal that invites the five to come forth and speak for themselves.

The Potluck at intermission at the Soho Rep. and INTAR

For many years after I learned about the Greensboro Massacre, I believed that America was a corrupt nation that needed a revolution. Any country that allowed such violence was broken, and any effort that didn’t overturn it was a waste of time.

Ironically, this simple narrative prevented me from facing that past. I couldn’t move forward if all I felt was rage, if all I wanted was retribution.

Like César, I first had to honor my own complicated feelings about the Massacre. And to do this, I needed two things that our parents’ generation had little of: art and faith—in my case, writing and Buddhism.

Writing allowed me to place the mess of personal and social history into a narrative. I saw how revolutionary theory offered my parents’ generation the sense that they could remake the world. I could reach through the door of literature and feel the thrill of those radical days. But I also saw how my own political anger was simply repeating the past, turning tragedy into politics, and skipping over grief.

For that, I needed Buddhism. Buddhism showed me that grief is not just a stage, or something that happens automatically with time—it is a constant practice, a way of integrating loss. Sitting meditation is, among other things, a ritual of grief: I remain still and let go of everything else I could be doing. Many of our chants invite in our ancestors, allowing us to hold them close. And, just like in The Potluck, we are always creating altars, marking our immaterial memories and connections with physical objects.

With this, I could hold a more complex truth of the Massacre.

I could hold the fact that the KKK and Nazis murdered five of my parents’ friends with little consequence, while knowing that a beautiful community of organizers, artists, and friends came out of this tragedy.

I could remain angry at America’s hypocrisy and violence while appreciating the freedom and possibility I’ve received from it.

I could accept that five lives were cut short in 1979 and nothing would bring them back, and that the meaning of those five lives was still being determined, a lesson conceived by the living.

A hard-won historic marker of the Greensboro Massacre

Without saying too much, a key scene in The Potluck involves a meal with the Five. It is one of several moments where I cried.

As I watched that meal on stage, I thought of how Buddhists feed the ‘hungry ghosts,’ the spirits whose lives are unresolved, who are forever searching for fulfillment. The hungry ghosts might be our ancestors, they might be the forgotten of our land and society, or they might be a metaphor for the part inside each of us that goes lacking.

The meaning of the Greensboro Massacre is far from settled. The meaning of America is far from settled. We make meaning when we become completely ourselves, when we use every reserve of art and joy to welcome our ghosts.

Updates and Recs

• The Potluck runs until July 26 and it’s almost sold out—get tickets here.

• I’m hosting a new, limited-series podcast with Axis Mundi Media on Buddhism, Asian America, and organizing—more details soon. Gratitude to the Luce Foundation for supporting it.

• I just returned from the annual Garrison BIPOC Retreat, and it was life-changing. It was also the first retreat I did with my mom. One highlight: daily ‘deep relaxation’ in the chapel proving that rest is, indeed, sacred.

• I plan to join parts of the Day of Remembering Our Interdependence in NYC on July 12, inspired by the recent cross-country Walk for Peace.

• I finally made it to Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 at Dia Beacon. I’ve been thinking about Hsieh’s work for years, and I always find new revelations about ART TIME and LIFE TIME. I was quoted in a long profile of Hsieh that previewed the exhibition.

Documentation of a performance in which Hsieh punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, for an entire year

My first novel came out over three years ago. It arrived at a time when a restless left was pushing our institutions to live up to their democratic ideals. Three years later, we are pushing to have democratic institutions at all.

Much of this struggle hinges on truth: not only the facts we agree on, but the very question of whether there is any deeper truth that binds us as a society, as humans.

My book launch was with Cathy Park Hong, who suggested the term “documentary fiction” for my novel, building off the tradition of docupoetics. I’d based my novel on oral histories and archives, and the historical events the novel references, along with many of its figures, are real. The idea of “documentary fiction” has been a gift, a koan, that I’ve been unpacking ever since.

But it’s still a novel. Fiction and nonfiction run on different fuels. Nonfiction burns through fact, the energy of knowing what happened. Fiction runs on something more mysterious: the truth of character, the shaping of words so that a person believes that a character is real, has lived. It’s why people talk about Sula Peace, or Anna Karenina, as if someone they’ve known.

Yet in writing my book, I realized I couldn’t separate my characters from certain historical facts. Those historical facts were unknown to most people, unknown to me before I started writing. And without those facts, I couldn’t understand the truth of those characters. So I needed to mix in the first fuel to make my engine run. I wanted to know if blending fact into fiction might offer new ways of knowing history, knowing truth.

I’m teaching an online, afternoon workshop in a few weeks on this very subject (more info below), where we’ll study how the writers I admire most, like Karen Tei Yamashita and John Keene, attempt this mixture.

II.

Another way I’ve been engaging history is by studying nonviolence.

I’d always known about nonviolent leaders and histories, yet for most of my life I didn’t understand why someone would commit to nonviolence—would endure hatred and scorn and physical blows. It seemed like some impossibly noble path, only for a special few.

Mohandas Gandhi saw part of the problem in the term “passive resistance,” which implies being resigned or complacent when faced with violence. His cousin Maganlal came up with a stronger term: satyagraha, literally “truth force.”

Gandhi offered definitions of satyagraha throughout his life, and they often strike me as elliptical. Here’s one example:

The word Satya (Truth) is derived from Sat, which means ‘being.’ Nothing is or exists in reality except Truth. That is why Sat or Truth is perhaps the most important name of God…Devotion to this Truth is the sole justification for our existence. All our activities should be centered in Truth. Truth should be the very breath of our life.

Each sentence offers a different definition: Truth is being, God, reality, and breath. If these sentences feel circular, I think it’s because Gandhi circles something that’s hard to articulate: nonviolence as a practice of being.

Gandhi’s words wouldn’t have meant anything to me for most of my life. Then I spent many, many hours as a Buddhist learning to do just this: being. I spent years in meditation and chanting, cooking and cleaning at temples, most of it designed to show me how much I do besides being, yet how freeing it is to simply be.

Conversely, most of the harm I do comes out feeling that my life, my being, isn’t enough. My clothes aren’t good enough, so I buy new ones knowing they’re made in sweatshops. I feel insecure about my work, so I disparage someone else’s. As I learned to quiet my mind, I saw how quickly dissatisfaction turns to malice.

I’ve come to believe in the force of truth: how seeing a truth compels us to act accordingly. For most of my life, I thought of nonviolence as bold, direct actions. I now believe this is only one aspect of nonviolence, a flowering that evidences a deep network of roots and nutrients. Those roots require careful tending, and absorbing those nutrients requires contemplation.

The English word “truth” comes from the Proto-Indo-European for “tree” or “solid.” I imagine some ancestor standing under a tree and swearing a truth by it, a promise as firm as its trunk.

What trees are we standing by today, and what flowerings will they bring tomorrow?

Announcements

• Participants in this one-day multi-genre craft class will explore the meeting places between personal and social history, and will use their own historical objects to generate new work. We will explore forms of research like oral history, archiving, and mapping through generative exercises. Scholarships available until February 28, more information and registration here.

• Speaking of my first novel, Which Side Are You On—it wouldn’t exist without the careful reading and editing of my dear friend Victory Matsui. They are now a freelance editor and open helping clients “clarify and stay true to their vision & voice, while strengthening structure, character, pacing, and prose to make the narrative as compelling as possible.” I can attest to that. Read more about their services here.

• I’m returning to Brown University for a student-led conference, Yearning to Breathe Free, March 13-14. It’s a very poignant invitation: my father was slated to speak before he fell ill, so I’ll be speaking about his work with Tam Tran and Cynthia Felix, dynamic leaders in the immigrant youth movement. I also worked with Tam and Cynthia while at Brown, and I was there when they were struck and killed by a drunk driver. I miss them all, and their work continues in us. Follow the conference here.