1 Part 2, Chapter 3: This carving of young Cynthia Talcott was perhaps created with the help of a death mask, a sculpting technique that used casts of the deceased’s corpse and was common in the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. I learned about death masks when reading about Gustave Flaubert, whose story “Un coeur simple” (A simple heart) features a woman who so loved her parrot that she had it preserved and died clutching its taxidermic form. Also of note: Flaubert famously had a death mask made of his sister after she passed.
2 Part 2, Chapter 4: David Eng, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Shinhee Han, a psychotherapist in New York City, wrote the book Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation. They argue that melancholia can facilitate resilience and hope. In one of their earlier papers, they write, “It is the melancholic who helps us come face-to-face with this social truth. It is the melancholic who teaches us that ‘in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill’ (Freud, 1914, p. 85).”
3 Part 2, Chapter 19: My father has similar views decades later, when the demonstrations in Hong Kong that demanded inquiry into the police, as well as full democracy and independence from China, were met with violence and tightening of laws from the Communist government.
4 Part 2, Chapter 19: My father did not know then—might refuse to acknowledge—that Wisconsin, the very state where he’d chosen his college, would later have one of the highest rates of incarceration of Black men in the country. Or that in Detroit in 1982, a draftsman named Vincent Chin would be brutally beaten to death by two white men on the evening of his bachelor party. Witnesses testified that Chin’s killers, who had worked in Detroit’s auto industry, had said that it was “because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.” Though Chin was Chinese American and had been mistaken for being Japanese, the outcome of that racism was the same—Chin’s death. His killers would not serve any prison time. This case would become one of the most notable hate crimes in Asian American—American—history and is often cited in textbooks, just one of many examples of the insidious, xenophobic violence woven into the fabric of this country.
5 Part 2, Chapter 22: These days, I can’t think about my father’s restaurant and the one I worked in high school without recalling a conversation I’d once had with a law professor named Gabriel “Jack” Chin. I’d interviewed him because he had studied the ways in which lawmakers and union members had during Chinese exclusion, as he put it, waged a “war” on Chinese restaurants. There was a violence within his vocabulary that pointed to the direness of America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, how so many people had rallied to create a methodical and systemic attack on Chinese immigrants. These restaurants were considered by many white Americans in that era to be “dens of vice”—where white women were susceptible to moral corruption via booze, opium, and sex. The restaurants had become stand-ins for how society regarded the people who operated them.
6 Part 2, Chapter 23: Asians in the U.S.—and in particular those from East Asian countries—only ascended the so-called societal ladder when it became politically convenient or discrimination against them lessened, not because of some innate cultural work ethic or strong family values, as some conservative idealogues argue when trying to generalize Asians in the U.S. One example: The Magnuson Act of 1943, which allowed 105 Chinese immigrants into the U.S. each year, was signed into law during the backdrop of World War II, when politicians in the U.S. worried that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 would damage an allyship with China against imperial Japan.
7 Part 4, Chapter 4: Mitzi Espinosa Luis’s story appears in Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History, an informative bank of research from Kathleen López, an assistant professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Mitzi’s grandfather, Francisco Luis—who had previously been known as Lui Fan—emigrated from China and lived in Cuba. He had two families—one in Havana, and one in Guangdong Province—and his older children in China referred to his daughters in Cuba as sanmei and simei, or third and fourth sisters. Mitzi, not long ago, traveled to China to visit the village where her grandfather had grown up, and was able to meet her cousins. I read about this transnational reunion with a longing.
8 Part 4, Chapter 4: Though the Cuban Revolution, writes Kathleen López in Chinese Cubans, “held the promise of better treatment for ethnic minorities…state revolutionary ideology and the loss of small businesses made it difficult, if not impossible, for Chinese and their descendants to actively engage in ethnic practices. On the other hand, unlike the situation in the United States, Chinese were not excluded from cultural citizenship in Cuba. The Chinese who remained on the island are simply never asked by fellow Cubans, ‘Where are you from?’”