Imagine if your whole life’s work was squeezed into the blurb of a high school history textbook, into a paragraph totaling maybe sixty words—your life and its complexities pruned for word count and impact. The people you loved, the things you hated, your passions—all of these things condensed for the sake of historical concision. And that oversimplification sucks, but take heart: at least you’re dead and can’t be pissed about it.
I’m talking about Malcolm X.
When I learned about Malcolm X in Mrs. Romberger’s AP US History class in eleventh grade, he was a bespectacled blur. I was being crushed under the avalanche of names, facts, dates: Adams, Madison, Quincy Adams, the Continental Congress, the Teapot Dome Scandal, the Bay of Pigs, 1791, 1812, 1945. Civil Rights marched by quickly, and Malcolm X was presented as a foil to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., but then we sped on. 1989 was also the year that the Berlin Wall fell, so Mrs. Romberger was especially keen to thaw the Cold War for us so that we could savor its delicious end.
When I read Malcolm X’s autobiography myself, I felt disappointed in my high school’s history book, let down by what I had been taught. We had not done him justice. He wasn’t the opposite of the Reverend King as he had been portrayed, and he was more than the one-dimensional pro-violence, radical Black leader whom I had read about. Our textbook had taken a convenient and incomplete snapshot of who he was at a particular moment in his life to shoehorn him into the yin-yang paradigm of Civil Rights leaders, reducing his life’s intricacy into a simple paragraph.
In fact, Malcolm X was complicated and evolving, and no one expressed that complexity better than he himself did. A year before his assassination, he wrote a letter home to his mosque detailing his epiphany about race relations, about his changing ideas of race and racism in America, about his movement toward white people as allies for civil rights. Malcolm X was changing, his name was changing—having rechristened himself El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—and his views on race were changing. “Even I was myself astounded. But there was precedent in my life for this letter. My whole life had been a chronology of changes,” he writes.
But me? My views? It was 1990. I was a senior in high school. I was at my apex academically and socially. There was no need for me to change my views, and frankly, I didn’t want to change. Everything made sense to me as it was—everything was in its place. I was poised to cross the finish line, sprinting to finish the race.
But what if the reality of life, what if experience and knowledge, went against what you thought? What if it went against what you wanted to believe? What if the race suddenly changed?
The new decade had begun, but what novelties did the nineties have for us? There was no death knell for the eighties (unlike the DISCO IS DEAD implosion of 1979). 1990 felt like 1989, its metamorphosis only the matter of a split second, the tick of 11:59 p.m. to the tock of 12:00 a.m., with the immortal Dick Clark rockin’ our New Year’s Eve with his smooth, embalmed polish.
The summer’s box office hits also suggested that 1990 didn’t know what else to do other than to keep moonwalking back to the 1980s: Back to the Future Part III, Die Hard 2, RoboCop 2, Young Guns II, Gremlins 2, and Another 48 Hrs. Hollywood’s coolest summer films were a reheated affair, microwaved entrées of recycled entertainment and regurgitated pabulum for the populous. In the face of this dreck, my friends and I dug our punk rock trenches even deeper and wider, erecting spikier bulwarks of biting cynicism and outré choices. Our punk umbrella had broadened to include the newly minted monikers of alternative music and independent films, whatever they were. I played Liam a cassette of the Pixies’ new album Doolittle, and he found it weird. Meanwhile, Liam was descending into the industrial sounds of Ministry, and a few of us dabbled with the gangsta rap of N.W.A. and Public Enemy. Our crew was still, at heart, a punk rock crew, but our dogmatic adherence to the punk playbook was trying to rewrite itself: rap, punk, Britpop, Detroit techno, hip-hop. I loved the Pixies exactly because they were sonically all over the place, just like how we were all over the place. Defined more by what we were not than what we were—by our fuck-no’s more than our credos—we pointed to the rednecks and jocks and preps, declaring that we were the opposite of them.
This opposition extended from music and movies to all matters of popular culture (going specifically against the notion of what popular meant). We didn’t want popular culture—we wanted rarefied culture, the scribblings in the margins that were more authentic and raw and rebellious. If pop culture was the lecture in class, we were busy reading and writing the graffiti on the desks.
Conor had gone off to boot camp, and within a few months he would be on the dusty front lines of the Gulf War. Several other friends had also enlisted in the armed forces either by indecision or indifference. It was a ticket out of town, and if the military would pay the fare, it was a price that some of our friends were willing to bear. I was struck by the irony that our punk rock friends (rule-breakers and intrinsic, immutable iconoclasts) were hurling themselves into the hopper of rigid, rule-oriented institutions. It gnawed at me. We had spent countless hours listening to the Exploited singing “Fuck the USA” and Minor Threat railing against fascistic conformity, and now—now some of us were signing up for the army.
I was surprised and a little disheartened by their about-face, but I also didn’t know what their futures could yield with high school transcripts that were dripping with the Cs and Ds of indifference, feckless documents that were hardly worth the time to print much less read. A few guys had dropped out of high school and rented squalid apartments, barbacking at the local taverns, landscaping, or dealing drugs. Conor, Scully, and Will all enlisted, emphasizing the opportunity to shoot guns and blow shit up, but their appetites for destruction seemed like a faint effort to distract from whom they were shooting (they didn’t know) and what they were blowing up (they didn’t care). Scully emphasized the irony of being in the military as if it were the ultimate prank. Can you believe the Air Force took a fuckup like me? Just wait till I get in there. As if one eighteen-year-old’s bad attitude would be a punk rock wrench in the well-oiled gears of a war machine.
If I admired anyone, it was Philip. Philip followed in his older brother’s footsteps, matriculating to NYU. It was a point of pride for our crew—another one of us had made it out of Carlisle—yet we didn’t acknowledge that more of us would have made it if we had given two shits about school or grades or extracurriculars. That was our tragedy. Philip had cared and had made an effort at school (as did I), but his investment and academic successes were never a point of conversation or commentary. Dragging on his perennial Marlboro, Philip passed off his success as a by-product of effortless, genetic genius, and we were happy to celebrate his NYU admission as long as it appeared breezy and natural. A few of my honor society friends went to the far reaches of academia, schools which I had never heard of: Haverford (which I initially confused with Harvard), Bryn Mawr, George Washington, Carnegie Mellon. My only college plan was to get out of Carlisle.
In the middle of his basic training in Georgia, Conor came home to Carlisle on a week’s leave. In addition to a Saturday barn party with two kegs of Yuengling, Nate and I suggested a drive to Philly on Sunday. Seven of us piled into Nate’s VW Squareback station wagon and drove the two hours to Philadelphia to walk around South Street, where the record stores and punk rock boutiques seemed to be lifted straight from London by my rusticated estimation. Leather pants. Studded belts. Posters and T-shirts. Import-only, color vinyl pressings of rare singles. We cast our petty dollars around, excited small-town punks hoping to hook a big catch in Philly’s flowing thoroughfares and waves of wares.
At home, I unpacked a few shopping bags from Skinz, Zipperhead, and Third Street Jazz and Rock. I didn’t have a lot of money on the trip, but I made a few purchases after labored agonizing and hurry-the-fuck-ups from everyone.
“What’d you get?” Lou was curious about what spoils would have warranted a two-hour drive to Philadelphia.
“A couple of T-shirts. A poster. A few records. Check it out.” I pulled out two black T-shirts that were bleached in the front so that the white part could be screen-printed. The bleach made the front image look as if it were exploding, with spots of white on the sleeves and neck. One shirt was screened with Albrecht Dürer’s illustration of Christ’s crucifixion. I bought this shirt to nettle my parents and anyone else I thought slavishly addicted to the opiate of the masses. My style compass, forged from irony, was oriented toward the slightly morbid and antiauthoritarian.
Lou shook his head at the T-shirt. “Whoa … Mom is going to freak out.”
“Yeah, maybe. But she can’t be that mad. I mean, it is Jesus.”
“Yeah, but it’s Jesus—on a T-shirt. That doesn’t seem right.”
I shrugged. My parents and I were locked in the churning cycles of offend and defend, provoke and react, ignore and annoy. The sacrilege of the Dürer T-shirt would irk them, but I also knew that they couldn’t complain about the actual image, because it was Jesus.
I held up the second black T-shirt, screened and bleached in the same style.
“Who’s that?”
“Malcolm X.”
“Who’s he?”
“Who’s Malcolm X?! Jesus Christ, man…” I pretended that Lou was supposed to know better when I myself had only learned about him the previous year. I gave Lou the quick, basic rundown of Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement that I had read about in my history textbook. It was a sixteen-year-old’s rehashing of what he remembered from the AP US History curriculum, and Mrs. Romberger would have been proud.
Lou looked more confused by the Malcolm X shirt than by the Jesus shirt. “Why’d you buy that?” Lou’s question was childlike and hard to answer, his innocent queries foiling my sharpened ideology.
“Because it’s cool. I mean: it’s Malcolm X. He was a total revolutionary.”
“I don’t get why you’d get a shirt of him … and besides: they’re just T-shirts.” Lou shrugged and left my bedroom, overly perplexed by my clothing choices and bored by our conversation about T-shirts of dead martyrs.
I was stung by the barb of his naïve insight. He was right. They were only T-shirts, but for me they made a statement, drew a sociopolitical line in the sand, and maybe they would provoke a reaction. If I saw a Bad Brains T-shirt, I acknowledged an ally. If I saw a Confederate flag T-shirt, I perceived an adversary. And if I saw a United Colors of Benetton shirt, I knew that person was a lemming. In the stores, on the streets, in the hallways, our T-shirts were our nations’ flags, chosen with care for the alliances they forged and the conventions they flouted. Jesus on a T-shirt? Malcolm X on a T-shirt? Maybe my T-shirts would offend someone. I was counting on it.
The rednecks had been offended by my being Vietnamese and by my hair and clothes. Now they could be offended by my T-shirt politics, too.
The shirts embodied my simplified take on politics and religion and everything else—T-shirt rhetoric for an image-obsessed age. You didn’t have to articulate who you were if you could explain it by whom you wore.
I wore my Malcolm X T-shirt to school that September, and sure enough, it elicited comments. My peers were more curious than outraged. Who’s that? Oh, I see. Malcom X, huh? I was waiting for a debate, ready to pounce, but no one took the bait.
Then in my AP European History class, Ms. Ganster saw the shirt and her mouth twisted into a slight pucker. I took surprising pleasure in her apparent disapproval, a pleasure that came from my general provocation rather than from a specific insult toward her. I liked Ms. Ganster.
“Ah, Malcolm X.”
I nodded.
“What did you think of his autobiography?”
“His what?”
“You know: The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley?” She seemed disapproving.
“Oh, uh … I didn’t know he wrote an autobiography.” I, lowly pawn, had been outmaneuvered by the History Queen. Check.
“Oh, it’s quite compelling. Quite compelling. You should read it. Or at least, you should read it since you’re flaunting the T-shirt.”
The insult was subtle, but she knew that pointing out my ignorance smarted me. Checkmate. It turned out that she wasn’t offended that I was wearing a Malcolm X T-shirt; she was offended that I hadn’t read the book, and I pushed down my embarrassment, the so-called literature guy who hadn’t read the book written by the guy on his T-shirt. Textbook poser.
That weekend at the Whistlestop Bookshop, I bought a used paperback copy of the autobiography—faded cover, stark in its red-black-and-white design, with a vivid photo of Malcolm X, finger jabbing the air, biting his lower lip. I was not going to let Ms. Ganster have the last word.
A few weeks later, I wore my Malcolm X shirt again and lingered after history class. “Hey, Ms. Ganster, I read the autobiography. Thanks for recommending it.”
“Oh, you did? Really?” She seemed surprised but impressed that I had done it. Trained by Mrs. Ferguson, I rarely let a recommended book go unread, and even if I hated it, I at least tried to read it (sorry, James Joyce).
“Yeah, I just finished it.”
“What did you think?”
“I’m still thinking about it. I mean: I think he goes a little too far in calling the white man the devil so much. That’s kind of intense. I think we all need to live together, right? I guess I’m more aligned with Martin Luther King Jr. than Malcolm X. But Malcolm X seemed to be evolving right up to his assassination, so I’m not sure.”
“That’s great that you read it—his assassination was a tragedy in a harrowing series of tragedies in the sixties. And you’re right that his autobiography depicts his evolution, his life. He was still growing and learning right up until he died. That in itself is an incredible lesson.” Ms. Ganster was sincere, and I was surprised, having assumed ignorantly that my middle-aged white history teacher wouldn’t be able to appreciate the radical stand of Malcolm X, but in fact, she viewed Malcolm X’s death as a tragedy. She straightened the chables back into their forward-facing rows for the next period. “Did the book resonate with you at all, Phuc?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did his life or his writing connect with you and your experience?”
I didn’t have a chance to answer as the bell rang for the start of the next period. I was late for calculus.
“I’ll write you a hall pass for being late.” She scribbled out a note for my tardiness. “Go on and get to class. We can talk more later.”
I sprinted down the hall clutching my pass, flashing it to the hall monitors like an East German checkpoint and bursting into calculus with my half-open backpack. I threw myself into the nearest open chable.
Mr. Cook was unfurling the intricate turns of functions and limits as I pulled out my textbook, but my brain was still in the AP European time zone, mulling over what Ms. Ganster had asked me. I didn’t know how to answer her question because I didn’t know what her question meant.
Did Malcolm X resonate with me?
In that fall of 1990, if pressed hard, I would have said no. I couldn’t comprehend it because of how I had compartmentalized my own experiences of bigotry. My parents had never talked to us about racism as a larger force at work, and we assigned prejudice, insults, and bullying specifically to anti-Vietnamese sentiment. In the long shadow of the war, I linked my personal travails to the war’s aftershocks and couldn’t see how our struggles were connected to a larger struggle for equality. We were not the descendants of slaves. Our people had not marched, sat-in, or been fire-hosed. It did not feel like our fight.
In high school, I understood racism as a thing that white racist people did and that Black Americans suffered, and our history books had the photos to prove it, in black and white. Racists were Klansmen and people who called Black people the n-word. Sit-ins. Bus boycotts. Rallies on the steps of Washington. Where did Vietnamese people figure into all of this? Nowhere, it seemed.
If I were honest, Malcolm’s message didn’t immediately resonate with me because his worldview about race and racism was flexible and responsive, and mine was static at best and cartoonish at worst. My understanding of racism hadn’t evolved because I hadn’t allowed it and didn’t want it to. I didn’t want the small, inscribed circle of racists to expand, because if it did, I was terrified it would include more people than just the Klan and skinheads.
It was the exclusive club in which no one wanted to have membership. If I put people who made racist jokes in that group, would all my friends go in that pile? Would I also be in that group? What would that mean to include myself in that group? It was a horrifying prospect to even consider that everyone I grew up with and my closest friends were racists if I broadened its definition, so I didn’t.
Malcolm X wrote to his mosque, “I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind.…” It was too much to consider and too hard to evolve my thinking about race as Malcolm had done. Malcolm’s “reality of life” was too harsh to behold in the light of the truth. For my own survival and sanity, I kept the racists under their hoods and in the dark.
Was I ready to evolve my thinking about race and racism or was I going to cling to the narrow boundaries of who was racist? Did it matter whether I was ready or not? My evolution would begin regardless.
I had quit the library job that summer, though I still volunteered there once a week as a page. I now worked at the Mobil gas station at the encouragement of Liam. One by one, during the spring of 1990, our crew of friends had applied for positions at the gas station, and by the end of summer, all the cashiers at the Mobil were our friends. It was the real-life cast of misfits tasked with running a gas station, and the upsides to the Mobil over the library were substantial: I got better pay ($4.25/hour!), worked with my friends when there were two of us on a shift, and when I had the closing shift at night, I perched on a rickety metal stool and did homework (which meant I didn’t have to do it after work). With a demanding class load and a lot of homework, getting paid to do homework until ten p.m. seemed criminally convenient. Our sympathetic manager, Scott, was working toward his associate’s degree at Harrisburg Area Community College, and he never complained about my reading on the job.
Saturday morning I sat in the fishbowl of the cash register office, flanked by a small steel rack of candy bars and a rotating display of merchandise: oil funnels, ice scrapers, air fresheners.
As I wended through my homework, the full-service customers had sharply dwindled. A few times an hour, a car came through full-service, setting off the pneumatic bell, alerting me to its presence and needs. Pavlov would have been proud. The bell jolted me up from the register, and I trotted out, metaphorical tail wagging with yessirs and noma’ams. Fill ’em up. Squeegee their windows. Check their fluids.
The mechanics clomped in and out of the office, making change, purchasing a Coke, avoiding the monotony of automotive maintenance. Dirty Dan (so nicknamed by us) ambled to the counter.
“Whatcher readin’, boy? I LAID?!?! What the hell is The I LAID?!” Dan bellowed. He always called me boy, and I disliked Dirty Dan from our first encounter. His breath was a repellant cocktail of burps and tobacco. I ignored his question, but he persisted.
I refused to raise my eyes from the page. “ILL-LEE-ADD. It’s actually pronounced Iliad. Like The Iliad.”
“Well, what the hell is The Iliad?” At least he said it correctly—that a boy.
“It’s about the Trojan War. Greeks versus Trojans. I don’t know.… I haven’t gotten that far into it.”
“TROJANS?! You mean like the RUBBERS?! Hawhawhaw … You know I’m jus’ fuckin’ with you, boy. Why the hell are you reading that book?”
“It’s for class. Homework.” I didn’t want to get into it with Dan since I was actually enjoying The Iliad, and his idiocy punctured my reading.
“I thought you people were supposed to be good at math!” He laughed and slapped the counter several times with a greasy palm.
“Math? I’m doing that, too. Here you go.” I lugged my AP calculus textbook out of my backpack. I had been procrastinating because calculus was killing me, but I felt the need to show him some identific-Asian. “This is my calculus textbook. See? Doing math. Big-time math.”
“Calculus? Huh.” He was suitably impressed. “Okay then … Enjoy yer book.… I LAID! Hahahahaha!” Hand-slaps on the counter again.
I finished up my shift and skated home, but I sat in my room unable to finish my homework because I was feeling too annoyed. And in the idle aggravation of not doing my work, I let loose and felt the full furnace of anger. I was actually furious.
Against a lifetime of small and large affronts, my humanity—my dignity—unhinged itself and swung open. I sat in my bedroom that night, fuming. Dan, a nincompoop by all measures, had looked at the color of my skin and the shape of my eyes and told me that I was somehow swerving out of my lane. Who the fuck was he to decide what lane I was supposed to be in? And what did it matter to him, anyway? My indignation rose up more as I felt like a punch line to some inside joke. That I was being laughed at, labeled, and pushed into a corner. I decided that I was going to get even with him.
I wasn’t going to fight Dirty Dan, because he was a grown man and I would have gotten fired (and probably beaten up myself). And as I had seen from Lou’s incident, punching racists was questionably effective. I was going to do what I could in the only context where I had any power: our high school newspaper. As the editor of the high school paper, I was given one editorial a month to write anything I wanted, and I decided that this was going to be where I’d serve my cold dish of revenge. I was going to write about the incident with Dan—I was going to humiliate him. I knew firsthand the power of words, and I was going to use that power to put him in his place (that is, if he ever read Carlisle High School’s monthly newspaper and happened across the editor’s column on the second page). Postponing my homework, I scratched out an eviscerating editorial in pencil on a yellow legal pad. My editorial unleashed a seething frustration: I was tired of the narrow path permitted to me because of how I looked, tired of the instant and lazy stereotypes that people applied to me. Did my friends suffer this bullshit?
On Monday at school, I handed it to Mr. Moyer, our school paper’s adviser. During our newspaper period, he read over my editorial and called me to his desk. I took the chable next to his desk and asked him bluntly, “What’d you think? I think it’s pretty direct. I don’t think we’ve ever had an editorial like this.” My anger over the incident was diminished slightly, but I was proud that I was taking a stand and calling it what it was: It wasn’t Klansmen or skinheads, but my interaction with Dan was racism, and I dared to say its name. “Pretty shocking, right, Mr. Moyer?”
“Absolutely.” Mr. Moyer shook his head. “Did this really happen?”
“Really happen? Uh, yeah, it really happened—happened over the weekend.”
Mr. Moyer continued shaking his head, and I felt comforted by his empathy as he spoke. “I’m sorry that it happened. I’m glad that you wrote about it. But do you think that publishing this is the right thing? I mean, we’re not the New York Times or even the Sentinel, and Carlisle is a small town. Someone might be related to or connected to Dan, and you don’t know who you’ll offend.” My airy sense of comfort darkened at the realization that Mr. Moyer was trying to talk me out of the editorial.
I countered. “But that’s the point.”
“To offend Dan? Why?”
“So he knows he can’t say that sort of thing.”
“You think that it will stop him from having stereotypes or from saying ignorant things? He’ll never read it. The editorial isn’t a soapbox for your grievances. You’re so smart, Phuc. Why don’t you write about something that everyone can relate to, like the SATs? It’s the college application season right now. Or this mess in Iraq? We might be going to war there. That involves the whole country. Those seem like things that everyone could relate to.”
This made me doubly furious and even angrier with Mr. Moyer than with Dirty Dan. I was trying to comprehend what I was hearing. Things that everyone could relate to? I heard nothing but Mr. Moyer trying to protect Dan and to redirect me, telling me that my anger didn’t have a place in a public forum. I was so angry that I almost wanted to seize my editorial and tear it up in Mr. Moyer’s face, but instead I checked my frustration and spoke as calmly as I could. “This is really important to me, Mr. Moyer. No one reads the editorials or takes them seriously because they’re always about nonissues. But racism…” My words broke off, and some of the other newspaper students hushed. I didn’t want Mr. Moyer to tell me that racism only affected me, the Vietnamese kid, in a room full of white kids.
My assistant editor, Jenna, piped up. “Well, I think an SAT editorial would be good. I mean, I don’t think the SATs are fair and—”
I whipped a stinging reply. “No one asked you, Jenna!”
“Phuc, she’s just giving you some suggestions.” Mr. Moyer lifted his chin as a sign to Jenna that we weren’t done talking.
The whole room was silent, my verbal snap having stopped the small group work. I leaned closer to Mr. Moyer, knowing that I needed to salvage my position so that he wouldn’t reject my editorial outright. I took a breath and collected myself. Pride swallowed. “I know this only affects me, but it’s also really important to me. Maybe no one can relate to it, maybe you’re right about that, but it’s also an editorial. What editorials did you tell Laura she couldn’t write?” Laura was the editor the previous year. “It’s an editorial, Mr. Moyer—I know the difference between an article and an editorial. And I know this seems like a risk, but it’s a risk I want to take, and I’m willing to write it and take full responsibility for it.” I did the best I could in the moment to appeal to the logic and boldness of the situation, to downplay my rancor even as I hated feeling like I was groveling to be heard because I was, in fact, groveling to be heard.
Mr. Moyer looked at my yellow legal pad, his eyes scanning my editorial. “Well, it’s too long, so you’ll need to cut fifty words for the column. And you can’t call Dan a racist pig. Leave it at racist. Lose the pig.”
“So I can run it?”
He nodded. “Yes. Yes, you can.”
“Thanks, Mr. Moyer. Thanks so much.” I would have shaken his hand, but I was nursing a broken trust. It was painful for me to endure bigoted remarks from the garage mechanic, but it was eviscerating—and felt like betrayal—for Mr. Moyer to ask me to think about offending others with the editorial. But at least in the end he allowed it, and in his acquiescence, it seemed like a self-inflicted win for me.
We ran the editorial at the end of the month. Simplistic because of its word count, my article was clear in its caricature of Dan: racism was bad. It was easy to hate caricatured racists as it was easy to hate Nazis, and the congratulatory feedback from my classmates was simple and frequent, but it didn’t feel victorious. I had to beg for the editorial to be run, and none of my peers on the newspaper had come to my defense or encouragement when Mr. Moyer was trying to talk me out of it.
In my editorial, the takeaway was so palatable: racists were bad people, bad apples in the barrel. But bad apples were easy to spot. What Malcolm X was suggesting was that it was the whole barrel—America—that was the problem, but my teenage brain rejected that notion immediately. I didn’t want to believe that the barrel itself was rotten because I was in that same barrel.
That fall I applied to three colleges with minimal assistance from my guidance counselor, Mr. Lebo, who was also the head football coach. His primary duty was coaching, and in the midst of the fall season, college guidance took the bench in favor of running plays and buttonhook pass options. We met once in his office, where he asked me a few times to help him pronounce my name, and then told me that I should definitely apply to Penn State because I had good grades. Afterward, he handed me a one-page handout with tips for writing a college essay and wished me luck.
I did apply to Penn State because I knew I would get in, and also because my parents (whose accents made it sound like Peng Stay) insisted on it because that was where my aunt had gone. Also, the in-state tuition for Penn State was affordable, and the three of us talked about additional financial aid and loans and grants. By this point, I seldom spoke with my mother and father beyond asking them for checks for the application fees or the use of a car to get to work. They had started taking classes at community college to earn their travel agent’s licenses, and between my work schedule and their school schedule, we crisscrossed in our household, a weave of missed connections.
Mrs. Krebs and Mrs. Romberger wrote recommendations for me, and I felt as though I had an excellent chance for getting into college. That feeling, of course, was based on the faintest knowledge and understanding of the application process. I checked out the College Board’s guide to colleges from the library, but its girth and its gray pages stifled even my breathy ambitions and aspirations. I knew I wanted to go to college in a big city, because—well, because fuck Carlisle. I had offloaded all my frustrations, all my grievances (real and perceived) upon the town, and it symbolized everything I wanted to leave behind. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: an easy symbol for narrow-minded bigotry and limited prospects for teenagers of all stripes—I couldn’t wait to put Carlisle in the rearview. I wanted to be around music, culture, art, artists, punks, anarchists, socialists, girls who were well-read and promiscuous. None of that was in Carlisle.
I was shocked that some kids applied to Dickinson. Staying in Carlisle for college? No way. Fuck small towns. I felt like I was destined for the big city. The Big Apple. The big time.
I applied to New York University, mainly drawn to the idea of living in the big city and being in a city that seemed filled with more fun, more punks, and more people like me. I didn’t know anything about its curriculum or the different departments. My parents seemed okay with NYU because my aunt and uncle still lived on Staten Island, and they envisioned my living there to save money. The only other big city that I had frequented and enjoyed was Philadelphia, so I applied to the University of Pennsylvania (which my parents and I thought briefly was the same as Pennsylvania State University). I heard about other colleges and universities to which my classmates were applying, and I skimmed their lists with no sense of where or what: Williams, Middlebury, Amherst, Skidmore, Swarthmore, Georgetown. They might as well have been rattling off Canadian territories, and I certainly had no sense of what a “good” college was. But I had started to hear the phrase “Oh, that’s a great school” after some schools’ names and not others. I had dumbly assumed that college was college and that what you did mattered more than where you were.
I requested the three applications for NYU, UPenn, and Penn State, and within the month I received their large, bulky white envelopes and the enclosed, polished prospectuses. My mother had gotten a discarded secondhand IBM Selectric typewriter from her insurance office so I could type out the applications instead of filling them out by hand. I filled out each application on the typewriter, one loud click after the next hard clack, the rhythmic sound of opportunity knocking.
I homed in on the personal essay and the opportunity to talk about what I loved, of course. I wrestled with what to write about. Don’t talk about being an immigrant. Don’t talk about race (Mr. Moyer’s advice about my editorial stalked me as I thought about how I would present myself to the wider world). Don’t talk about punk rock or running away or your fucked-up childhood. Universal. Relatable. Aspirational. Talk about your love of books, your love of art, your love of learning. Be funny. Be yourself. No—be better than yourself.
I took the SATs three times, and I thought my scores were fine. They weren’t perfect, but my essay was propulsive. My essay would carry me. My grades were good (good enough for me to be in the National Honor Society for the last two years), but I leaned on my essay, my mission statement about the universality of literature, about my love of learning, proving that I was ready for college. Ready to be at an institution where they would see me for my intellect.
The UPenn application required four personal statements and supplemental essays. Undaunted, I wrote multiple drafts in Bic pen on my yellow legal pad. I scratched out edits and moved sections around, slogged through them, essay after essay after essay.
Essay 6A. If you were given the opportunity to spend an evening with any one person, living, deceased, or fictional, whom would you choose and why?
I must have been feeling punchy or cocky or stupid. On the UPenn essay 6A I wrote about wanting to have dinner with God. I had been reading Woody Allen’s collected essays, Side Effects, and fancied myself a satirist. I went in for the comedic kill, typing out the essay, so sure that I had slayed it with my irreverence and sacrilegious humor. I was the best-read kid in my class. I had audited a college course and gotten an A. I was the editor of our school paper and the literary magazine, and in a frenzy of adolescent hubris and ego, and for the first time, I was absolutely confident in my greatness.
Punchy. Cocky. Stupid. But that was me, unapologetically so, and if UPenn didn’t want me, then fuck them.
Applications mailed.
I emerged from the gas station’s bathroom, shoving the reluctant yellow bucket in front of me as I rounded the corner into the cashier’s office. After some robotic mopping motions, I tipped it over outside as it made a foul, retching sound and heaved its gray water into the curbside drain. I rattled the wheeled bucket and mop back into the utility closet. “Okay, that’s it—the bathroom’s cleaned.”
Liam gave me a thumbs-up. He and I worked the Friday shift because those shifts, between the full-service pump and register, bustled with customers and full-service patrons. “How much time is left? Do we have time to play quarters?” He rooted in his pocket for change.
“Yeah, it’s like nine thirty. Let’s do it—it’s not that cold outside.” I pawed around in my pants for quarters when a police car pulled up in the full-service lane.
Liam and I were immediately nervous, and all the petty villainy we had been committing sprang to mind: stealing lawn ornaments, mailbox baseball, trashing an abandoned farmhouse—that was what I conjured in the ten seconds while the patrol car idled outside.
The door chimed as the officer entered. Black uniform. Shaggy brown hair. Matching mustache. Middle-aged. Moderate belly. Shoes well polished but worn. He carried a large white three-ring binder under his arm. As the doorbell dinged, he glanced at me intently—the cop-look where you can tell they’re measuring you up—and I stood in the corner with the oil display.
Liam stayed fixed behind the counter, and I watched as the cop approached him, the officer’s wide frame blocking the width of the counter, and with his dark uniform, he eclipsed the space so that I saw only Liam’s face and his recently shaved head. Liam had an incredible, gee-willickers-boy-next-door shtick that had saved our asses on several occasions, and I knew it was best to let him do the talking.
“Good evening, Officer. Can I help you?” Nice and polite—well done, Liam. His calm was inversely proportional to my anxiety. I was still adding several other misdemeanors to my mental list, including putting parking cones on top of the Dickinson gym roof, skating in a few pools illegally, and pushing over some cows one drunken night in Dillsburg. The police officer was definitely not there to give us any community service awards.
He drawled in his Carlisle accent, distinctly more Dixie than Yankee. Yew boiz werrrked ’ere las’ week? Las’ Thurrrsday nat?
“I did—it was just me.” Liam nodded.
The officer continued. “Did you see the robbery?” The robbery was the talk of our Mobil station—the 7-Eleven across the street had been held up, and the perpetrator had gotten away. Scott, our manager, had posted a memo, and we all clucked about it (and about how robbing a convenience store was another level of criminality that we couldn’t imagine). We were content to tip cows and steal lawn gnomes, but brandishing a knife to steal a store’s cash was in another league of lawlessness.
Liam shook his head. “No, I didn’t. I mean, we heard about it from our manager, but I didn’t see anything. It’s all the way across the street.… I can barely see it as it is from here.”
“So you didn’t see anything?” The officer wanted to make sure.
“No, sir.” Liam’s golly-shucks was working overtime.
“Did you see the culprit? He was a black male.”
“I didn’t know that. But I didn’t see anything.” Any dread that I felt dissipated once I had heard that the officer was inquiring about the robbery and not about any of our hooliganism. I pretended to arrange the oil quarts in the corner, unsure of what else to do but absolutely sure that I should stay out of the cashier area. Their exchange paused for a moment, and the white three-ring binder thudded on the counter, rattling aside the Skoal penny tray.
“Would you recognize the black male if you saw him?” The officer flipped open the binder. Over the officer’s shoulder, I could see Liam’s face as he looked down at the binder. A slight tremor recoiled across his face, but he forced his brow to smooth itself and feign an adolescent indifference.
“What?”
“Take a look at these pictures. Do you recognize him in these photos?”
Liam didn’t look down. “No, I don’t recognize him. I didn’t see anything—like I said.” Liam’s insistence had gone from redundant to desperate.
“Are you sure?” The officer continued to flip the laminated pages.
“Yes, I’m sure.” Liam’s face went cold and ashen, and I felt his eyes straining not to look at me.
The officer spoke clearly. “Listen, son.” He kept turning the pages of the binder, the word son hanging between them—dirty white laundry on the line. “Don’t you want to get another nigger off the streets?”
My dread returned, exponentially terrifying.
Liam’s voice almost cracked, but he persevered. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I didn’t see anything.”
The officer finished flipping through the binder for another five pages, then closed the back cover. “All right, boys. You call the station if you think you remember anything.” He pivoted and walked out, never glancing at me as I stood motionless in the corner, leaning into my sagging throne of oil quarts.
We were dumbstruck and waited until the patrol car was well away.
Liam stared out the glass office. “What the living fuck was that?!” We couldn’t look at each other, and surveyed the station lot in the fear that he might return.
My whole being was rattled. “Dude. What was he showing you? In the book?”
“Mug shots, I think. I don’t know.… It was pictures of the black guys in town.”
“Seriously? Like pictures from when they were arrested?”
“I don’t know, man. They had pictures of some guys we’re in school with, too. Franklin Jefferson? His picture was in there.”
“What? He hasn’t been arrested, has he? Franklin? He’s still in high school.”
“I don’t know, man.… I don’t know. What the fuck just happened?” Liam shook his head.
We closed up the Mobil and locked the doors, the gloom of the office now a cave in which we had witnessed a terrible revelation. I wished we could have locked the whole incident in the office, in the dark of the night.
Liam gave me a ride home. Our usual loud, music-filled drive was instead somber mileage, more inward than homeward. Liam occasionally muttered what the fuck, and we’d rehash the events of the whole exchange. This was our first run-in with someone in a position of power displaying such blatant racism. This was beyond anything that I was ready for. I had accumulated a thick calculus from years of experiencing bigotry, but it was mostly at the hands of other kids whom I could punch or verbally lash back at. But this incident didn’t involve Klansmen or skinheads or Dirty Dan. This was a police officer. He was sworn to serve and protect. He had a club and a pistol. He had authority. And he had a binder with pictures of black men in our town.
My narrow definition of what a racist was had to expand, and in the aftermath, the circle widened to include, apparently, some police officers.
The reality of life was forcing me to face a vile truth whether I was willing or not.
A letter from the University of Pennsylvania informed me that I was scheduled for an alumni interview with the vice principal of a nearby high school. After some deliberation, I decided to tone down the punk rock look. This was for all my future marbles, and I didn’t want some small-town, anti-punk sentiment to scuttle my shot at Penn, so instead of spiking my hair on top, I pushed it over into the semblance of a respectable haircut. I wore a button-down vintage shirt that I tucked in, a black London Fog trench coat, jeans, and boots. I looked funky and stylish but serious and ready for college.
The vice principal, Mr. Daughtery, seemed nice. He was tall and athletic, and had a firm handshake, fading cologne, salt-and-pepper hair, and wore a gray suit. We met in an archetypal principal’s office (flag, ferns, degree from UPenn on the wall). He talked at length about being a UPenn man and about his classmates, their business ventures, and their subsequent successes, all of which emanated ostensibly from the wide-ranging and munificent springs of UPenn. I thought it was odd that he was making the sales pitch to me—a kid who had already signed up to be a Penn man. I was ready to enlist in this fraternity, the lauded Pennmanship.
As he was delivering his UPenn spiel, he opened a manila folder and leafed through what seemed, upside down to me, to be my application: my transcript, my SATs, presumably my essays. I couldn’t tell if he had already read them or was now looking at them for the first time.
“Tell me about some classes that you’re really enjoying, Phuc.”
“Oh, well, I really love my honors English class, but I’m really trying to push myself in all areas. I don’t know what I’ll be good at, but I love reading, writing, and visual arts. And I think it’s important to have a broad foundation, so I took a class last year—well, audited it—a Dickinson College religion class, 200 level. I got an A- in that class. But I love learning and reading and the universal nature of great books.”
“Tell me more about that.” He looked interested, resonating with my connection to literature.
“Gosh—well, I think that discussing literature has been a chance for me to strip away all the unimportant things, the superficial things. We’re all people—we all struggle and strive for the same things: love, acceptance, a sense of place and belonging. That’s the universal struggle, the human struggle. If you and I can connect with each other through a book, we’re really transcending the superficial things, the external things, the things that divide us.”
He was nodding vigorously. I was on a roll. “That’s great. I absolutely agree with you about the universal nature of great literature.”
I didn’t know if I was beaming or not, but I felt as though I had the widest grin on my face.
“Well, I have to say, Phuc: your grades are pretty good.”
I caught his tone in the way that he said pretty good and mounted my own clarification. “Thanks. I mean, school is really important to me, and I’ve been working hard, and that’s why Penn is so—”
He cut me off, looking over one of the pages in the file. “But Asian students, they’re really the cream of the crop, right?”
I didn’t know how to reply to his assertion about Asian students. I glanced nervously across his desk, not wanting to interrupt him.
He paused, holding one page in particular. “I mean, the best kids at any high school, if they have Asian kids, those kids are usually at the top of their classes. Your transcript is very impressive, but I expect it from students like yourself—your people are very diligent. We have some top-notch Asian students here. But I love what you said about the literature thing. That literature thing is good—I’ll be sure to mention it.”
Was he complimenting me or seeing me through the lens of some Asian stereotype? Was he making racial assumptions about me? But wasn’t he saying that Asian students were awesome? I’d never expected anyone to say that being Vietnamese was an asset, and now I was wrangling with that statement in the midst of a college interview. My head spun as I tried to recover and redirect the conversation, but I didn’t know if I was successful. The rest of the interview was a blur, I was so derailed by his remark.
I drove home and glumly ate dinner. My mood went unnoticed by my family, its foulness indistinguishable from any other cantankerous day for Phuc. I wasn’t about to tell them that the interviewer said that my transcript would have to be better because I was Asian—it galled me even more so after I had told him that I was connecting deeply on the universal level of literature. I was trying to tell him that I didn’t want to see race, that I wanted to get past it. But he told me that he did see race and that I’d have to do better.
My suspicions about who and what was racist, its Caucasian chalk circle, was widening to now include a UPenn alumni interviewer. He emphasized my race when all I wanted to do was ignore it, and in my ignorance, the circle widened to include myself, too. I just didn’t know it.
It would be decades before I could acknowledge how our conversation was showing two ends of the same pendular swing. See race. Don’t see race.
We motored home along Hanover Street, and at the red light near the Hardee’s, we observed a couple fighting outside a brick apartment building. Even with the car windows rolled up, we heard their muffled profanities, saw their shivering gestures and middle fingers, their tank tops and undergarments far too thin for the December weather. Husband and wife? Boyfriend and girlfriend? Who knew? We could see that the fight had taken itself to the streets.
The man and woman were Black.
My father stared at them and defrosted the silence. “Geez … look at those Black people. Look at them.”
Lou caught my eye and nudged me. For two years, I had been ignoring most of what my father said as part of my truce with him (it was easier for our family), but this remark, his use of “those Black people,” outraged me.
I stopped him from saying any more. “What did you just say?”
“What? I just said look at those Black people.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean look at them. Fighting on the street. Half dressed. On Sunday.”
“What does Black have to do with anything? You don’t know them.”
“Well, they are Black. That’s just a fact.”
“Your tone, Dad. That was racist.”
Lou jumped in. “Yeah, you can’t say, ‘Look at those Black people.’ What does that even mean?”
My father was shocked that Lou and I were both so agitated. We were calm but intense. It wasn’t a fight. The light had turned green, and he kept his eyes fixed in front of him. “Are they not Black? Of course they’re Black. That’s all that I said.”
“It’s the context—it’s what you were implying. There was no point to saying anything about them being Black.”
“Geez, you’re too sensitive.”
“No, Dad. You’re not sensitive enough. That’s the problem. Jeeeesus f—” I swallowed the fucking Christ before it escaped my mouth.
“Phúc! Don’t say Jesus like that!” My mother proved my point about tone and context.
“Oh, now you care about my tone? Well, don’t say Black people like it’s an insult. Do you really think that you guys are treated any better by white people? Those people that you just saw? We’re on the same side.”
“Same side of what? America is a great country! Americans helped us escape and gave us so many opportunities. Same side with Black people? Same side of what?” My father turned his head to look at us while we idled at another red light.
Lou jumped in. “The same side of RACISM!”
My father grimaced. “We are not the same as Black people. We work hard—”
I exploded. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?! Are you telling me that Black people don’t work hard?! That’s insane!” I wasn’t about to let him or my mother start spouting off their bigoted ideas, which we’d heard all our lives from nearly all our relatives.
This was it. In our Ford Fairmont on a Sunday morning. I took a stand, Malcolm X T-shirt or not. “Dad, you cannot make general statements about an entire group of people. I’m not going to allow it. We don’t like it when white people do it to us! How can you do it to others?”
My mother reinforced my father. “But what people say about Vietnamese people is mostly true. We work hard.…”
Lou jumped in—it was a full-on yelling battle royal now, and I was surprised to see Lou tagging into the ring to throw some polemical elbows. (Was this an inspired upside of his punching Mason?) “Mom, you can have your own opinion, you know? You don’t always have to side with what Dad says!” Lou, who didn’t even know what the patriarchy was, was criticizing the entrenched patriarchy of Vietnamese culture.
I backed him up. “Yeah, Lou’s totally right! Mom, you should have your own opinions! You don’t have to have the same ideas as Dad.”
The conversation had careened from racism to sexism in a sharp angle, and my father defended himself. “Of course your mother has her own opinions! Honey! Tell them! Tell them you have your own opinions!”
My mother nodded. “It’s true, I do.” She said it so earnestly, so unaware that my father had commanded her, that both Lou and I started screaming, hitting each other with disbelief over the irony of it all, yelling are you kidding me? and covering our faces at my mother’s insistence of her own independence.
We argued all the way home, neither the front nor back seats budging, and by the time we pulled into our driveway we were a house divided against itself. It was our Vietnamese civil war in a microcosm: generational, cultural, and racial.
Our respective bedroom doors slammed, and before long, I headed off to the Mobil station for my Sunday shift. Relieved at the chance to have a break from my parents, I pumped gas and did my homework, sitting at the counter and tuning in to the public radio station.
The doors opened, and a voice drawled. “Do you people have any oil? 10W-30?”
“I’m sorry, what?” Did he just say you people?
“You people have any 10W-30?” But then my ear recognized that this was a different context and a different tone. “You people” being tossed about in a casual way, meant to address anyone who was sitting behind the counter.
“Oh … right. Yeah—right over there.”
Maybe my dad was right: Maybe I was too sensitive. You people wasn’t always a secret way of saying something bigoted. But I had heard it from a mechanic. I had heard it from a University of Pennsylvania alumnus. I had heard it from my father. In those instances, there lurked a subtle judgment, yet I couldn’t quite articulate it.
It was easy to spot racism when it shaved its head, drew a swastika, and wore Doc Martens with white laces. But what about when it came to your coworkers? Or during the college application process? The police? Your parents? You and your friends who said the n-word without flinching?
Who were the racists now? I suspected the answer and didn’t want to say it aloud. The answer slithered all around me, on the streets, in the patrol cars, across the interview desks. It was even in the mirrors.
This was the real lesson I learned from Malcolm X, the one I had been avoiding, and like Malcolm, I had to evolve my own thinking. But for me, that meant confronting a hideous truth about who the racists were. This was the hardest thing he had written about. It would be a long time before I could begin to understand how big racism was and how it affected me, but I had to take the first step, to acknowledge the reality of life, to tackle the hardest truth if I wanted to fight it.
We all were the racists.