Maurene Goo
When I was little, I kept a diary with holes ripped through the pages from all the times I scratched so hard the pen poked through—a small angry fist clutching my Keroppi pen because all my friends had ditched me. Because they said “loser” under their breaths when I walked by their desks to do a math problem on the board. Later, in high school, my anger was fueled by the injustice that the boys I loved with the heat of a thousand suns didn’t know I existed, by the delirious all-nighters I pulled so that I could get into a respectable college like the good Korean daughter I was, by the intense frustrations with my parents who just didn’t understand any of it.
Anger coursed through me like water in a burst pipe—the rage spewing everywhere, uncontrolled and unfocused. Hitting everything in its path.
How many times did I regret, the second after I did it, throwing a desk lamp onto the floor? How many pillowcases were left moldering under the constant assault of tears and saliva from my openmouthed screams?
I am an angry person and have always been this way. My Facebook profile used to say, “I never take the high road.” What was the point? Passivity was almost offensive to me. I didn’t understand people who just “let things go.” Let it go? What the actual fuck does that mean?
My high school was the school that you never saw in movies or on TV: a mix of immigrants and children of immigrants from all over the globe—Armenia, Mexico, El Salvador, Iran, Taiwan, the Philippines, Korea, et cetera. I could count the number of white kids at my entire school on one hand.
In this Benetton ad of a high school, my best girl friends were on the volleyball team. They wore tight little shorts and had sturdy legs while I sat in the bleachers wearing oversized sweatshirts to cover up my skeletal frame. It didn’t matter—what I lacked in body mass I made up for with my huge mouth. I cheered aggressively for my friends and my school, like a girl possessed. I loved picking fights with fans from the opposing team, loved slinging insults at their players. It was the perfect pastime for someone who was competitive but had zero athletic ability.
One day we played against a high school that I shall charitably call Homogenous High. It was a team of blond ponytails and last names that were easy for American mouths to pronounce.
So there we were at this game—a pretty run-of-the-mill game since Homogenous High was in our school district and we played them often—when the kid next to me on the bleachers starts rummaging through his duffel bag. I glance over at him: blond water-polo-player-looking fool. Whatever. I feel mild irritation at all the rummaging noises but nothing worse than that. But before I can focus back on the game, I see him pull out an American flag.
I get that prickly feeling on the back of my neck, that instant temperature rise. My heart starts beating just a bit quicker. Even before he speaks a word, I know why that flag is there.
He unfurls it, and it’s as wide as his arm span. Then he, and the kids next to him, start chanting, “USA! USA!” People look over, confused and annoyed. But then they turn back to the game.
I stare. I stare so hard.
Finally, I say to him, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” The words come out fast. I’m not thinking of their consequences.
He won’t even look at me, but he cracks this shit-eating grin as he keeps his eyes straight ahead. “We’re cheering for America.”
“Stop it.”
“Why? If you’re American, you shouldn’t mind. Don’t you like America?”
By this point, people are looking at us, and I know that I’m red-faced and my voice is raised while his cronies laugh. An emotional teenage girl surrounded by chill dudes laughing. He keeps that flag waving. Absolutely shameless. So assured of his place in this gym, this city, this country.
I want to rip it out of his hands and make him eat it. I want to throw myself into his body so that we both go crashing down the bleachers. I want to scream, YOU ARE BEING RACIST. But the words needed to connect this act with racism are hard for me to find; I don’t have the vocabulary nor the map for that yet.
Instead, I just hurl impotent obscenities at him that make him laugh. The game goes on and no one else speaks up. I feel completely alone in my rage.
I’m in a parking lot with my Asian-American girlfriends. We’re giggling because I accidentally drove into the parking lot the wrong way and had to do some clunky maneuvering to get into a spot. We’re walking toward a Mexican restaurant when we hear a male voice say, “I guess it’s true that Asians can’t drive.” It’s a middle-aged white man sitting in his car, watching us, a smile under his greasy mustache.
Screaming ensues. He continues to smile. Our dinner is ruined.
Even decades later I am careful of how I drive—I spent hours learning to parallel park until I could do it blindfolded. I drive fast and well because I refuse to be the bad Asian woman driver stereotype.
It’s college now, and I am a little drunk with my friends. We start telling dumb jokes, laughing at each one. Then one of them says, “Hey, I have a good racist joke.” I look at my friends—one white, one half Brazilian, several Chinese, one Mexican, two Persian, one Vietnamese. “What kind of racist joke?” I ask my friend uneasily.
“About Black people.”
I tell him, “Fuck no. Don’t tell a racist joke about Black people.”
“Why not?”
This question begins an hours-long debate between me and one particular guy, the lone white dude. Like many times in my life, I don’t hesitate to take the bait. This guy, he’s like a lot of guys I meet in life. The kind that hate girls like me, that feel threatened and irritated by girls with strong opinions. I’m like a pebble in their shoe and their ego cannot take it. You know that guy. Most people ignore him. Not me.
And so I delve into the impossible waters of defining racism, but I am not equipped with the tools to articulate my thoughts about privilege. So I yell in anger. And I do the thing that I hate doing as a girl—I cry in frustration when they don’t get it. I accuse Lone White Guy, who is my most ardent challenger, of being racist. It’s loaded, but it’s true. My head just about implodes when he says, “Black people should just wait for equality to happen naturally.” I am angry, but I also feel sorry for him. That his life is so small, that he has had such little exposure to oppression and injustice, that he actually believes this. At this moment, my anger is balanced by a feeling of gratitude for the family and city that I was born into.
Later, when we’ve all left the red Solo cups behind, my friends thank me for speaking up. Their silence, which I interpreted as damning, was just discomfort and fear. Their thanks is like a balm.
I leave California and go to graduate school in Boston. I’m not there to get an MFA in creative writing, but I take some literature classes with people who are. At first I’m comfortable in these classes—I have loved, known, lived in books my entire life. I’ve read everything. I can write critical essays dissecting literature in my sleep. I’m grateful for that confidence because I am the only person of color in these classes. In almost all my classes. Almost in my entire program. But after a while it’s clear that I’m too irreverent. I don’t take literature as seriously as them. I like talking about books, but I also don’t name-drop Cheever in earnest. This makes me uncomfortable because I feel the pressure of needing to excel as the only nonwhite student. And because I’m a woman in a male-dominated class of full of little Hemingways in training. I need to prove that I am not in these classes by accident, that I knew what I was signing up for.
One evening in a lit class, we’re talking about a popular memoir by a Black writer that had just been exposed as fiction written by a white woman. For me, being repulsed by this is natural; that is the normal reaction. For these guys, it’s not. And I’m holding back because by this point the rage no longer runs through a burst pipe, but a sturdier one with some small leaks. (The pipe has been patched up by various things: the knowledge that people get shot on LA freeways over road rage, understanding that holding on to certain angers triggered my chronic anxiety and was toxic, and learning the hard way that explosive anger wasn’t always productive.)
I listen to people as they are in agreement about this thing: that being a writer, an artiste, means you can write about anything. It’s so entitled and clueless and I am conspicuously silent. To speak or not to speak? To make everyone uncomfortable or to keep everyone feeling safe and cozy?
But when it starts to feel ridiculous, I speak, tentatively, knowing exactly who I am in that class. “I don’t know. I think I understand why writing from the perspective of another culture might be a sensitive issue.” (I was probably not this concise, probably stammering.) It is the most gentle, coddling way I can think of to express my views.
The biggest blowhard in the class, this fool who once told me with a straight face that New Hampshire had better Mexican food than California, this guy says, “I disagree. I can write about a Black man’s experiences just as well as a Black person.”
The silence is so thick, so loaded with discomfort and cowardice, that I also find myself speechless. (Oh, to have, as writer Sarah Hagi said, the confidence of a mediocre white man!)
It’s only later, when I’m buzzing with anger on the train ride home, that I fully comprehend the shittiness of the position I had been in. That nothing I could have said wouldn’t sound like hysterics from an overly sensitive Asian girl. Nothing short of MLK Jr.–level articulation would have shamed me as the Ambassador of All People of Color in Literature Programs.
I’ve had my culture appropriated and misrepresented my entire life. I know why one should be careful and thoughtful. Writers can write what they want, but I also know that they can, rightfully, be criticized for doing it poorly.
Years after this class, a white woman, bestselling author Lionel Shriver, will walk onto a stage wearing a sombrero and basically proclaim the same thing as that bozo in my class. That as writers, we can write whatever we want—that awareness of cultural appropriation and good representation are stifling to the creative process. But by then I’m a published author and have finally found the words to rip literary entitlement like that to shreds. Step right up, folks. Ask me about the importance of diversity in literature and I promise this time I won’t keep silent.
There are permanent lines in my forehead that I discovered after growing out my bangs.
“Your face is going to stay that way.”
Grandma, you were right. My constant bitchface has now gifted me with these markers of my ragey time on earth.
Why am I reliving painful memories and listing grievances, each like a whisper out of Arya Stark’s mouth as she falls asleep at night, like a promise of revenge?
Maybe it’s because I’m Korean-American. Koreans believe we have han. It’s hard as hell to describe. It’s not a characteristic of Koreans as much as a concept that they feel is specific to their history and culture.
A quick and lazy Google search had this to say, on Wikipedia:
Han or Haan is a concept in Korean culture attributed as a unique Korean cultural trait which has resulted from Korea’s frequent exposure to invasions by overwhelming foreign powers. Han denotes a collective feeling of oppression and isolation in the face of insurmountable odds . . . It connotes aspects of lament and unavenged injustice.
In her book, The Birth of Korean Cool, journalist Euny Hong says:
The result of all this abuse is a culturally specific, ultra-distilled form of rage, which Koreans call han . . . By definition, only Koreans have han, which arises from the fact that the universe can never pay off this debt to them, not ever . . .
. . . But Koreans do not consider han to be a drawback. It’s not on the list of traits they want to change about themselves.
I actually discovered the concept of han by reading Hong’s book. My parents never mentioned it, I would guess because it’s so ingrained in the culture that there’s no reason to explain it. If you’re Korean, you’re born with it, just like you’re born with the burning desire to root for any professional sports team with a single Korean player on it. So when I read Hong’s chapter on han, I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. That’s it. I recognized han on a molecular level—especially the part about “unavenged injustice.” As mentioned earlier, in all of these stories I’ve just told, there was never enough justice doled out to satisfy me.
Because there’s an alternate ending for each story:
The kid at the volleyball game gets expelled and is forced to watch El Norte on repeat until he cries blood.
The man in the parking lot keeps laughing until his car explodes to smithereens.
The racist joke teller fails out of college because he had no critical thinking skills and becomes a heroin addict—sad.
The smug MFA guy is forced to share a stage with Ta-Nehisi Coates, discussing how he could write about the Black experience better than him. And then literally shits his pants in front of me.
Alas.
I’m a firm believer in #noregrets. And in each of those instances, I found myself growing as a debater, a fighter. I leveled up each time someone was sexist, racist, or a delightful combination of both. It adds another little metal plate to the armor I wear every day.
I understand that there is a spectrum of anger. I don’t want to punch a woman in line at the grocery store for taking too long counting her change. I want to have civil conversations on heated topics without resorting to screaming and calling someone an asshole, which is what I did in high school and in college fighting with those boys. And I certainly don’t want friends and family to fear confrontation with me.
After years of fights and arguments, I’ve learned how best to communicate my anger, how to make my point effectively and, in the best of cases, be persuasive. Having a husband with the disposition of a monk helps. Therapy helps. And having a proper outlet—my writing—has been the most helpful of all.
So now, when used wisely, I’ve discovered my anger is an immensely satisfying weapon during battle—these personal, tinier battles set against the backdrop of bigger battles that we all need to fight against systemic racism and sexism. So I’m willing to harness this rage, my han, and do something with it.
Because ever since November 8, 2016, there’s a lot to be angry about.
This last election opened a whole new facet of rage in me I didn’t know existed. Those unjust oppressions passed on to me from my ancestors? They now take on the form of the person in charge of my country. My home.
Seeing the stark differences between my reaction to the election and some of my Black, LGBTQ, and disabled friends compounded it. They weren’t as shocked as me. Their battles have not been as tiny as mine, and many of them have always been battle-ready, whether they wanted to be or not.
Now when I wake up angry because our basic tenets of democracy are being threatened, I take that anger straight to my phone and call my representatives. It’s the fuel that keeps me going when I’m fatigued by the news, when I feel helpless. If I see something idiotic on someone’s Facebook wall—whether it’s someone’s great-uncle or a close friend—I’ll speak up. I will tell the truth, even if it pushes them to a place of discomfort, so that they are forced to face their wrongness. My anger now courses through a very well-functioning pipe and I’ve installed a couple of convenient faucet handles.
One night, unmoored and unemployed after graduating college, I started writing a story about a girl. A Korean-American teenager who always says what’s on her mind and tries to do the right thing. Vulnerable yet fearless. I worked on this story on and off for a long time, over many years. Her voice was always in my head, urging me to sit in front of my computer and write her thoughts down.
I, for one, am looking forward to growing a year dumber through my abysmal California public school education.
Heh heh.
Now I had to go to the stupid dance and find a stupid damn date.
Then many years later, someone wants to buy this story and make it into a book.
Since You Asked . . . , my first novel, was the culmination of years and years of rage. Rage that had no outlet. Rage that sometimes shamed me or got me into trouble. Maybe it’s not so obvious when you read it, but it’s there. Anger was the seed that book came from. It finally had somewhere to go.
I continue to write about teen girls. Not all my girls are angry. Some are those even-keeled types who mystify me. But I almost always write about Korean-American girls. I give them a voice in my novels because my readers are living in a world that is, sadly, not so different from the one I grew up in. We still live in a world where people will underestimate you because you are a girl, because you look different from them, because your parents are immigrants, because you worship differently, because you like girls instead of boys, because you’re in a wheelchair, because you have to take medication to get through the day. These people who keep us on the margins, they think we will not fight back.
But those people are wrong. Those people can go fuck themselves.
Rage has empowered me, and I give you permission to let it empower you.