—————————— I SAT AT THE MULHOLLAND DRIVE outlook leaning against the Prius and hugging my old bomber jacket around me against the night chill—my “heavy” jacket in high school, when I thought sixty degrees was frigid and anything below that uninhabitable. A layer of smog and mist settled over the basin, and the streetlights pulsed like glitching stars. I stared, waiting for anything else the city had to teach me. I’d wanted to fill myself with histories and instead felt like they’d been carved out of me.
My phone dinged. CJ ignored the long apology I had sent her and wrote instead:
Did I freaking kick you the other night?
Yeah you did
But I was being a dick
Fuck I need to stop drinking
Me too
But how else do we self-medicate under late capitalism?
Duh—pick me up in a bit
A tingle ran through me and it felt like my insides were smiling. I’d never been so eager to apologize. I’d been flayed of all my pretensions, all my grand ideas of myself, which suddenly made knowing what to do simple.
I got back into the Prius, turned on the overhead light, and took out my phone to FaceTime Tiff. It was late but I knew they’d be up. The phone rang a few beats and their face appeared.
“Hey,” they said warily. Even over the small screen I could see they hadn’t been sleeping. Their buzz cut had grown out and bluish circles ringed their eyes.
“So I’ve been having these conversations with my mom,” I blurted, overriding the part of me that didn’t want to say what I knew I had to. “I wanted to organize a teach-in or toolkit, to fill in our solidarity timeline. But I kept failing and failing and I realize it’s because I was missing the deeper lesson: what it means to really know myself, ourselves. And to let that guide me. Anyway, I’m still committed to Black Lives Matter. I’ll still show up for other rallies. But I can’t get behind asking for Liang to go to jail.”
Tiff sighed as if this were expected, as if it were a matter of time before I let them down. “We need Asian Americans to show up right now. But yeah, I understand: folks have to do what’s right for them.”
I shut my eyes. Tiff was talking to me as if I were a stranger, and I realized I’d felt this way a few times before but never had the courage to admit it to myself, let alone Tiff.
“I’m not ‘Asian Americans,’” I said. “I’m not ‘folks.’”
Tiff’s face changed, like they’d been stirred awake. Now they stared into the camera with focus.
“You’re upset with me, okay,” I pressed. “But talk to me like a person.”
“Fine,” they said. “I’m confused. A week ago you were ready to drop out of college to work on this case and now you don’t even agree with the ask, right when we’re trying to escalate. What the hell?”
I felt, to my surprise, totally stable, as if rooted into the mountain. “You know, we always talk about cross-generational dialogue, about learning from activists in the past. But here’s the thing: you either extract a story that reinforces your beliefs, or you let that history change you. That’s what happened. And I think our approach right now is going to burn us for a long time.”
Tiff’s face went slack, and the camera tilted up as if they’d forgotten they were holding it. “I can’t really talk on that abstract level right now,” they said.
“It’s not abstract, though,” I pressed. “If you just stopped for a minute, you’d see that maybe the reason we’re in such a minority within the Asian American community is we haven’t figured out how to address them. Maybe it doesn’t diminish the grief around losing Akai Gurley to also acknowledge their hurt, to ask what the hell is going on that they’re pouring out for Liang.”
“Let me know how it goes on the other side.”
I winced and thought about arguing but instead muttered a goodbye.
Tiff’s accusation pained me because it was the same one I’d wielded against myself for so long. The two of us had shared a furious energy, an exacting conviction, but now I saw what fueled it and knew I’d have to stop—I no longer believed in my guilt.
* * *
I sat outside CJ’s apartment and watched her walk toward the car in her hurried slouch. She slid into the passenger seat. “’Suup,” she said.
“Thanks for meeting up,” I said.
“For sure.”
I drove and held back my flood of apologies. “You still like KCRW, right?” I asked. I tapped on the radio as a consolation gesture, a nod to our perennial argument in high school: I wanted to listen to my “old man music”—the jazz station—while CJ wanted to play her mellow electronica.
“For sure,” she repeated. She rummaged through her bag and started rolling a joint. We were in the same scene as that first night, just four days earlier, but a world had risen up between us.
“You should light,” I said. “My mom can tell no matter what.”
CJ didn’t need a second encouragement, and with a swish of her lighter singed the tip and exhaled through her nose. She reclined her chair a few degrees and her gaze relaxed.
“Let’s go to the beach,” she said.
I nodded and merged onto the 10 freeway. The air rushed through the windows as we picked up speed. A few cars zipped by, pushing ninety. The freeway at night was a lawless zone—no amount of speed counted against that infinite sheet of pavement.
We came to the end of the 10, where the freeway’s long journey from Florida ended and it morphed into a highway up the coast. It was the end of America’s promise to let you speed from one end of the country to the other, to remake yourself overnight in a different state. Here was the finish line, the drop away into the ocean, the end of the destiny manifest. And once America had bloomed bloodily through this continent, a restlessness settled in, and it pushed forward across the ocean, taking the Philippines and Hawaii, launching its armies into Vietnam and Korea, resulting in, among other things, CJ and me driving in a Toyota with our fucked-up histories.
The ocean spray filled the car and I could taste the water’s brine. The breeze cleared the smog away and we could see all the way to the Malibu hills, dotted by the lights of mansions climbing down to the black Pacific.
I turned left into a parking lot and CJ and I got out. The two of us moved by instinct, in silence, crossing the boardwalk onto the beach. We paused, took off our shoes, and stuffed our socks into the heels.
Our pace slowed as our feet sank into the cold sand. The crash of the surf became louder, and the white crests of the waves appeared, illuminated by city light behind us. CJ plopped into the sand, butt first, and hugged her knees. I sat next to her. She took out the half joint she’d saved and I leaned closer and cupped my hands as she lit it.
“Listen,” I said as I puffed, the familiar cloudiness slowing my thoughts. “I was being ridiculous the other night. I wanted to be better than someone, anyone. I’m sorry.”
CJ sat there, a bemused statue. “Word,” she muttered. “I hate that number-one-radical act.”
I nodded. The words pained me but felt necessary, like scraping out an infection. “You’re gonna say ‘I told you so,’ but—I can’t get behind Tiff’s politics anymore.”
“I told you so.” She considered what else to add. “Bitch.”
“Yeah. I can’t unsee all the fucked-up things this system does to people, and now I can’t unsee the shit my parents told me about what they went through. The two are blurring my vision.”
CJ puffed philosophically on the joint. “You know, the time you did the most for me was in high school, when my umma was in the hospital and I was going through my shit.”
I thought back to that string of afternoons when I picked up CJ outside Kaiser Sunset and we hotboxed the car, drove to In-N-Out, and wolfed down our Double-Doubles and Animal fries in the parking lot, thinking that nothing would ever taste as exquisite. “All I did was, like, hang out with you.”
“Yeah, dumbass. I needed someone dependable to just be there. I was about to lose the one person in my family, even though she’s fucking nuts. You probably never understood that because you had your Brady Bunch–ass family. You did the same when I had my breakdown at Harvard. You always think people want some heroic shit, some big radical act. But just being there, without your head in your ass, without some agenda—that’s the most helpful thing.” CJ shook out her limbs and smacked my arm. “Blah! That shit’s hard, and I know I haven’t always been solid like that either. Apology accepted.”
I breathed in the salt air. It was, I realized, a perfect night. I’d leave all this the next day for a sludgy April in the city, hustling down slippery subway steps to breathe in the thick condensation that formed in the train. A few days ago, I felt I couldn’t take this time away from my important life in New York. Now I saw how much I’d needed to be here.
“Can I see?” said CJ. She nodded to my leg.
I rolled up my pant leg and used my phone to illuminate the scrape. It had turned a gaudy red, emanating clouds of dark blue and purple.
“Fuck,” she said in appreciation.
“It’s just a flesh wound, like they say.”
“I heard you called Jane a bitch.”
I blushed. “That was bad,” I admitted. “But how can you stand it? Not just the racism but all of K-Town: the gossip, the meanness, the materialism, all that?”
“Because,” she said, her voice rich with respect, “Koreans are crazy motherfuckers, and so am I.”
“I’m not,” I blurted.
CJ hocked and spat. “Uh? You’re having a nervous breakdown over some cop you don’t know, and you’re going to drop out of college because of him?” She started to count points on her fingers. “You don’t know Korean people or history, but somehow you’re going to be a ‘good ally’? You didn’t know your own umma’s story until two days ago and you’re acting like it’s some deep burden you have to carry?” CJ collapsed back on the sand. “You’re fucked in the head.”
A dozen rebuttals started to form: It’s called organizing, neoliberalism is all a nervous breakdown, dropping out is an act of resistance. But I couldn’t voice any because I knew she was right.
“I’m going to have to think about this.”
“Don’t, actually.”
I relaxed backward too. My mind, which had always been the one part of me I trusted, had become my prison. I closed my eyes and felt the cool sand hold me, let the roar of waves overpower the droning of my thoughts.
“Enough about my shit,” I said. “What do you want to do, for once?”
CJ bit her lower lip and the corners of her mouth curled. “Swimming high is amazing.”
I looked nervously at the dark water. “But we don’t have towels, or even swimming trunks.”
She heaved herself to her feet. “Don’t pussy out.”
“‘Pussy out’?”
“If you say ‘that’s problematic,’ I will kick you in the nuts.” She walked toward the water and I followed. The beach dipped down, and my feet found the firm sand packed down by waves. Sea-foam crawled onto the shore in wild whorls and I shivered as it slid across my ankles.
“How are we doing this?” I asked, trying to hide my alarm.
CJ laughed. “Get over yourself. We’ve seen each other.”
She stripped off her shirt and bra and wiggled out of her skinny jeans. I looked away and peeled off my bomber jacket and dropped my clothes in a pile on top of it. There it was again, my body, the plain, awkward fact of it.
“Let’s go, motherfucker!” CJ whooped and ran into the waves. Her body became a blur against the dark water. She crashed against the churning tops then knifed into a wave. The round shape of her head bobbed up. “Fuck! That’s cold.”
“I told you!” I ran forward. Water skimmed my ankles, and then splashed against my legs. I dove into the heart of a wave. The sound of the world stopped, cut by the water’s hush. The wave wrapped me in an icy sheet, pricking my skin alive. The weed, though, formed a layer between me and the water, softening and brightening all the sensations.
I came up for air. “This is amazing!” I shouted over the water, over the blood ringing in my ears.
CJ laughed and I swam with her beyond the wave break, parting my little slice of the ocean. We waded, backs down, staring at the dark blanket above, streaked by faint clouds. A few bold stars pierced the city glow. CJ yelled. I yelled. We had nothing else to say, no words for the sky or waves or each other. We were just bodies, carried by the swell.