Everyday Acts of Resistance in Roger Shimomura’s Nightfall and Franny Choi’s “It Is What It Is” - Gabrielle Avena

"This academic paper examines the disorienting psychic effects of racial trauma on the psyche through two works of art: a print by Roger Shimomura and a poem by Franny Choi, arguing that the persistence of Asian American life itself might be figured as a form of resistance."

Fig. 1. Roger Shimomura - Nightfall (2010)

Fig. 2. Franny Choi - “It Is What It Is” (2022)

For racial minorities in America, racialized violence is an ever-present threat to life within a white-supremacist society. Two artists who capture the psychic effects of this fact in an Asian American context are Japanese-American artist Roger Shimomura and Korean-American poet Franny Choi. Shimomura's Minidoka Snapshots (2010), a series of mini prints on Japanese internment, figure the quotidian within catastrophe, depicting a child on a tricycle, a girl jump roping, a boy with a bat––all framed by bars of barbed wire. Operating in the inverse direction, the poems in Choi's The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On (2022) move through a kaleidoscope of catastrophes across time, from comfort women to the climate crisis, to offer a recognition of apocalyptic regularity for marginalized people. Two works from these larger series, Shimomura's Nightfall and Choi's "It Is What It Is" capture the disorienting effects of racial trauma on the psyche by blurring the boundaries of space and time, respectively. Still, despite approaching these disorientations from different angles, both Choi and Shimomura illustrate how even small forms of seeking life for Asian Americans similarly disrupt larger systems of oppression. Ultimately, putting Choi's poem in conversation with Shimomura's print allows us to understand how the persistence of Asian American life itself might be figured as a form of resistance.
‍
   In Nightfall (Fig. 1), Shimomura disrupts the audience's sense of space by calling into question where safety lies and who gets to exist within its walls. Printed in 2010, this piece draws on Shimomura's personal experience as one of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans forcefully relocated to concentration camps during World War II. The small, 6.5 x 8 in lithographic print depicts a threshold divided by two dark walls, themselves segmented into even sections by six vertical brown pillars, resembling an interrupted fence. In between these walls, a bright yellow color cuts through the central threshold into the foreground. Beyond this threshold, framed by the same yellow light, are six more evenly-spaced horizontal lines marked by knots suggestive of barbed wire. Finally, contained in a small square of window which cuts through the top right corner, we see the small figure of a mother holding her child, similarly set against yellow light. While the mother's purple blazer and baby's white diaper are not framed by barbed wire, their faces remain shilouetted from view by a shade. Though I now read the light as coming from two separate sources—one an exterior fenced-in area and the other a domestic interior—the artist's use of the same shade of yellow in both led me to initially assume they shared the same impossible space.
‍
   Ronald Takaki's "The Myth of Military Necessity" from his seminal Strangers from a Different Shore elucidates how Shimomura's disorientation of space speaks to the psychic experience of Japanese American wartime relocation. In his signature narrative style, Takaki examines why Japanese Americans in Hawai'i were not interned like their brethren on the mainland––namely, their foundational presence in the labor force and the emergence of a discourse that categorized Hawai'i as a multiethnic society (Takaki 384). In Nightfall, the similarly ambiguous location of the mother and child challenges the viewer to adjudicate the central question of the relocation policy: are these figures included within the national 'home'? That the question has no clear answer in the print reflects the arbitrary nature of this decision in real life, predicated on point of view rather than any fundamental difference in Japanese American loyalty itself. This concern over belonging is further reinforced through the art style, as Shimomura's thick, bold lines and bright, highly-saturated colors evoke the panels of an American comic book, implying the Americanization of his subjects. And yet, these same visual elements serve to cage the figures beind harsh light and barbed wire, unable to enjoy the freedoms of their fellow citizens. The failure of Asian American assimilation to resolve in equality is reinforced by Takaki's recounting of the Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt's formal recommendation for Japanese removal, in which he declared that "while many second and third generation Japanese… have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted" (Takaki 391). Through his ironically American art style, Shimomura shows that cultural assimilation ultimately cannot rescue one from the larger forces of racialized exclusion. Ultimately, using these clever visual techniques, Shimomura captures the psychic reality of Japanese Americans in incarceration.
‍
   Most importantly, in the face of these restrictions, Shimomura figures the mother and child as obstructing the order and logic of exclusion. As a historical example, Takaki describes how despite the architecture of the camps being composed of "barracks lined in orderly rows; barbed-wire fences with guard towards defin[ing] space for the internees," they resisted these impositions "by creating rock gardens with bonsai outside the drab barracks" (Takaki 395). Like these gardens, the bodies of the mother and child disrupt the print's semblance of symmetry and order through their organic shapes. Even contained within the window, their yellow background seemingly exists beyond the reach of the barbed wire, exercising a private freedom within the confines of their situation. Finally, the symbol of the child itself that may present the greatest act of resistance. The conditions of internment were such that one mother thought to herself, "gosh, what am I doing getting pregnant… there's no future for us… what are we having kids for?" (Takaki 396). Put simply, to nurture Asian American life in such conditions is to assert a hope for life for Asian American people. As such, the disrupted dualism created by the human figures in Nightfall show how even small acts of survival disrupt systems of domination set against Asian American subjects.
‍
   Unlike Shimomura, who presents the persistence of everyday acts in exceptional situations, Choi's "It Is What It Is" (Fig. 2) captures how life itself becomes exceptional to an Asian American condition that is constantly threatened by racialized violence. The poem follows the speaker's mother on her daily walk to "make a living" past one location from the Atlanta spa shootings in which a White man "killed three Korean mothers / just like mine" due to his reported sex addiction (Choi 2, 5-6). The speaker's churning anxiety for her mother's safety is expressed through the form of the palindrome, or a poem whose lines read the same forward or backwards, radiating out from her mother's central question: "What am I supposed to do? / Be afraid? // What am I supposed to do?" (Choi 9-11). Through such repetition, the line between mother and daughter blur, both asking themselves the same question as despite "the tunnel between us, / her voice echoes, heavy / just like mine" (Choi 12-14). While the words themselves repeat, the poem resists visual symmetry such that when one reads it the first time, there is a sense of surprise as they encounter the same words in new contexts. Through this sonic and visual echo, the temporal distance between generations is collapsed under a shared racial-sexual threat to life. In this way, Choi's literary techniques convey the disorientation of time following a racialized tragedy which emphasizes the cyclicality of anti-Asian violence in the country.
‍
   Indeed, Choi's broader consideration of cyclical catastrophes can be further understood through an Asian American context when put in conversation with Takaki's "Overblown with Hope," another chapter of Strangers from a Different Shore which tracks the waves of early Asian migration, focusing on the patterns of hopes they embodied and violence they encountered as they came to America. For one, Choi's poem begins and ends on the act of "passing"---the migrant mother never arrives at her destination, never settles in her new land (Choi 1, 19). This representation accords with Takaki's claim that Asian Americans "were brought here to serve… as 'cheap' migratory laborers… not future citizens of American society' ' (Takaki 31). Likewise, in Choi's poem, the migrant mother exists without a discrete present, future, or past, her sense of time suspended in a constant state of 'passing,' implying a proximity to passing out of life itself. This sense of threatened mortality continues with the speaker's specific emphasis on how "I've tried not to think of it— / a man killed three Korean mothers", invoking a painful racial-gendered critique (Choi 4-5, emphasis mine). For the sexual motivation of the Atlanta shooting can be traced to the 1875 Page Law, which nominally "prohibit[ed] the entry of prostitutes" but materially "discourag[ed] Chinese wives" from migration to the States (Takaki 40). By presuming the Asian women in massage parlors to be sex workers, the Atlanta shooter operated on the same racial logic that presumed all Chinese women to be involved in prostitution. Following from this, the looping of words in Choi's poem reproduces how the same racial-sexual ideologies recur across centuries of time. In spite of this specter of death, the migrant mother persists in her goal "to make a living"--or later "to make a life" (Choi 2, 18). In the words of Takaki, "while the Asian immigrants did not choose the material circumstances of their times, most of them still made choices regarding the futures of their lives and therefore made history" (Takaki 31). For instance, though the central questions of "What am I supposed to do?" might initially read as helpless and passive, the fact that the poem turns on the ironic question of "Be afraid?" evidences a quiet sort of resistance to remaining in abject fear from this reality. Especially in the context of racial violence, for the speaker's mother to boldly seek a life within a condition of passing is a truly subversive act. Thus, while the title "It Is What It Is" may at first invoke the disaffected shoulder-shrugging Asian American stereotype, close attention to the text reveals what Choi asserts instead to be a rich, historical-informed account of the afterlives of racial trauma and the determination of Asian Amerians to make a life beyond it.
‍
    Ultimately, the works of Shimomura and Choi provide a valuable intervention in our understanding of Asian American political resistance. In her book chapter "Response and Resistance," Shelley Sang-Hee Lee lays out a broad account of Asian American political advocacy to advance the argument that "the history of anti-Asian racism cannot be reduced to simply what whites did to Asian people," (Lee 152). I would contend that while Lee provides a valuable debunking of the myth of Asian American apoliticality, she overlooks less obvious modes of resistance, including the creation of art and other everyday activities. Through their respective artworks, Shimomura and Choi supply examples of this more quotidian form of resistance. For while Choi's figuring of the violent as everyday may at first read as fatalistic, it is through putting her in conversation with Shimomura's figuring of the mundane as obtrusive that we can understand the commonplace acts of Asian Americans as politically powerful. Indeed, when Choi first shared "It Is What It Is" on Twitter, a year after the Atlanta shooting, it was with the caption that "One year after the Atlanta spa shootings… All I can say is: Hi, hello, also-hurting You. I'm holding us close today" (Choi). Alongside marching in the streets, what Shimomura and Choi show us is how especially in the wake of racial violence, resistance can exist simply in a holding—a holding of the also-hurting's feelings of anguish, anxiety, and rage; a holding of one's child in a world that is certain to harm them; a holding onto hope to make a life out of whatever conditions it may be confined within.
‍
Bibliography
‍
Choi, Franny. "It Is What It Is" in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. First edition., Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2022.
Choi, Franny. "One Year after the Atlanta Spa Shootings, I Haven't Been Able to Turn the Grief and Rage into Anything except for Grief, Rage, and This One Very Small Poem. All I Can Say Is: Hi, Hello, Also-Hurting You. I'm Holding US Close Today. Pic.Twitter.Com/Ddr0xy3cer." Twitter, Twitter, 16 Mar. 2022, twitter.com/fannychoir/status/1504238327058382857?lang=en.
Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee. "6. Response and Resistance" in A New History of Asian America. Routledge, 2014.
Shimomura, Roger. Nightfall. 2010. Lithographic on paper. Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA.
Takaki, Ronald T. Strangers from a Different Shore : A History of Asian Americans. Updated and revised edition, First Back Bay edition., Little, Brown, 1998.

“The defiance of those who serve them” - Se Eun Katie Ryu

"This contextual analysis was written for my Spring 2024 course, “Asian American Gender/Sexuality/Species.” I chose to focus on Monique Truong’s 2003 debut novel, The Book of Salt, and I lean toward an interpretation that is more empowering—subservient service that is also a form of resistance."

Monique Truong's The Book of Salt presents its narrative through the perspective of its protagonist Bình, a Vietnamese cook employed by the famed Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The couple "occupy a formative space in queer literary studies and high modernism," while fictionalized Bình has been elevated "from obscurity by [Truong] plucking his character from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book" (Cheng 2019, 91). Central to The Book of Salt is its exploration of Bình—a queer Vietnamese exile in 1930s Paris. His identities and categorizations are critical to the manner in which this character is perceived, and it is especially fascinating how Bình's means of livelihood or employment throughout his life interact with such. In Bình's narrative, Truong ultimately reveals a subversive power in servitude, portraying what subtle resistance in language might look like for a marginalized subject: dignified yet striking, all the same.
Orientalism provides itself as an essential cultural framework for working toward understanding Bình and his positioning in his world. Coined by Edward Said and established in his seminal work, Orientalism, the late theorist argues that the notion of the Orient was constructed by the dominant European colonial powers in order to control, define, and subjugate it. He asserts that the West, or the Occident, exists only in relation to the East, or the Orient; it is because the East is weak that the West is strong, feminine as to masculine, irrational as to rational. This ideology is also applied in terms of sex and thereby sexuality. Said writes, "In most cases, the Orient seemed to have offended sexual propriety; everything about the Orient—or at least [Edward William] Lane's Orient-in-Egypt—exuded dangerous sex, threatened hygiene and domestic seemliness with an excessive 'freedom of intercourse'" (Said 1978, 167). To the West, the Orient is deviant, sexual—homosexual, even. In controlling the perspectives on the Orient, the West uses them to define itself: "In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action" (Said 1978, 3). As such, it is always the West, or the colonizer, who speaks about the East—rather than, of course, the colonized, Oriental subject themselves.
‍
   In the beginning pages of The Book of Salt, Truong presents the concept of servitude as performance—as well as what can be gained through manipulating the perceptions and expectations imposed on a colonial subject. Bình is described to have a particular skill: an "acumen" for the streets of Paris (Truong 2003, 15). But it is indeed "more like a sleight of hand," as Bình himself so accurately notes, because he essentially takes on the role of a scam artist—strategically combining his knowledge of Paris' streets with his accented, ineloquent French to fool Frenchmen. And it is simply glasses of marc, just alcohol he gains, but it is still a taking from the French—in terms of both money and ego. In other words, the Frenchmen are fooled and made fools. Bình clearly understands the power imbalance between himself and the men he might take from but uses it to his advantage: "But once it is clear to them that I am there for their amusement, the rest is an enthralling performance" (Truong 2003, 15). Here, Bình, the colonized subject, is the winner; he has bested the French colonizers. He can very well imagine their eventual reactions, even putting specific words to their anger and indignation: "How can this little Indochinese, who can't even speak proper French, who can't even say more than a simple sentence, who can't even understand enough to get angry over the jokes that we're making at his expense, how can this Indochinese know this city better than we?" (Truong 2003, 15-16). Through Bình's scam, his performance, his intellectual service of sorts, he is able to belittle the French, to make them the subject of the joke. It is a reversal of how he knows they perceive him, not even bothering with Vietnamese but Indochinese. The final, lingering impact is how Bình—the colonized Vietnamese—now speaks for the Frenchmen.
Through Bình's occupation as a galley hand, Truong works to display solidarity among marginalized subjects, using humor and mockery as tools for resilience. This is shown primarily with Bình and Bão, the shipmate he meets on the voyage from Vietnam to France aboard the Niobe. In one conversation, Bão explains a subterfuge for the colonial subject—giving fake names to their employers, the French colonizers:
‍
     "The new name isn't for you. It's for them. TôiNgườiĐiên, AnhĐẹpTrai, TôiYêuÊm …" he began listing for me his chosen names. After the third one, we were laughing so hard he could get no further. We rolled on our bunks, him on the top and me on the bottom. In between gasps of air, he told me that they never know which is the given name and which is the surname, so it usually comes out all at once. It made life worth living, Bão said, when he could hear, "Hey, IAmCrazy, if you're late again, I'm throwing your lazy butt right off this boat, and I don't mean when we reach shore! Do you understand me, IAmCrazy?" or "Come over here, GoodLookingBrother, you call this deck clean?" or, his personal favorite, "ILoveYou! Hurry up with those crates! ILoveYou, a trained monkey can do a better job!" (Truong 2003, 107)

‍
   The French colonizers have again become ridiculous, comical through the powers of language and knowledge and naming. In this way, they are stripped of their being as the colonizer who is thereby also the intellectual, the superior. The colonizer's ignorance in the face of Bình and Bão's knowledge of Vietnamese brings these colonized subjects joy and reprieve and connection; it even gives a reason to live under the oppressive, draining systems of colonialism. Moreover, the reader receives the corresponding translations to TôiNgườiĐiên (IAmCrazy), AnhĐẹpTrai (GoodLookingBrother), and TôiYêuÊm (ILoveYou), having been gleefully and freely invited into the minds of these Vietnamese laborers to understand their linguistic joke. Notably, Bão's recollections of such silly names with poor Vietnamese pronunciation detract from the harshness of the orders and insults. It is evidently a means of self-protection—now being shared with a fellow colonized subject—a way the cruelties cannot touch Bão. He has made a joke of the colonizers. Additionally, soon after that quoted passage, Bình reflects on his violent seasickness and how that laughter had provided a brief reprieve from the raging storm. With this, Bão is also said to have supported Bình in yet another way—by uncharacteristically speaking that entire night, knowing that while "the sickness would have to pass on its own … sometimes the sound of a human voice is a steady raft on a lurching sea" (Truong 2003, 107). Bình and Bão are marginalized subjects who, to each other, are both human rather than subhuman or animal. It is the humanness, the human voice, that soothes Bình. Resilience, Truong implies, is found in solidarity and a shared humanity.
‍
   Later, in Bình's most prominent job as a cook in the rue de Fleurus home, his internal language is steady and tremendously cognizant of his worth and agency. He interacts with his employers in what must be understood as a very intimate manner—this act of cooking and preparing food to be consumed. And when asked the question of "What is your secret?" for his cooking skills, he thinks, "Please Madame, do not equate my lack of speech with a lack of thought … Dare I say it is your ignorance, Madame, that lines my pocket, gives me entry into the lesser rooms of your house, allows my touch to enter you in the most intimate of ways" (Truong 2003, 153-154). Bình's Mesdames are Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; they and their rue de Fleurus guests are widely considered some of the most renowned thinkers of the 1930s. Yet, Bình challenges their intellect, specifies that they, in fact, are ignorant for viewing him as so. He maintains his language of deference and respect with "Madame" but it is a challenge nevertheless. Bình asserts that he is by no means the ignorant one—not in terms of ability, specifically his ability to cook and his expertise over ingredients, but also in terms of his power over those he serves. Bình is paid, given unique access to the rue de Fleurus home, and has touched "every morsel that slides down [their] dewy white throat" (Truong 2003, 154). It is a mistake to disregard him. Bình himself puts it best when he muses, "If there is a 'secret,' Madame, it is this: Repetition and routine. Servitude and subservience. Beck and call" (Truong 2003, 154).
‍
    Resistance against the dominant language is presented from the origins of this story, even at what may be considered the most colonial site: the Governor-General's house; here, Bình, with mocking and derision, rejects the language of the colonizers and its intended impact. This is the first thing he is described to have learned at the house:
      ... when Monsieur and Madame were consumed by their lunatic displeasure at how the floors had been waxed, how the silver had been polished, or how the poulet had been stewed, they would berate the household staff, all fifteen of us, in French. Not in the combination of dumbed-down French coupled with atonal attempts at Vietnamese that they would normally use with us, no, this was a pure variety, reserved for dignitaries and obtuse Indochinese servants. It was as if Monsieur and Madame were wholly incapable of expressing their finely wrought rage in any other language but their own. Of course, we would all bow our heads and act repentant, just as the Catholic priest had taught us. Of course, we would all stand there, blissful in our ignorance of the nuances, wordplay, and double-entendres of that language that was seeking so desperately to assault us. Naturally, some words would slip through, but for the most part we were all rather skilled in our refusal and rejection of all but the most necessary. (Truong 2003, 13)
‍
   First, Bình paints the Monsieur and Madame as irrational beings. Their "lunatic displeasure" and the hyper-specific list of household tasks immediately characterize them as so. What's more, their use of proper French to berate the staff is, according to Bình, because they are "wholly incapable of expressing their finely wrought rage in any other language but their own" (Truong 2003, 13). Not only are they irrational, but they are impractical—for Bình and the other house servants cannot understand their French, but the Monsieur and Madame rage in this French anyway. Regardless, the servants do not, cannot, and perhaps choose not to understand "the language that was seeking so desperately to assault [them]" (Truong 2003, 13). Through this ignorance, in what might typically be considered a lacking or shortcoming, the relationship between the Monsieur and Madame and their house servants is twisted in favor of the servants.
Those with power and authority look down upon those without; their hierarchical rank and superiority justifies an action like scolding or berating. But when that scolding is logically impractical, when it falls on strategically deaf ears, it ultimately loses its bite and sting. The Monsieur and Madame berate the staff in what is described as pure French, and it's the pure French—implied as perfect, ideal, and unsullied—that fails to truly harm the colonized subjects. Then, there is a certain kind of judgment and knowing Bình holds as he subsequently reflects on the "ruling class everywhere," "So enamored of their differences, language and otherwise, they have lost the instinctual ability to detect the defiance of those who serve them" (Truong 2003, 14). The Monsieur and Madame can speak all the pure French they would like, they can berate to their fullest and most enraged extent, and they can criticize over the most minuscule household tasks. However, because they are oblivious to the deviance of the colonized subjects, a shift in the power dynamic has occurred. It is a quieter, more subversive resistance but it does firmly assert the colonizer as the ignorant, simple, uninformed subject.
Lastly, there is a very distinct power in Bình's role and talents as a cook; he directly controls what the dominant subjects consume into their bodies. He reverses the roles inflicted on him as a colonial subject—the mute, the silenced, to say "I am no longer the mute who begs at this city's steps. Three times a day, I orchestrate, and they sit with slackened jaws, silenced. Mouths preoccupied with the taste of foods so familiar and yet with every bite even the most parochial of palates detects redolent notes of something that they have no words to describe" (Truong 2003, 19). His primary means of survival and livelihood is an ability that occupies and silences the mouth of the colonizer. Beyond silence, it even renders them speechless with such "redolent notes." Bình's cooking is incredibly intimate in nature, and it is clearly a field in which his skills are undeniable. The elevated, fanciful language and word choice related to taste and cooking and Bình's cooking in particular point to this. This is intentional on Truong's part as it further emphasizes the striking idea that all his gifts and abilities are not enough. Bình indirectly acknowledges that it is not "the sheer speed of [his] hands, the flawless measurement of [his] eyes, the science of [his] tongue, that is rewarded" (Truong 2003, 19). And ultimately, he admits that "collectors are never satiated by my cooking" (Truong 2003, 19). Truong is thereby asserting that his labor does not save him from his condition as the colonized subject. This is also applicable to Bình as an Oriental subject, with scholar Lisa Lowe explaining—in the context of America, another dominant Western empire—that "Asians [are placed] 'within' the U.S. nation-state, its workplaces, and its markets, yet linguistically, culturally, and racially marked Asians as 'foreign' and 'outside' the national polity" (Lowe 1996, 8). Labor—exceptional or otherwise—is not sufficient for Bình to rise beyond the conditions he has been put in; another approach is needed.
Truong shapes Bình, throughout his life and in his labor, as a character who is quietly subversive—with his language and narrative voice carrying a subtle, humanizing resistance against the dominant subject. Truong has already, just by virtue of centering a subject who would not have been centered in traditional modernism, given this marginalized subject agency. Resistance and resilience can often take quieter forms, making for an interpretation that is more critical than complicit.
‍
Bibliography
Cheng, Julia. "Queering Lists: Culinary and Literary Modernism in The Book of Salt." MELUS 44, no. 3 (2019): 91–111. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26801008.
Lowe, Lisa. "Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique." In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt: A Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003.

Rise: Essays