Non-fiction — Pieces

There’s a sort of primal satisfaction that comes from eating a chicken foot—biting around for the knuckle, pinching off a joint with your incisors, sucking ferociously at what little cartilage, skin, and sauce can exist on a centimeter-long segment of chicken toe. I have no way of knowing how satisfied the Paleolithic man felt lounging by the fire after his dinner of freshly slain mammoth, but, as I admire the mound of chicken bones on my plate, I feel that I’ve come pretty close.

Of course, some would disagree: those who would prefer a drumstick or the sterile civility of a chicken nugget to the jagged realism of the chicken foot. These are the people who cut the crust off their sandwiches, who don’t like onions on their burgers, who call themselves sushi lovers but only ever order the California roll. I know, because I went to high school with these people.

Despite being one of three Chinese kids at my high school, I never really thought about race. I didn’t get called a chink or have my lunch money stolen or anything—the Hydroflasks plastered with Bernie 2016 stickers precluded such behavior. The only time the cultural rift manifested was when I—like countless immigrant kids before me—brought lunch to school. Even my staunchest white liberal peers couldn’t resist commenting. “What is that?” “That looks disgusting.” “Are you going to eat that?” (No, I was actually going to blend it up and make a face mask).

My friends were even more direct. In four years of after-school homework sessions, sleepovers, and birthday parties, never once had they come over to my house for dinner. The most common (and most eloquently worded) reason: “Hell no, your mom’s gonna make chicken feet or some shit.” If I were more oblivious, I wouldn’t have cared. Chicken feet isn’t exactly my family’s typical dinner, and not everyone is a hardcore hunter-gatherer like me.

But it was never about the chicken feet.¹

It was about their conception of Chinese food, of Chinese culture. The dirty Chinatowns and shady Chinese restaurants. The squalid, authoritarian, communist police state on the other side of the Pacific with surveillance cameras on every corner and portraits of Xi Jinping in every living room. The depictions of China that color the collective American imagination and—despite what CNN or Fox News or even the New York Times say—were far from the truth, far from the China that I knew.

Of course, I couldn’t expect them to know that. Liam didn’t grow up watching Chinese cartoons and Ryan never ran up and down the snack aisles of H-Mart. Nonetheless, it still bothered me. These were my friends. These were my best friends! Sure, they didn’t have Chinese parents, but they had me.

I studied abroad this past summer in Beijing—a polluted, aggressive, energetic, wondrous city that actually does have surveillance cameras on every corner, but also, more importantly, the equivalent number of restaurants. With me were a few other students, all Chinese-American, who, as one does when the dining hall serves the same thing every day, ate out whenever we could. We ate Japanese food made by Korean people and Pakistani food made by Chinese people and lots of Chinese food made by Chinese people — those who say America is the immigrant capital of the world have yet to visit a night market in Beijing. One night, we ate at a dim sum restaurant, and someone suggested we order chicken feet. For the first time in life, I heard not one, not two, but an entire table of nineteen and twenty year-olds proclaim, “I love chicken feet!”

I felt validation, pride—I had found my people.

The feeling, however, was short-lived, because not two seconds had passed before someone asked something that I had not expected: “But have you tried duck intestine?” Then, someone else: “Yes, that’s so good, but once I had pig brain!” “Not as good as pig blood though.” “What about fried crickets?” “Snake soup?” “Sheep penis?” It was like this culinary cold war, a pissing contest for who’d eaten the weirdest animal appendage. Of course, it was more than that: it was a contest to see who was the most in touch with their culture—who was the most Chinese.

I was hurt, not just because I had lost the war (my mom was never able to find frozen sheep penis at the grocery store, not even at Whole Foods), but because we were fighting it in the first place. We were like Remus Lupin and Sirius Black, squabbling while Peter Pettigrew escaped unnoticed. The schoolyard bullies and whitewashing Hollywood producers and xenophobic politicians—they were the real enemy. We should have been touting our Chinese culture to them, not each other. We should have been calling out the snide remarks and challenging the biased media coverage and asserting our Chinese-American identities in America, because if we didn’t, who would?

Most of the Chinese-Americans at that table were second generation, which means our parents were the ones who first immigrated to the United States. They carried with them the thousands of years of culture of their ancestors—the history, the values, the food—but they faced challenges much more pressing than cafeteria taunting. They had to survive, to adapt to this odd country where people say exactly what they’re thinking and eat rice with a spoon and don’t take off their shoes indoors. Our parents still face that struggle; my mom, to this day, never feels confident enough to go to the doctor alone.

We, as Chinese-Americans, are the Avatar, the bridge between the two worlds—it’s right there in the name. We dress and talk like Americans, but we also grew up in our parents’ house and, often, in China. We’re the only ones with that ability to share and translate not just language, but culture. So why weren’t we doing that?

I did, however, sympathize with them. The feeling of being too Chinese to be American and too American to be Chinese? It sucks. And people cope by picking a side, or trying to. Some choose to talk to their parents in English and order Starbucks instead of Boba. Others study abroad in Beijing and master sheep and pig anatomy. Balancing two identities is hard, and being an ambassador for one of them is even harder.

But if we don’t do it, who will?

I think about those high school lunches often, about what might have happened if I hadn’t ignored the comments, but instead I had called out my peers, if I had brought a chicken foot to school and offered them a sweet, delicious toe. Sure, they might have spit it out and called me crazy. But I like to think they also might have had an epiphany, a complete change in worldview, a spiritual transformation that could only be triggered by the singular primal satisfaction of eating a chicken foot.

¹ And it also couldn’t have been. Preparing chicken feet, according to Wikipedia, requires frying, steaming, stewing, and simmering—more effort than my mom would have been willing to put in even at Chinese New Year.

Cover photo source

Meena:

As a freelance immigration and border journalist from Southern Arizona, I spent last summer exploring the U.S.-Mexico border and the hands that shape it. In June, I visited the Tohono O'odham Reservation, which neighbors my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, to speak to O'odham activists about their struggle against the proposed border wall and increased border militarization on tribal lands. I have been interested in indigenous issues for some time now, especially given the unique, shared history between American Indians like the O'odham people and Indian Americans like myself that has largely resulted from both the events of 1492 and the scars of colonization and genocide in America that continue to shape today's political and social climate. This piece strives to explore this complicated, shared history through the lens of my personal experiences visiting the Tohono O'odham reservation in June and as an Indian American woman growing up on stolen land that is, has always been, and will forever be shaped by indigenous cultures and perspectives.

You are almost there when you get to the Border Patrol checkpoint.

“Checkpoint Trauma,” as it is called by the Tohono O’odham people who are regularly pulled over, sniffed by hounds, strip searched by chalky, uncertain hands under the glaring beam of their own headlights.

Our cameras are aimed squarely at the agents when our car rolls to a gentle halt that belies our tightening throats, pounding hearts.

The four of us — all women, three Asian and one white — are not stopped.

“Have a good one, ladies,” the agent, who is white, says after giving us a perfunctory once-over. We are filming him because we can.

We park at the Sells 86 Diner. Neon Coca-Cola signs blink from off-white walls. The faint smell of cigarettes crawls in from the Shell gas station next door. Everyone here is O’odham, with the exception of the four of us and an elderly white man who works for Tribal EMS.

The line cook wears a Washington Redskins hat.

The Sells 86 Diner sits along the AZ-86 Highway in Sells, Arizona, one hour southwest of Tucson.

In second grade, no one bothered to tell me I was a different kind of Indian. I wasn’t the kind we learned about every year around Thanksgiving, making construction paper cutouts of turkeys and colored-pencil cornucopias.

It was the time of year when we would write out a list of things we were thankful for, the first being getting three days off school to eat pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes with family (or, in my case, basmati rice and daal with my parents). We were given permission to indulge in this holiday because, we were told, it emerged from a truce between the Pilgrims and the Indians.

I was the kind of Indian whose parents had come from a country on the other side of the world, as I eventually learned to describe it to my friends.

At lunchtime, we would sit on circular red stools affixed to a long cafeteria table as I slowly spooned potato curry from my pink Thermos, trying to explain what I meant.

This was Tucson, Arizona in 2006, and I couldn’t provide too many examples of where to find Indians like me, so I scrambled for sloppy frames of reference that would make some kind of sense to a group of fellow seven-year-olds.

Apu from The Simpsons didn’t land well; most of us hadn’t watched the show, and it would be years before any of us understood the racism behind it. Those twins in Harry Potter, I would suggest, but frankly, most of my classmates hadn’t yet read the series — or paid attention to its minor characters. Princess Jasmine was a compromise, and I offered up her name bashfully, hesitant to allow myself the quiet pride of implicitly comparing myself to a Disney princess.

Still, my classmates would confuse me for the other kind of Indian — an indigenous person, the kind whom our teacher encouraged us to playfully caricature through our Thanksgiving-inspired drawings and fairytale discussions about colonial America.

Whenever we spoke about Native Americans, our class would role-play, impersonating the colonists of four centuries ago encountering an unfamiliar people. (For those of us who were neither white nor indigenous, it was expected we choose a side.)

When we weren’t simulating these interactions, we would read a textbook that consistently employed the past tense to describe indigenous communities, forgoing any mention of the brutal genocides of their people, the ceaseless invasions of their lands, the growing militarization of their homes, the trauma that still lingers.

Each year, at the end of our class unit on the Pilgrims and Indians, I would bring home the beaded medicine bags and colorful dreamcatchers we made in class and proudly showcase them on my bookshelf like relics of something I imagined to be long gone, swept into extinction.

Years later, when my classmates had grown old enough to fathom the difference between American Indians and Indian Americans — our transposed names a vestige of Christopher Columbus’s well-documented folly — no one told us there was a reservation just miles away from our homes in Tucson: the Tohono O’odham Nation.

The O’odham had been here for millennia, of course, and along with co-opting the tribe’s historical lands, the city of Tucson had conveniently borrowed words from the O’odham language to describe its own, urban landmarks: the Tohono Tadai bus station downtown, the Tohono Chul botanical gardens up north near my house.

In the O’odham language, Tohono means desert, and grafted onto this arid, unforgiving landscape was a city of half a million residents, many blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the stolen land upon which they exist. I was one of them.

Reduced to a footnote of history in this desert are the tribe’s complicated past and its contemporary challenges: the loss of tribal sovereignty, increasing government occupation, missing and murdered indigenous women.

Tucson is a city that has allowed itself to forget.

Looking up at the menu sprawled across five TV screens, I am unsure of exactly what frybread is and whether to order it, so I Google the word on my phone when I am standing in line and learn that it originated from the U.S. government’s attempted ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people, known as the Long Walk.

We place our orders and wait for the three O’odham women and tribal school counselor who have agreed to meet us here.

As we wait, I become painfully aware of abstractions. The four of us are just another group of non-indigenous people on indigenous land. We have told ourselves we are here to learn, much like those who have come before us. I quietly fear how we will appear to the O’odham women as our collective ignorance is slowly laid bare, as our persistent questions about life on the reservation gradually expose the assumptions we do not yet know we harbor.

We will ask them about life on the reservation as if it something that can be packaged into neat sentences. We will expect them to deliver the stories of their lives to us in a form we can swallow.

Confession: I have come to detest the word “ally” because it represents a kind of bargain: the ability to adopt a struggle without actually experiencing it, the privilege to partake in a naïve brand of activism without enduring any sort of concomitant, existential threat. I hate that it is the best we can be in this situation.

The Kansas City Chiefs pennant hangs above photos of indigenous men and women.

April, Pachynne, and Hon’mana spend three hours talking to us against a backdrop of colorful NFL pennants punctuated with historical photos of indigenous women in regalia.

We start with the usual questions about Trump’s border wall, which would bisect tribal lands, choking off sacred burial grounds and water sources straddling the border. We yearn to know of the O’odham community’s reactions to the wall, its fears, its ensuing fight.

I imagine these are questions the women have answered countless times before, sitting in this very diner, their answers satisfying the hunger of visiting political journalists on encroaching deadlines, erudite magazine writers who hit words together like song.

But there are other things I want them to tell me, things that aren’t usually given the space to gestate during fifteen-minute conversations with reporters often centered on a single, premeditated theme. I know these things exist, untold, in the liminal space between our words. But I am unsure what to ask.

As time crawls forward, I watch the barriers separating the four of us and the O’odham women dissolve ever so slightly. It feels natural, like together, we have cobbled a patchwork of trust appropriate for this conversation to march on — slow, and increasingly steady, like a newborn’s heartbeat.

April recalls the lingering trauma of being racially profiled and detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint with her children while trying to exit the reservation.

Hon’mana speaks of compromising tribal sovereignty for the sake of a national security mandate, becoming desensitized to the robotic eye of a surveillance tower in her own backyard.

Pachynne remembers the young asylum seeker who showed up at her doorstep, parched, asking for small amounts of food and water to support endless days of trekking through the Sonoran Desert after crossing the border.

The women tell us of the tribal border gate that was welded shut after the Mexican government sold O’odham land to a private citizen who cut off access to sacred indigenous sites south of the border.

They speak of state politicians who have never visited the reservation.

Of presidential candidates who have reduced indigenous identity to a joke.

Of feeling like phantoms in a land that belongs to them.

It is three o’clock. Everyone is exhausted. We shake hands with the O’odham women, thank them for their time, and climb into the car.

We sit in silence on scorching leather seats, shining tires tracing the skin of the desert beneath us as we drive east, back to Tucson, away from the reservation.

The sun is behind us. In just minutes, the checkpoint will be, too.