The Land of the In-Between

Frances Wang-LaVallée

Frances Wang-LaVallée was born and raised in New York City, educated at the United Nations International School, and is a recent graduate from Concordia University in Montreal. She is a creative non-fiction writer and visual artist with a special interest in anticolonialism and alternative geographies. Wang-LaVallée was deeply influenced by her early life in the East Village as a Chinese American, and later on by the many educators and mentors who helped her develop her craft. She now works and lives in Montreal. 

Special thanks to Dr. Nalini Mohabir at Concordia University for making this work come to life.

Abstract

This essay was given as an assignment in my Geographies of Postcolonialism class where we used Dionne Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging as our guide. My goal with this creative nonfiction piece was to create an exhibition of personal maps that harness an alternative understanding of geography to chart a felt presence of history in regards to legacies of colonialism. My focus is how I occupy space towards and away from colonialism as a Chinese American. I offer nontraditional maps, which are being acknowledged more frequently in academic institutions, that string together an array of points of time, place, and perspectives to convey the deep inter-relatedness and geographic imaginations of diasporic histories. The process of writing the essay delivered another meaning to my geographical imagination as I revisited myself in younger and more painful places. The journey of each map is personal as well as historical, which is where all maps come from. It is an archive that we can critically look at as we move forward with the idea of memories and dreams as evidence for maps. The archives of the world are symbolic representations of layers of time, they are carefully saved and mapped. The negative or absent occupancy of the archives tells us much about what dominant society believes is worth keeping. With creative nonfiction, Black geographies, and alternative ways of knowing and mapping, we can create an alternative archive of maps that do not serve traditional, hegemonic agendas of exploitation.

The Land of In-Between

INTRODUCTION

Lived experience, memory, personal memorabilia, secrets, stories, routes traveled, and exchanges with others are all things that contribute to our cognitive schemas. These are maps to a life that navigates colonialisms, liberatory passageways, and the all-encompassing historical presence of oppression and freedom. I write from my own experience and the influences of the captureland in which I have always lived. My cognitive schemas are written and rewritten throughout time. My maps represent layers of history in the present moment, where we will see that history does not exist in a vacuum. Concepts of postcolonialism, such as the door of no return and the geography of unbelonging, have altered the way I see the world and contributed to my understanding, giving me a vocabulary to explain my orientation towards and away from colonialism. I write with a memoir style to transport you into regions of my life that have molded my geographical imagination and methods of way-finding. In my maps we will look at my chop/YinJian along with a self-written poem, the Pledge of Allegiance, New York as an ice cream truck, and an excerpt from Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong.

Maps: YinJian & Wang Miao

 When I was born, my father gave me a Chinese name and a Chinese chop (YinJian). My name in Chinese is Wang Miao. Its philosophical meaning is “the three waters: intelligent, strong, and beautiful,” qualities which my father valued and believed I would embody. He wanted to primarily name me “Miao,” and my American mother vetoed that immediately because she thought it would make my life more difficult and that it was unacceptable for people to call me “Miao” (pronounced in an English accent like ‘meow’). So it became my middle name instead. I was embarrassed about my Chinese name for a long time. In middle school, the sibling of my best friend found out about it and made fun of me for the next two years. I was horrified that it was part of my identity and wanted my name legally changed for years. I never told anyone my middle name after that and even lied to people that I didn’t have a middle name if the topic ever came up. This was just one instance of when the White gaze began to control my thoughts. My relationship with my heritage, my racial identity, and my father are all equally complicated and at times upsetting. Like a push-me-pull-you, I have struggled with accepting my Asian-ness and my Chinese name. This map is two-fold: the chop is part one and the poem is part two.

Part One

My chop lays in its case like a corpse. It laid there for most of my life because I didn’t feel a connection to it and I didn’t care for what it represented. In the past two years I have grown to accept my chop. I cherish the beauty of it, the craftsmanship it took to make it, the materials extracted from the earth that were molded into this ancient form of mark-making. I have now used it several times to sign my name on pieces of artwork that I’ve made. I’ve struggled with seeing my chop as “exotic” and “oriental,” the way Westerners see anything that originated from Asia, a binary which takes persistent effort to unlearn. When I use my chop, there is an intentional recognition of my heritage, and it honors the work I have done. But I have a slightly pessimistic annoyance with the way it will be perceived. My surroundings are captureland, my audience is Western; I fear the White gaze won’t understand what I mean, and I know that they will perceive my chop as exotic.

Part Two

Wang Miao

Water carries me holds me lifts me

Water tries me distorts me measures me

Water mimics me follows me remembers me

Water denies me pushes me permeates me

Water is my end and my beginning

Water loves me water hates me

Water is with me without me

Water is a life sustaining element. Water kills and water saves. The theme of water in Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging by Dionne Brand is illustrated as a portal that owns everything, a passageway to death, and the vastness between ‘here’ and 'there’ (Brand 2001). Christina Sharpe also uses the metaphor of water and the wake with a multiplicity of meanings and positions: “the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness,” conveying a process of care, grieving, and work that can invigorate new imaginations of living in the afterlives of slavery (Sharpe 2016, 17-18). Sharpe quotes Gaston Bachelard: “water is an element ‘which remembers the dead’” (Sharpe 2016, 20). The chop opens the door to my ancestors which I have neglected. Water finds its way back to its source, settles in a pool of dread, and refreshes the cycle. We peer at each other through the threshold, beneath and above the water’s surface, the tension of the past is still and present. Their legacy is in my name, my name which signifies water, remembering the dead.

This is my history, and it is intertwined with my identity, as much as I tried to reject it. The rejecting/ion is part of the larger life of colonial impressions on Asian-Americans and the diaspora of Chinese immigrants (and could be said for anyone with relation to diaspora). I wasn’t there when the chop was made, at least consciously, but there was a deliberate decision made to include my English name, Frances, below Wang Miao. This composition, this clash, this combination even evident in my chop, is an ironic representation of my position as a Chinese American. You could see this as a benefit: two very different pasts, cultures, lives coming together in harmony and a celebration of diversity. You could also see it as I feel it: existing in an in-between space. A feeling many feel: not Asian enough for Asians, not White enough for Whites. In Sonja Boon et al.’s “Place: Re/mapping,” they recall Fred Wah’s metaphor of the swinging door “between the kitchen of his family’s Chinese restaurant and the adjoining dining room filled with White settler Canadians as a representation of the unmappable place of in-betweenness within Canada’s degrees of belonging (Boon et al. 2018, 78). I imagine the language change from one side of the door to the other, the social cues, and the cultural shift as Wah passes through.

In my family, I am the only mixed person. I mainly lived with my mother and never learned Mandarin. So, even as I step through the door to my Chinese family gatherings, I don’t feel a full sense of belonging. I sense the “blurred and arbitrary beginning and ending” of the door while inside the room (Boon et al. 2018, 78). I see them from a distance; I see my chop, but I don’t read it. My ancestors watch me in the room with them, and I cannot speak. The three waters: intelligent, strong, beautiful; life, death, rebirth; gas, liquid, solid; drought, deluge, tsunami; here, there, and in-between…

Maps: The Pledge of Allegiance

The Pledge of Allegiance is a promise of loyalty to the United States. The first version of the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892 to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the explorer, Christopher Columbus, in the Americas. Over the years, more words were added, and the pledge that we recite now was written in 1954:

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” (Government Publishing Office, n.d.).

My mother is from a small town in Massachusetts called Ipswich. When I was a child, I lived there for two years. Every day in first and second grade, I had to recite the pledge of allegiance. I had no idea what these words meant nor the weight they carried. Place your hand on your heart and speak these words, I was told. I, not knowing which side my heart was on, would place my left hand on the right side of my chest every morning. Looking around the classroom (and the town for that matter) for the two years I lived there, I saw only one other young person who looked like me. Since my mother was from there, I had cousins and aunts and uncles to welcome me and ground me. They were blonde and tall and placed their hands on the left side of their chest.

The site I sourced the pledge from describes the purpose of the pledge as commemorating Columbus’s arrival to the Americas. I can’t think of anything more fitting that the American government would come up with to memorialize and honor the beginning of slavery, genocide, and exploitation. The pledge is wildly ironic; actually, it’s laughable. My seventh-grade history teacher once said that they got inspiration from the salute to Hitler in Nazi Germany. Not that surprising, considering who the pledge is for and what it is really saying.

The town of Ipswich is situated on the coast of Massachusetts, north of Boston. There are hundreds of preserved colonial era houses in the area (Dennis and Harris, 2023). The culture of preserving the haunted past follows you everywhere in Ipswich. It is the town with the oldest stone arched bridge in America, Choate Bridge. It is known as “the country’s best-preserved Puritan town, and its residents have been the proud custodians of its history” (Dennis and Harris, 2023). That bridge, the houses, and the pledge of allegiance are the archives which Ipswich, and the U.S. for that matter, believe are worth keeping and proudly acknowledging. I wonder if anyone from Ipswich has ever thought about what these archives mean to anyone else, the pain they carry, and the othering they project.

Maps: Ice cream truck

New York is like an ice cream truck. The ice cream truck song blares loudly through the streets, letting everyone know where it is and of its importance. When it passes by and you don’t get any ice cream, you feel as though you have missed an opportunity of a lifetime– “what a loser you are for not getting any ice cream” Mister Softee says as he gets further away from you. If you do decide to stop and get ice cream, you are presented with so many choices. You choose soft serve with rainbow sprinkles, you pay, and you start to eat. It’s good, but not great. You get ice cream because it seems like a fun thing to do, but the idea of getting ice cream from an ice cream truck is better than the actual ice cream. But at least you are part of something, you are someone who got ice cream from an ice cream truck, you let the song speak to you, you didn’t miss out on the fun.

 As a New Yorker, I have been instilled with a sense of pride and superiority from birth. I soon learned from interactions with people who weren’t from New York that it was an intriguing place. The response I have come to expect when I tell someone where I am from is: “woah, that’s so cool, what was it like?” It is hard to tell someone in a conversation of small talk what it was like, especially because they usually already have an image in their mind of New York that cannot be reconfigured in two sentences of me trying to explain it. I hate Times Square and everything it stands for; I avoid it at all costs. I don’t care for Rockefeller Center or Radio City. I have never been to the Statue of Liberty. I rarely get ice cream from the Mister Softee truck (I usually get flavored ice or Italian ice from the “frio frio man”). But these are all part of the magic of New York in many people’s minds. New York would not have the reputation it has without these sparkling, bustling, ultra-consumerist landmarks, and I wouldn’t get that very validating response without the conception of New York as the place with these things.

 Someone said to me recently that New York is the most classic representation of American industrialism. I was offended. I thought, “NO it is not, it is so much more.” I have thought of New York as its own place, not representative of America. But I have been deluded by the New Yorker mindset, which is that it is the best city in the world and is not “America” like we perceive “America”. However, it is very much America, and I am very much American. I have rarely introduced myself to people in Montreal or anywhere else as an “American,” only as a “New Yorker,” because I am ashamed to be from America, even though I have often felt that I was lucky to be born there. The Mister Softee franchise is an example of American industrialism and the ultra-consumerist nature of New York. When the song plays, it sets out a map in my head, and my orientation becomes a binary of avoiding or seeking. My Asian-ness, my New York-ness, my American-ness: avoiding or seeking.

Maps: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

 As a poet, I have always treated English as a weapon in a power struggle, wielding it against those who are more powerful than me. But I falter when using English as an expression of love. I’ve always been so protective of making sure that family’s inside sounds didn’t leak outside that I don’t know how to allow the outside in. I was raised by a kind of love that was so inextricable from pain that I fear that once I air that love, it will oxidize to betrayal, as if I’m turning English against my family. (Hong, 2020, 101)

Language, its nuances, and the symbolic power and oppression of the English language. English has spread its tendrils far and wide, rooted itself in popular culture, and taken its seat as the language of the hegemon. As a native speaker, I never really thought about the implications of English. But I now realize that only speaking English and thinking everyone else should accommodate you by speaking English is having a colonizer mindset. It reveals your ignorance and your privilege and your unjustified self-righteousness.

 Maps are communication tools to convey information about way-finding. Maps speak different languages, maps find their way through a multiplicity of passages where each reader reads them differently. Your maps become more apparent when you speak. Hong writes as if she is in my brain, expressing so many silent emotions that I have felt my entire life. When my father speaks and I correct his English, I feel that I am turning English against him. As much as he wants to prove his American-ness and believes in colonial narratives, someone else can tell that he’s not from here—they see his map’s edge, where it started, and that it didn’t start here. When I correct him, I feel bad, but he is grateful. I experience interactions with people that look down on him when he makes a grammar or pronunciation mistake. I want to protect him from the racism and xenophobia—so I correct his English. I want his map to look like mine, so he doesn’t get lost. My map’s edges have been lined with racist micro-aggressions and colonial narratives. Over time, they are wearing down. Dionne Brand asks: “Why is all geography irony?”(Brand, 2001, 89). Now I ask myself: Why is everything White supremacy? This realization that everything is colonial White supremacy is defeating but also freeing, because at least I am awake. And I remember: my maps will not be drawn by the White gaze.

References

Boon, Sonja, Lesley Butler, and Daze Jefferies. Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the
            Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Doubleday Canada,
            2001.

Dennis, A. and G. Harris. “Historic Ipswich.” Historic Houses of Ipswich. April 23, 2023.
            https://historicipswich.net/historic-houses-in-ipswich/.

Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: an Asian American Reckoning. First edition. New York: One
            World, 2020.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. First edition. Durham: Duke University
            Press, 2016.

Government Publishing Office. “Pledge of Allegiance: 1892.” Ben’s Guide to the U.S. Government.
            Accessed April 20, 2023, https://bensguide.gpo.gov/liberty-bell-1753/35-age-4/apprentice-
            symbols-of-us-government/86-p ledge-of-allegiance-1892.